The New Year is here! Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions? According to USA.gov, the top resolutions include losing weight, getting organized, traveling and volunteering. While all of these goals are great for improving your life, they’re also valuable ideas for your email marketing strategy.
Here are four New Year’s Resolutions you should consider making at work, it’s not to late:
1. Lose Weight. It’s time to trim down – your email list. If your open rate is lower than you’d like, pay attention to who is and isn’t reading your campaigns. Chances are if a subscriber hasn’t opened your email in over a year, they’re not interested (they’re also finding it easier to delete your emails instead of unsubscribing.) Your goal as a marketer is to engage with your customers, and you can’t do this if your emails aren’t being opened. There are a few things you can do to trim down your list: remove inactive subscribers from your list or ask them to re-confirm their subscription and/or opt out, and eliminate email addresses that continuously bounce. You’ll feel so much lighter when you do!
2. Get Organized. With the amount of storage bins being sold during this time of year, it seems like plenty of us are cleaning our closets. Organizing your email marketing is a good idea, too, as campaigns are most effective when they’re done on a consistent basis. The key is to create a marketing plan with specific goals and objectives that you wish to achieve this year. Will you send a campaign weekly, biweekly, monthly or on another schedule? Create a calendar and include topic ideas. For help, look at your email marketing performance metrics from 2013. Which campaign had the highest open rate? This is a good indication of successful subjects lines. Which campaigns had the highest click-through rate? This is a good indicator of the topics your customers are most interested in. Which had the lowest open rate or the highest unsubscribe rate? This will help you avoid similar missteps for 2014. An organized marketing strategy is a successful marketing strategy.
3. Travel. For 2014, resolve to travel – with your customers. If you aren’t focusing your email marketing campaigns on mobile devices, you are missing out. Approximately 145 million people in the U.S. own smartphones, which makes up more than 60% of the mobile market, according to the August 2013 comScore report, and their top activity is retrieving email. If a subscriber opens your email on their smartphone and can’t easily view it on their device, 89% will delete it without giving you a second chance, and 27% will unsubscribe from your list. This is the year to optimize your emails for the road.
4. Give Back. Volunteering time and money is a popular New Year’s resolution,
but did you realize that you can give back to your community by sharing your knowledge? This can come in the form of a company blog and email newsletter. Use these tools to educate others by offering industry news and trends, as well as quality content that can help others in their own workplace. When you give, you will receive; people buy from people they trust, not people who treat them like just a sale.
The Boomerang crew is here for you every step of the way! ~ Cheers
