Automating Your Email-Marketing Campaigns

Often, new email marketers want to save cash, and thus opt for managing their email marketing campaigns by hand without the use of software. Now, although in the beginning this is possible, what inevitably happens is that their list grows. First to 100, then 300, then 1000 and before they have time to realize the mess they’ve gotten themselves in to, they’re unable to keep up with standard list management. In order to keep this from happening, it is important to automate many of the repetitive email marketing tasks from the very beginning with good email campaign software.

Email Marketing Software

Ultimately, what new marketers should really do is invest in email campaign software that helps automate the more repetitive tasks. Things like managing un-subscriptions, performance analysis, email design and email scheduling are just a few of the benefits of good email marketing software. Generally, prices range from $10/month all the way to a couple thousand if your list is very big, but chances are that you will be in the $10/month range for quite a while as you begin to grow your list. There are multiple software programs available and a simple Google search will bring up a handful of good ones, but ultimately the point of email marketing software is to help you focus on two things, and they are performance testing and writing great content.

Performance Testing

One of the most important tasks of any email marketer is performance testing. This involves segmenting your list and then simply trying various calls to action, designs, button placement and so-on. After making a few changes and sending a fresh newsletter, record the results and then make changes again. Over time you will notice that a certain combination of text, calls to action and layout consistently perform the best. This is one way professional email marketers get such good results, it’s because they test! Now, it’s not very easy to test your emails on your own, especially as your email list grows, but great email marketing software will help automate this aspect by literally tracking exactly which subscribers open and respond to your emails. This, in my opinion, is one of the greatest benefits of email marketing software.

Content

The other important benefit of email marketing software is that it lets you focus on content. Now, there are many different theories on what makes great content for an email marketing newsletter, but generally, it’s important to consider your audience first. I notice that many new email marketers focus their newsletters too much on their own business, which of course is important to you but boring for most everyone else. Because of this, it’s important to consider your audience and make your material unique and interesting. Simply including a poll, a few links to beneficial “how-to” articles or even interviewing someone in the field and providing a download to the audio file in the email will do wonders for your conversion rates and subscriber retention. Remember, nobody cares enough about your business to spend their free time reading about it in every single newsletter.

Ultimately, you want time to focus on growing your business, not managing every nuance of your email campaigns. Fortunately, there is great email marketing software available that can help you save time from the very beginning.