5 Golden Rules for Email Marketing for Startups
It is important to recognize the potential of email marketing. Startups have so much on their mind that they are potentially burning out their lists. Startup success is the buzz word in the business world. It’s always to ‘start’ it but takes significant efforts to ‘maintain’ it. Email marketing is basically a form of human interaction but rather in a formal manner. There is a set of unwritten rules about human interaction. If you don’t follow them, you’ll end up annoying your potential customers and prospects.
Email marketing is a challenge for email marketers. Before sending out emails, they need to go through some challenges including acquiring quality databases, low open and delivery rates, spam, and many more. With the rise in mobile use, mobile email is expected to account for 15% to 70% of email opens. Depending upon your target audience, product, and email type, the value can vary. If you are still not involved in email marketing as a part of your low-cost marketing, well you should start considering it now.
Before you dive right into email marketing, there are some things that you need to consider. Here is a compiled list of golden rules you should apply for your startup. They’re proven, time-efficient, simple gems of common sense.
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Test Everything
Gone are the days of spreadsheets and manual tracking. They are time-consuming and error-prone. You don’t have time for that, as you need to be ahead of time. Do not go with the trend, rather you should be the one to set the trend. You can’t get specifics on how to resonate with your specific audience. Try figuring it out for yourself.
Look for an email marketing software which will make testing simple and quick for you. Be a scientist about it and test one variable at a time. Do not assume anything, you’ll often be surprised. Try testing on various variable including:
- Subject Line
- CTA wording
- Personalization
- Image v/s no image
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Either 1 To 0 CTAs
CTAs are basically the choices you offer to the readers. And choice overload is something which is extremely easy to invoke. With one CTA, readers still got two options, click or don’t click. With just two options, readers are weighing up in their minds whether to click or not click or which one to click from both of the links you offered.
Or consider how quickly that will spiral into a bounce. Lazy people are distractable whereas busy people don’t have the time to ponder something just because you asked them to.
Zero CTA can also be proved as a strong tool for you if you use it right. You can design a series to build excitement for an upcoming launch. Try designing an email that provides all its value within the body and then drops the hint at something exciting coming up to leave them wanting more.
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Start Building Your List
This one is a specific rule. Stop building your list before the three months of the launch, because one of the most powerful sales tools is time. Pre-launch list building is a great approach for product validation. With enough time, sales objections tend to evaporate and the list building procedure is longer than you expect it to be.
Follow the following approach for a successful pre-launch list building-
- Put up a landing page which briefly describes the product or service you’re launching.
- Ask for the email address from people who are genuinely interested in your product and wants to know more about it.
- Maintain that list as it grows, and try to make them feel like the cool early-adopters they are.
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Consider Advantages of a Smaller List
Gone are the days when a long list was everything. Now, quality matters more than quantity. Let it be as small as it wants to be. Just make sure you nurture the list. Don’t let your list get larger than it should. And don’t even ad bunch of people aren’t interested in engaging because it means a net loss for you.
Use the common practice of list purging performed by email marketers to barrel scrap open rates and sky-high spam flagging is noticed by the email clients. Try keeping up that for your emails or it will be shunted down in the spam folder of the users even before they get a chance to read it. You can’t afford to lose the interested users.
Keep up the practice of nurturing your fledging list with content they really want. Keep a stubborn focus on the quality and send messages to individuals of this early list. Strike up conversations about their goals, opinions, and challenges. You can tune up your marketing to a laser point with focused quality.
Consider conversations with your customers as your assets or intellectual property as they can amazingly be valuable.
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Keep Your Milestones Checked
With time, your list is prone to grow. Which means you’ll need a way to automate conversations somewhat. To do so, you can try segmentation. Give them a choice of two things and track the number of clicks through each.
These links should be either pure value-offerings or a direct question:
“We’re curious. Which of these interest you more?”
In case your email automation doesn’t have a way to segment your lists, delete your account right away, It’s that important. People get you on their list because they think that you can offer them something relevant to their lives. With segmentation, get progressively more relevant to each subscriber with time. And try to make them stay by you as time rolls on.
If you’re in business, you should be marketing by email. If it’s not the area of your competence, contact Softuvo Solutions! We will run the email marketing campaign for you. Not only that, we have a complete range of digital marketing solutions to help your business grow. Take the first step today and ask our experts about your next step!
