Whether in the personal or professional sphere, people all over the world use email on a daily basis. Though dozens of other communication methods have sprung up since the advent of the internet, email has always remained a constant, and has given many marketers a consistently great ROI as a marketing channel. ROI on email marketing can be as high as $42 on every $1 spent.
You probably already know something about the massive potential of email marketing, but like many startup owners, you may feel a little lost when it comes to getting started with this particular marketing discipline.
To help you clear up some of the confusion and help answer the questions “how to do email marketing for your startup?” here's eight examples of tools and strategies to help you maximize conversions right out of the gate.
The Best Email Marketing Tools
If your email marketing strategy and arsenal is feeling a little bare, here’s some of the best kinds of tools you can adopt to ensure your email marketing gets off to a good start.
Email Marketing Suites
When you’re taking those initial steps into the email marketing arena, one of the first tools to look into is a full email marketing suite.
SaaS tools such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SendinBlue can go a long way towards simplifying the email marketing process, and often come with some great analytics and AI tools that will help you fine-tune campaigns in progress for better conversions. Depending on the tool you choose, you may also have access to features such as audience segmentation, custom sign-up forms, and landing pages.
An email marketing suite won’t be the answer to all your problems, and most successful marketers will use email marketing services in conjunction with an array of other tools to plan and execute their campaigns. However, with such a versatile array of features, adopting a reputable email tool is a no-brainer for any startup entrepreneur looking to get started with email marketing.
Data Enrichment Email Marketing Tools
In many marketing disciplines, including email marketing, generic copy and content is nearing extinction. Today, personalized marketing materials based on highly granular data sets are a given in the eyes of modern day consumers, and this trend is only expected to increase in-line with the growing purchasing power of Gen Z shoppers.
Better personalization means better conversions, and to ensure you’re targeting and personalizing your email campaigns as best as possible, you’ll need an effective way to organize the reams of data that pertain to your target audience.
Data enrichment tools such as Clearbit are email marketing software suites that merge data from your own databases with third-party data, giving you deeper insights and a broader scope for personalization. Simply enter a domain or an email address, and these tools will return useful data from hundreds of sources sorted into distinct fields you can use to inform your campaigns, such as business sector, job title, and more.
Landing Page Builders
Getting contacts to open an email and click-through is only half the battle. From there, it’s a matter of getting prospects over the line with the content on your site.
Take a moment to think about the pages where you want your customers to convert. If these pages aren’t high-quality, user-friendly, and equipped with a CTA that serves as a valid next step after your email content, then these pages could be losing you conversions.
Today, there are plenty of tools on the market like UnBounce, which are designed specifically to optimize landing pages linked to a variety of marketing channels, including email.
These landing page builders include content tools that will allow you to build stunning, customized landing pages, and innovative machine learning features capable of creating page layouts based on your customer data, and even writing copy that’s more likely to convert.
Email List Cleaner and Verification Services
Analyzing the performance of your email campaigns while they’re in progress is an important part of email marketing, but for a truly great ROI, this analysis should begin before a campaign has actually started.
With an email list verification / cleaner service, you’ll be able to separate deliverable and undeliverable email addresses in your list before a campaign gets started, and ensure that you’re spending your time and resources on verified, quality prospects.
Though you may want to get things moving as quickly as possible, running an email campaign based on outdated or unqualified data can be immensely damaging to your results. On the other hand, if you equip yourself with a method of email verification from the very beginning, you’ll drive down bounces, maximize your conversions, and enjoy an all-around stronger ROI.
GetID online id verification service enables you to automate the verification process and reduce your compliance team’s workload.
Essential Email Marketing Strategies
Now that we’ve broken down some of the essential email marketing tools that go into a successful email campaign, let’s look at how to apply these tools with proven email marketing strategies for better conversions.
Mobile Optimization
Like any other kind of content, the majority of marketing emails are now read on mobile devices. With this in mind, making sure your emails are optimized for mobile should be at the top of your list when it comes to email strategies. Most modern consumers will ignore emails that aren’t mobile-friendly, so don’t cheat yourself out of all that potential business!
Many of the email marketing tools listed in the first half of this article will have features for creating responsive email content that will look great on desktop, laptop, and mobile screens. However, if you’re taking a more manual approach in the early days of your brand, there are a few things you can do to make sure your emails are mobile-friendly.
Keeping subject lines brief (30-35 characters), using a single-column structure, keeping images compressed, and using a large, clear font are all simple changes that can have a surprisingly profound effect on your campaign results.
Using Dynamic Content
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: personalized content is quickly becoming a necessity for any successful campaign in any marketing discipline. If you’re not trying to craft messaging that speaks to your customers at an individual level, then you’ll quickly start to lose that business to a competitor who does.
Dynamic content (sometimes called adaptive content) refers to automatically-populated content blocks in a marketing email that will change according to various data fields pertaining to the recipient, such as their personal demographics or their interests. By automating email personalization in this way, you’ll not only help your click-through and conversions, but also save yourself precious time and resources when managing your email campaigns.
Granular Segmentation and Prospecting
In the modern marketing arena, consumers are being bombarded by countless pieces of content expertly tailored to their personal preferences. Although there are tools and strategies that tend to work better on average in every marketing discipline, no one approach is going to appeal to everyone in your target market. If you want your content to stand out from the noise, then you need to segment your audience on a more granular level than the next best competitor.
To ensure email marketing success now and in the future, you need to segment your audience and qualify all potential leads in a way that’s informed not only by their location, purchasing history, and other standard data sets, but also the way that they interact with your site, your social content, the way they browse your products, and more. For a deeper understanding of sales-qualified prospecting, we recommend checking out ‘The State of Prospecting’ from leading prospecting experts Sopro. The study uses original data from 25 million emails, across 82 B2B industries over five years. The more detailed you can get with your segments and prospecting, the more personalized your content will be, leading to greater all-around success in your email marketing.
Constant A/B Testing
You can read and apply all the generic email marketing strategy tips in the world, but none of these will be as valuable as the information generated by your own customers. Don’t rely on articles like these to tell you what the best style of copy or email structure is - let your customers tell you instead!
Although effective A/B testing takes careful planning, time and patience, the investment can pay off massively, ensuring better open rates, click through rates, and conversion rates. Furthermore, when your branding and copy is consistent across different marketing channels, A/B testing emails can give you some valuable insights that can be used in campaigns elsewhere.
A/B testing can often fall by the wayside after the first year or two of a startup’s life, due to the belief that you’ve gathered enough results to craft strong emails indefinitely. It’s important to remember that your audience is always evolving, and that just about every aspect of an email can be tested for better optimization. Don’t let yourself fall into complacency after a few successful tests, and try to guide your marketing team towards a culture of constant testing and refinement.
In Summary
We hope this round-up of email marketing software tools and strategies has helped answer “how to do email marketing for your startup?” and help you reap the best email marketing results possible now and in the future.
Getting well-equipped for modern email marketing takes a lot of time and research, but by making sure you have the right tools for the job, you’ll be able to avoid common pitfalls, and improve your chances of a consistently great ROI from day one.