Are you using email marketing to cultivate a warm audience and stay connected to your tribe? When is the last time you audited your email campaigns? If you’re like many ‘preneurs, it may have been a while.

Once you set up your email campaigns, it’s easy for time to go by and to let everything get a little stale. If you’re not getting the results you used to get, it’s probably because you’re in an email rut. And if you want to get out of the email rut, it’s best to come up with a plan to update and improve your email marketing at least once a year.

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Get Out of the Email Marketing Rut: Eight Ways to Success

Every year, take time to update technology, redesign your artwork, improve your calls to action (CTA), optimize for new devices and so forth. Here are 8 specific items to refresh and update to get out of the rut and prevent your email campaigns from going stale.

1) Update Technology

Are you using the same phone you were five years ago? Probably not, because technology, apps and your life have all upgraded, and the old toys don’t work quite same anymore.

The same holds true for your email marketing systems! Are you still using the same technology that you were using five years ago, or even two years ago? If so, you might want to take a hard look at what’s out there that’s new and improved to figure out if you want to make a change. There is so much technology available now to make your email campaigns successful that you don’t want to miss out by not staying informed about new offerings. This is true whether you switch technology or not; your current service provider might offer new email functionality that you don’t even know exists until you check it out for yourself.

[Tweet “Are you using the same technology you were 5 years ago? You shouldn’t be using the same email marketing tech from 5 years ago!”]

2) Create New Designs

Every year you want to update your artwork to reflect the changing times as well as reflect your brand in such a way that your current customers as well as future customers take notice. You want to remain fresh, memorable and modern. Update your newsletter graphics, and maybe make a change in the look and feel (format) of each newsletter that you send out. Creating new designs for your email headers, or other art work and marketing collateral will breathe new life into your campaigns.

[Tweet “When is the last time you updated the look and feel of your email marketing campaigns? Is it time to freshen things up?”]

3) Improve Your Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

What worked a year ago might be old news today. As technology improves and people become more educated, you may need to try new ways to get your market to act upon your CTAs. Plus, it’s likely you have learned more too about what type of CTAs work best for your market. Revisit the CTAs you have in place now, and try to improve upon them so that you’ll get even more results.

4) Optimize for Mobile

It’s past time to optimize your email marketing for mobile. Most emails are now read with mobile devices. If the emails you’re sending are not responsively designed, you’re likely missing out on most of your market. Your service provider probably has easy templates and designs that are responsive, but what about the items you ask your audience to click through to see? Are they responsive? If not, they need to be.

[Tweet “#EmailMarketing Tip: Make sure your email campaigns look good on mobile. Most ppl open emails via their smartphone.”]

5) Renew Your Drip Campaigns

Even if you’re promoting the same products and services today that you were promoting last year, it’s important to update your drip campaigns anyway. As you learn more about what your audience needs and their pain points, you can easily improve upon your drip campaigns in both design and words. A little refreshing and improving will go a long way to getting more customers.

Run that back – what are drip campaigns? These are the emails you send out automatically once someone subscribes. Also called autoresponders, these campaigns will likely have links to sales pages on your website, or pages with resources for more information. At a minimum, you will want to make sure all of these links are working, and the info provided is still relevant for your audience.

6) Update Segmentation Strategy

Segmentation is relatively new for many ‘preneurs. Are you segmenting people on your list? Most people start out with segmenting their list between buyers and non-buyers, but you can go so much further than that. You can segment by product interest, device interaction, open rates, and more.

You will get a far better return on investment for your efforts when you define clear segments your subscribers. Email segmentation enables you to deliver the best message to each audience.

 

7) Integrate Social Media

You probably already use social media in your marketing campaigns. But, do you have your email marketing integrated with social media in a way that allows your subscribers to help you get more subscribers, as well as help your subscribers join you on social media? You should be cross-promoting your email list with your social media to get the most results. If your audience is reading your emails and interacting with you on social media, you’ve got the best of all worlds and the most chances of conversions.

8) Study Your Metrics

Nothing is done until the numbers are reviewed, and that includes email marketing. You should probably study the metrics of your email marketing before and after each marketing campaign. Then, look at some things more thoroughly each year to find out what is working and what is not working. Which subscribers are engaged and which are not engaged? Should you clean the inactive subscribers? Do you know and understand how your list is working (or not working) for your business?

[Tweet “Are you studying your email marketing metrics, to see what’s working and tweak for better engagement?”]

By keeping on top of these things you can actually get out of your email rut and stay out of it. Make a plan to revisit this 8-point checklist each year. As technology improves and changes, it’s up to you to stay on top of the items you need to improve and change too!

Ciao,
Miss Kemya

Are you stuck in an email marketing rut? How will you dig yourself out?