Optimizing Your Email Marketing to Drive Sales for Your Business

If you’re looking to drive more sales than ever in 2016, email marketing remains one of the best ways to do so. Though email can hardly be called “trendy”, it still promotes a tremendous amount of engagement from recipients, with studies showing that 82 percent of people open promotional emails and 44 percent of people receiving promotional emails make at least one purchase per year because of them. What’s more, the average return on email marketing is $44.25 per dollar spent. If you want to see email marketing success this year, however, you need to put the effort in to make your campaigns stand out. Below, we discuss ways to optimize your email marketing to maximize your results in 2016: Segment your email audience and personalize your content The key to email campaign success is to make sure you’re always delivering content that meets the needs of your audience. Take the time to segment your email list based on variables such as interests, demographics, and sales process positions. Make sure your email content is tailored to each particular segment and your results will show the difference. Once you’ve segmented your audience, tailor your email content to each group’s specific needs to boost your sales. Think about how much general, irrelevant advertisements turn you off—you likely don’t pay them any attention whatsoever. You want your emails to feel familiar and comforting to your audience, and to show them that you’re willing to go the extra mile to deliver a unique experience. Adding elements of social proof to your emails is another good way to boost your results. People trust their peers more than they trust marketers, so include recommendations and success stories in your emails. Make everything easily shareable via social sites so that your current audience can recommend your content across their networks. Format your emails for mobile and commit to A/B testing If you want to drive your email marketing results this year, you need to focus on mobile. In 2015, mobile traffic outpaced desktop traffic for the first time ever. If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile, you’re alienating the majority of your audience. Make sure your emails load quickly and that all buttons are easily clickable via touchscreen. If you are directing your audience to a landing page, make sure it’s also optimized for mobile. Once you feel you’re at a place to begin sending out your marketing emails, commit yourself to consistently performing A/B tests to maximize your efforts. Change certain features of your emails (one at a time), including subject line, headlines, introductions, or CTA placement to see which version performs better and attracts more attention and engagement from your audience. Over time, you’ll understand the elements necessary to create emails optimized to entice conversions from your audience..