Among small business owners, you can find a spectrum of opinions regarding the practice of content marketing.
Some entrepreneurs balk at the idea, seeing it as little more than a waste of time to produce regular blog posts and social media updates.
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We’ve said before that email marketing remains the most effective way to make a direct connection with your audience—and indeed it is. Simply put, most of us are attuned to our email inbox around the clock, ready to drop what we’re doing to check the latest messages either from our desktop, our mobile device, or even our watch. With that said, email marketing does take some high-level strategy and some ongoing refinement. Not all email marketing strategies are created equal, and it’s worth contemplating some of the ways your company can boost its own email marketing performance.
Digital marketing has advanced considerably over the last few years, and there are still ongoing innovations afoot daily. It begs the question: Does something as tried-and-true as email marketing still have any place in your digital strategy? After all, email has been around for decades now—an eternity, compared with the short lifespans of social media sites—and it’s hardly seen as flashy or exciting.
Email remains the tried and true method in every marketer’s toolbox. Even more than social media, email provides an effective way for brands to directly connect with their audience. But just because it’s a proven strategy, that doesn’t mean email marketing is impervious to change. Like anything else in our digital world, email marketing (and, in particular, marketing automation emails) is ever in flux. Smart marketers are always looking ahead to the next big trends—and in this post, we want to highlight a few things you can expect to see in email marketing over the next year or two.
While other digital marketing strategies have developed or evolved over the years, you may be asking yourself, “Is email marketing still important?”
Your email marketing list can be used for many different purposes. Indeed, email marketing can be a powerful tool for building brand loyalty, disseminating content, and driving traffic to your company website or blog. Of course, you can also use your email list to directly boost conversions—though doing so will always require strategy and skill.
There are a few different ways of accomplishing that; in this post, we’ll list some of the most common and effective.
Every piece of content you publish should have a specific goal—whether it’s getting sign-ups for your email list, traffic for your website, downloads of your e-book, or phone calls to your sales team. Whatever your goal is, it needs to be indicated somewhere within the content itself—specifically in the form of a call to action. A call to action, or CTA, is essentially an invitation for your reader to take action—to leap ahead to the next step of the consumer journey. Every piece of content you produce needs a CTA at the end, and the CTA should always be clear—but with that said, you don’t have to resort to clichés. Specifically, you don’t have to include the words ‘click here’ in every CTA, as many do—and in this post, we’ll tell you why.
In terms of return on investment, there are very few marketing channels that even come close to the power of email. With that said, not every email marketing campaign is guaranteed to be a rousing success. As with anything else, you have to invest time and strategy into your email marketing efforts if you want them to get results.
If you pay any attention at all to what’s going on in the world of SEO, you’re probably familiar with accelerated mobile pages—or, as they are more commonly known, AMP. For the uninitiated, here’s a speedy synopsis: AMP is effectively a coding language that allows for websites to be designed with speed in mind, ensuring that, when the site is opened on a mobile device, it loads quickly. AMP matters because more and more search engine queries are happening on mobile devices, and users don’t want to wait for their content to load; Google, meanwhile, takes loading times into consideration when determining rankings, and AMP content is now being indexed by Google’s algorithms—meaning it’s a good way to enhance your website’s mobile SEO.
The term automated email has gotten something of a bad reputation. People hear that term and think of something cold and impersonal, which of course can be true. When done correctly, though, email automation is anything but irrelevant to the recipient. Ideally, automated emails play a critical role reminding your recipients why they signed up for your email list in the first place, potentially leading them down your sales funnel at the same time.
