Week 10: Email Marketing

You know those horrible emails that always fill up your inbox and never seem to stop bugging you? Yeah, that’s email marketers hard at work. I was surprised to learn that even though email marketing seems old, it is still one of the most effective marketing channels out there.

One of the main reasons email marketing is so effective is because the messages are direct and personal, which leads to higher engagement and conversions. The reason it has lasted so long and remains effective is that the algorithms almost never change, so what worked several years ago still works today.

Now, I want to go over the best practices for creating and maintaining an email list campaign:

1. Build an Email List.
Use eBooks, discounts, free guides, or just free stuff in general. I know I give my email away the most when I get something for free or at a discount. Those things where you spin the wheel after entering your email get me every time.

2. Create Subject Lines That Actually Work.
You need to make subject lines easy to understand, short, and include a bit of urgency, like a call to action to get people to open the email. Also, use A/B testing to find the best subject lines for your target audience. This semester, I learned that A/B testing is when you create two different subject lines (or something else), make them slightly different, and then use analytics to see which one works better. You can use this data to improve your marketing.

3. Personalize Your Emails.
In email marketing, you have the ability to make your emails highly personalized, and it’s important to do this because the more personalized they are, the higher the engagement rate will be. You may need to separate your audience into groups to make your emails as personalized as possible.

4. Set Up Trigger Emails.
Trigger emails are sent to customers based on specific actions they take. Common examples include welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and follow-up emails after a purchase. There are a lot of great tools to help with this, including Mailchimp, which I’m most familiar with, as well as many others.

5. Track Data and Optimize Campaigns Strategically.
Track data from your campaigns and use it to strategically optimize your emails.

Works Cited

“Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide.” HubSpot Blog, HubSpot, 15 Nov. 2023, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-guide. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.