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14 Essentials to Maximize Your ROI

Email marketing is a direct marketing approach that uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to (1) sending emails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, and (2) sending emails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.

The main difference between email marketing and other types of direct marketing is that with email marketing, businesses can communicate one-to-one, as opposed to one-to-many. This allows for more personalized attention that can result in better conversion rates.

While the statistics are overwhelmingly in favor of email marketing as the best method for converting leads, but you can’t expect those kinds of returns without putting a lot of thought and effort into your campaigns.

Having your own email list is obviously ideal, but if you don't have one you can utilize other lead-generation methods to help you get started. Either way, you're going to want to capitalize on the 50% of people who say they buy from marketing emails at least once per month or the 59% of people who say that marketing emails have influenced their purchases.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. How many bad marketing emails have you received for everyone that’s converted you? Nearly 1 in 5 email campaigns aren’t optimized for mobile devices, and 41% of marketing emails are viewed on smartphones (59% of millennials, and 67% of Gen Z).

Email marketing isn't just about sending out mass emails to everyone on your list. The success of your email marketing campaigns depends on three things: the quality of your list, the quality of your content, and the frequency with which you send emails. Keep these things in mind as we go over some tips for successful email marketing.

Keep your list clean and up-to-date. 

Remove any inactive subscribers, bounced addresses, and duplicates on a regular basis. Not only will this keep your list manageable, but it will also improve your deliverability rate (the percentage of messages that are successfully delivered to subscribers' inboxes).

Make sure you have permission to send emails. 

This seems like a no-brainer, but it's important to make sure that everyone on your list has opted in to receive emails from you. Otherwise, you risk being marked as a spammer.

A larger list does not mean a larger ROI.

‍There is a point of diminishing returns when it comes to large email lists. Instead of blasting one giant list with the same content, consider segmenting those lists and personalizing your content as much as possible.

Too few or too many emails per month hurts email ROI.

‍Daily is too much, and monthly is not enough. Based on studies, the sweet spot seems to be between 9-16 emails per month. While slightly more or less still generate significant returns, we're going for outstanding, not pretty good results.

Testing your emails leads to higher ROI.

‍Companies that test their email campaigns enjoyed 28% higher ROI than their counterparts. Keep it simple at first by testing different subject lines. Definitely make sure you're testing for spam filters and deliverability, and preview before sending for formatting issues. Once you're comfortable, you can start testing different content and even the landing pages where you're directing traffic.

Personalized content leads to higher returns.

‍Dynamic content is essential to add a personalized touch to your email campaigns, and companies that do experience ROIs 4x higher than companies that don’t.

Make sure you have permission to send emails. 

This seems like a no-brainer, but it's important to make sure that everyone on your list has opted in to receive emails from you. Otherwise, you risk being marked as a spammer.

Know your audience.

Segmenting your list allows you to send targeted content that is relevant to each group of subscribers. This increases engagement and makes people more likely to open and click through your emails.

One of the truly innovative things you can do to update your website is to add features that allow you to automatically update your social media feeds. This eliminates the need for the people who handle your Internet marketing to update your social media feeds individually after making an update to your website.

The Concept

Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and other social media giants do have tools that work with them and that allow you to update them regularly. In fact, there are tools available that allow you to update your social media sites on a schedule. Your Internet marketing people, using these tools, could make several updates for these feeds and schedule them to deploy automatically.This can save a great deal of time and money and increase the return on investment you get from your website. It also allows you to do something very important, given the fact that many social media sites are coming up with various payment schemes for companies that use them for largely advertising purposes.

This article is meant to be an elementary glimpse into the world of digital marketing; there are many avenues to explore in the realm of marketing on the Internet, but one of the biggies is SEO. Below you will find some of the basic tactics and tricks anyone can do to immediately help with their site's Page Rank (the placement of your site in Google searches). SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of sprinkling specific commonly used words (or “keywords”) into your websites in order to (hopefully) have your page rank higher in Google’s search engine. To find what words you need to use you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Begin by punching in words you think people will use when searching for your company’s trade in Google.Take note of the most commonly used words or phrases, these are your “keywords”.

1) Plug-In Your Keywords!

The trick here is to not use them too much, Google can spot these and will consider your website spam and not post it at all; which is definitely not what you want. Be crafty and use multiple different keywords to plug into your website copy. Think of it as a game of Sudoku, but with words.