In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for businesses, offering unique benefits that other channels can't match. For companies operating in the scientific, engineering, and manufacturing sectors, email marketing holds particular value, allowing them to establish thought leadership, showcase technical expertise, and build direct relationships with clients and partners. In our recent webinar, email marketing specialist Torsten Christensen explored the strategies and best practices that can help you develop effective email marketing campaigns within these industries.
Watch Email Marketing Guide
Listen to Email Marketing Guide
Read Email Marketing Guide
Building a Strong Email List
The foundation of any successful email marketing campaign lies in a high-quality email list. To ensure compliance with data protection regulations and maintain a clean list, it's essential to use opt-in strategies, where subscribers willingly provide their email addresses and grant permission to receive marketing emails. Implementing double opt-in, where subscribers confirm their email addresses through a confirmation email, further enhances list cleanliness.
Remember, it's not about tricking people into signing up but demonstrating the value you can provide and delivering on that promise to engage with interested users.
Lead Magnets and Compelling Content
To attract and engage subscribers, it's crucial to offer valuable incentives known as lead magnets in exchange for their contact information. In the STEM sectors, lead magnets can take the form of technical white papers, exclusive webinars, or industry reports that provide valuable information to your target audience. Crafting compelling content is equally important, striking a balance between technical expertise and engaging material. Visual elements like infographics and images can enhance the user experience, while digestible language ensures busy subscribers can easily read and engage with your emails.
Personalization and Segmentation
Personalization and segmentation are powerful strategies to improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Personalization involves tailoring emails to individual recipients based on their preferences, behaviors, or data points. It can range from using recipients' names to providing content recommendations based on their browsing history.
Segmentation, on the other hand, involves dividing your email list into smaller, targeted groups based on specific criteria such as job role, industry, or buying process stage. By segmenting your list, you can send highly relevant content to each group, maximizing the impact of your campaigns.
Email Content
Crafting compelling content for your email campaigns is essential to keep your subscribers engaged and nurture leads towards making a purchase. To provide value to your subscribers, start by leveraging your existing lead magnets and repurpose that content for your emails. It's crucial to diversify the types of content you offer in your emails to ensure subscribers receive a range of information, keeping them interested in your company.
Analyzing the impact of certain words or phrases in subject lines reveals that broader content, like downloads, eBooks, and posters, performs well, while product-related emails tend to have lower success rates, as most subscribers may not be ready to buy. However, sending product emails can still be effective if targeted correctly. When it comes to subject lines and preview texts, use industry-specific language that resonates with your STEM sector audience while keeping them concise and focused.
Staying Organized and Measuring Success
Maintaining organization is key to ensuring consistent and timely communication with your subscribers. Using a calendar to schedule email campaigns in advance, track important dates, content themes, and marketing objectives is highly recommended. Coordinating email marketing efforts with other channels becomes seamless with a clear overview of your campaigns.
To optimize your campaigns, measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential. These can include clicks per email, total subscribers, and open rates, among others. Analyzing KPIs helps identify areas for improvement, enabling data-driven decisions and the refinement of your email marketing strategy.
Q&A
Is the biggest benefit of email marketing the fact that you own your list and have control over it?
Torsten: Yes, it is certainly a significant benefit. Email marketing provides a direct line of communication with your audience that is not impacted by algorithm changes on platforms like Google or social media sites. While it may not be the biggest benefit, in my opinion, the ability to build upon existing relationships with customers and nurture them over time is the greatest advantage of email marketing.
How can you keep your email list clean and monitor it effectively when you have a large number of subscribers?
Torsten: The process involves removing inactive subscribers, correcting invalid email addresses, or removing them altogether. It is also important to segment the list based on engagement levels or other parameters. Many email marketing platforms offer automated list cleaning features, but there are other tools available such as ZeroBounce, Clear Out, and NeverBounce that can help with list cleaning.
What are the main benefits of having a clean email list?
Torsten: A clean email list helps ensure high engagement and improves deliverability rates. If your list contains inactive or bouncing email addresses, it can negatively impact your spam score and result in your emails being caught by spam filters.
How can we ensure compliance when running email marketing campaigns?
Torsten: Compliance with regulations like GDPR or the CAN-SPAM Act involves obtaining clear consent when adding people to your subscriber list, providing easy ways for subscribers to unsubscribe, and including a physical address in your emails. It is crucial to send relevant and high-quality content to subscribers as well.
Are there any best practices for email subject lines in terms of optimal length?
Torsten: There is no definitive rule, as it depends on your audience and email content. However, a general guideline is to keep subject lines between 50 and 60 characters to ensure they are not cut off by various email clients.
When optimizing emails for different platforms like Outlook and Gmail, what design considerations should be taken into account?
Torsten: It is important to ensure that emails are responsive and can be viewed on mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. Using simple layouts, web-safe fonts, and alt text for images can help ensure consistency across different email clients.
Is there an optimal length for email newsletters, or is it better to keep them shorter?
Torsten: The optimal length of email newsletters can vary depending on the content and audience preferences. It is recommended to deliver value while keeping the content concise to respect the audience's time and attention. A/B testing can help determine the most effective length for your specific audience.
When is a standalone email a better solution than including the content in a newsletter?
Torsten: Standalone emails work well for important announcements, special promotions, or when highlighting a specific topic that may get overshadowed in a newsletter. If content is relevant only to a specific segment of your subscriber list, a standalone email may be a better choice.
How can you avoid email fatigue and reduce unsubscribes when sending multiple emails to the same target audience?
Torsten: Splitting the campaign into different segments and ensuring each send has relevant and high-quality information can help maintain engagement. Changing the subject line and swapping out content between sends can also help keep subscribers interested.
