Rethinking Email Marketing During Covid-19

Rethinking Email Marketing During Covid-19

Social distancing, because of the ongoing pandemic, has caused most business leaders and staff members to work from home. Adding to this, most businesses are going through a crunch, forced to think about evolving their business strategies, while having more time on hand. As a result, we have seen a clear higher rate of emails opened and responses.

However, you still need a well-directed approach to reach these businesses decision-makers.

In this article, we will explore how to execute email marketing where you have quality leads.

How to do Email Marketing

First thing to note is: email marketing is here to stay. So, if you have been thinking that the return of email marketing is a fad, you need to rethink.

Marketing trends don’t simply come and go. Usually, if an option becomes part of the daily routine of your target audience, it either develops or becomes highly targeted. Simply think from the perspective of developing habits. Habits don’t simply get created and destroyed.

So, email marketing will still be effective even in a pre-COVID 19 business environment.

From your perspective, the positive thing is, email marketing is still the cheapest form of marketing, with virtually no monetary costs involved. All you need is a bit of time to invest.

And, through advanced tracking, you can see how effective your efforts are. In particular, you can track click-through rates and response rates, along with information on how further down did your receivers scroll. This information then allows you to tweak further and improve your results as you go along.

Such tracking options are not readily available for non-digital forms of marketing, which makes it harder to calculate your ROIs.

Email marketing provides valuable data, possibly the strongest currency in the current market. However, you still need to understand where email marketing can and cannot work.

Going Industry-Specific

We are not over-selling email marketing.

Marketing is only effective for certain industries, which increases the value of testing and innovation, as well as understanding your target audience.

Now let’s look into the process of email marketing.

Email Marketing Steps

This is how we conduct email marketing campaigns:

1. Research

• Think about and research into which contacts you would like to send the email/newsletter to
• Research the content for the campaign and make sure you are delivering value.

2. Integrating Tech for Tracking

Simply sending emails will do you little good.

That is why it is important to choose a tracking and email development tool

I like Mailchimp as it enables the sender to build clean segmented subscriber lists. In addition, the end reader can easily unsubscribe and it offers great reporting. Plus, the templates are easy to create using building blocks. On Mailchimp, you’re able to get going at no cost where once you’ve got a bulky list, you can consider upgrading.

3. Setting up and Sending Emails 

• Think about how you are sending an email and what you will be including – usually one topic, with an image. However, if it’s a newsletter, do you need to break the content up into blocks? And then, how many images do you need for such a newsletter?
• Create a list – ensuring you are within GDPR rules
• Create your content
• Check your content for any spelling or grammar mistakes – Grammarly is a great tool for this
• Ensure that your images are available for commercial use. If you are unsure, either use a tool such as Canva or Pixabay or if you are using Google Images, check in the settings that you are allowed to use the image and whether, if needed, you can make any changes to it
• Create a Call to Action button and add social media links – make sure all links work
• Add alt text to your images. So, if the images do not load well for the receiver, at least the alt text will appear
• Ensure your email is optimised for mobile use – if using MailChimp then it should be
• Send yourself a test email. Doing so helps to preview the email and ensure all links work
• Either send the email straight away or schedule it to be sent
• Check the reporting to see who has opened the email, which links they’ve clicked and even who has unsubscribed
• Utilise the collected data to improve the quality of your emails.

Conclusion

There are 2 core areas of email marketing that we have identified:

1. The audience
2. The message

In between these two points, there are several tasks to resolve and figure. However, once you have optimised your emails, the gains are ongoing.

In fact, we have noticed that each optimisation can improve your campaign performance by as much as 5%. Scale your list to a few hundred recipients and you start seeing the impact of your work.

Here, it goes without saying that, just like every other skill, it takes time, effort, and dedication to master the art of email marketing. We like to share the process of email marketing with small businesses because they are not always able to outsource the task from the outset.

However, once you have got some success, you are more likely to hand it off to someone you trust. If you are a looking to outsource and use a virtual assistant, please get in touch.

This article has been written in collaboration with Digital Marketing Agency London – Marketing Voice