This article was contributed by Vincent Sevilla.

Having a large following on social media is always good. And having an engaged audience is even better. But you know what’s even better than both of those? Getting a good return on investment for your marketing efforts.

And that’s exactly what email marketing brings. When executed well, email marketing can bring up to 30 times your initial investment, making it one of the most viable communication channels available. If you still need a bit more nudging, here are some other stats that support email’s effectivity as a marketing tool:

• 320% more revenue are attributed to welcome emails (on a per email basis) than other promotional emails.
• Consumers who purchase products through emails spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers.
• 80% of retail professionals say email marketing is their greatest driver of customer retention.

Here are 10 ways to maximize your email marketing

• Set your goals

As with any campaign, establishing your goals from the onset is key to achieving success. While goals are generally crafted to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant, Time-bound), there are tools like ROI Goalsetter that can help you out.

These types of tools allow you to set goals by adjusting key metrics to find out which changes affect the bottom line, while also allowing you to easily test different opportunities.

• Proactively grow your email list

The average email list naturally degrades by 22.5% every year. This makes it crucial to continuously grow your list. One of the best ways to do so is by offering value in exchange for people’s emails. Here are some ideas:

• Host webinars – Hosting webinars is a great way to build relationships with your target audience. And if you offer a webinar on a topic that resonates with them, they’ll be more than happy to opt in. You can even utilize Facebook advertising to spread the word about your free webinar.

• Giveaways – Be it a special discount or a free tool, people love freebies and would gladly give their emails for such.

• Establish expertise – A simple way to provide value is by interacting with groups on Facebook or LinkedIn. Once you establish yourself as an expert, it’s easier to convince them to opt in.

• Use triggered emails

Triggered emails like welcome emails (when someone opts in), abandoned cart reminders, and thank you emails (post purchase) are great at building relationships with your subscribers. It gives them a sense that you actually care about them and would likely lead to positive responses to future emails.

• Segment your list

According to MailChimp’s user data, segmented campaigns get 14.64 more opens and almost 60% more clicks than on-segmented campaigns. This is because segmenting your list allows you to send highly personalized emails to people most likely to respond to them.

It could be as simple as segmenting them by gender, by company position, or by location. However you want to go about it, segmentation is a must if you want to optimize your email marketing.

• Optimize for mobile

At the start of 2018, there were 3.7 billion global mobile internet users—a number that is only expected to grow. This means that if you’re not optimizing your emails for mobile, you’re doing it wrong.

The easiest way to go about this is by using responsive templates from your email service provider (Just Creative uses Aweber). These templates are designed to fit the screen they’re viewed on, be it a laptop, tablet, or phone, and pushes you one step closer to becoming an integrated mobile driven business.

• Automate 

Similarly, if you’re not automating your email marketing, then you’re not giving yourself a fair shake. Apart from saving time, automation brings a host of benefits to your campaigns, which include:

Autoresponders – A large part of email marketing is building relationships, and integral to doing so is by being able to deliver direct emails triggered by actions and behaviors of your subscribers. This lets them know that you’re on your toes when it comes to serving them.

Email workflows – Automation allows you to create intricate email workflows that are able to deliver key messaging as they go through the conversion funnel.

Dynamic segmentation – As alluded to earlier, you can’t just send out a generic message to everyone on your list. While basic demographic data can be used to segment your list, that’s far from taking the dynamic approach. Automation tools can help you segment your list as they go through the funnel, allowing you to send personalized messaging depending on their actions and behaviors.

• Email marketing + social media

While email marketing ROI is higher than that of social media, you’d be remiss if you’re not combining both. While keeping your brand top of mind is an obvious benefit of using email and social, the crucial data you can derive from both enables you to hyper-personalize your messaging and content. This makes integrating both an integral part of your social media strategy and vice versa.

• Use a tracking pixel

A tracking pixel is a snippet of code that allows you to track your subscribers’ activity across various channels like your website, landing pages, and newsletters. Then, you also have the option to send emails triggered by certain behaviors. So for example, if a subscriber goes to your site and checks out your product page, a tracking pixel can send an email with a special offer for the specific product the viewed.

• Time your campaigns

Sometimes, sending the right message is just as important as when you send it. Using your email automation’s data capabilities, you can find out when the optimal time to send an email is for each subscriber.

• Track and test your campaigns

You can only truly optimize your email marketing by consistently tracking and testing its performance. A/B testing is a simple way to test out different types of messaging, content, and lists to see which works best – allowing you to tweak your approach accordingly.

What worked this quarter may not perform as well in the next, so be proactive with monitoring your campaigns and tinkering with different elements of your campaign until you reach your goals.

Takeaway

Without a doubt, email marketing should be part of everyone’s business plans in 2019. And with the amount of affordable tools that enable you to automate your campaigns, you can easily improve your conversion rates, and ultimately, increase your ROI.

What improvements are you planning to integrate to your emails marketing? Let us know in the comments below.

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Vincent Sevilla is a professional web designer and inbound strategist for GRIT. His goal? To innovate ideas, create good music, and travel to all the best places in the Philippines. You can follow him on Twitter @easyvince.