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Marketing

How to Use FormKeep Email Campaigns to Grow Your Reach

Email marketing is one of the most reliable, cost-effective forms of digital marketing, and it has only increased in effectiveness in 2020. People who are in quarantine or working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic are a captive audience — which means they’re more likely to engage with content in their email inbox. The data backs this up: In April, the rate at which people opened emails was up more than 20% from last year, and the amount of people who followed through on the email’s call to action increased by almost 23%. The return on investment for email marketing is huge: spending $1 on an email campaign generates an average $38 in return, according to research by Campaign Monitor.

Whether you’re building brand relationships with private consumers or marketing to other businesses, email is a fundamental part of any marketing campaign. Unlike other forms of digital marketing, email lets you personalize messages to connect with different segments of your customer base. This increases the effectiveness of those messages and helps build relationships with your target audience, which will keep your customers coming back.

FormKeep’s new Email Campaigns feature can help you get an effective email marketing campaign off the ground, even if you’re not sure where to start.

FormKeep for email marketing

With FormKeep, you can collect email addresses and start emailing your contacts right away. All it requires is FormKeep’s Email Marketing Introductory plan and a physical address, to comply with the FTC CAN-SPAM Act regarding commercial email. When growing your email list, it’s important to focus on collecting subscribers who are interested in your company and will likely want to learn more. You don’t want to target just anyone, because an unengaged subscriber base can make your email campaign less effective overall. How do you determine the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign? Take a look at the data.

In the Reports tab, FormKeep tracks the click rate, bounce rate, and open rate of your campaign. The open rate is exactly what it sounds like: the percent of email recipients who open your emails. While the open rate is important to keep track of to make sure your emails are being read, the click rate shows whether recipients are engaging with the content of the emails by clicking embedded links. This indicates that recipients are interested in what you have to offer and would like to learn more. 

While open and click rates are important numbers to increase, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible. A bounced email is an email that could not be delivered to its intended target. There are several reasons why this happens: It could be that the address it was sent to is invalid or was closed by the user, or it could be that the email itself was blocked for containing spam. A high bounce rate is bad news, because it can affect the digital reputation of the sender’s account. Luckily, FormKeep makes it easy to decrease your bounce rate: just remove the bouncing email addresses from your contact list.

One way to keep your open rates high is to divide your email list into segments, which helps you provide relevant content to different parts of your audience. That could mean segmenting your email list based on geographic location, ways they have interacted with your company already, or how often they open your emails. This can increase your click rate, and it can decrease the number of people who choose to unsubscribe because they’re not getting relevant information from your campaign. Segmenting an email campaign can increase revenue up to a mind-boggling 760%.

FormKeep has existing fields that get sent from your form that will also be saved into contact submissions. A good form is designed to take note of various fields and details that help you segment your contacts. 

With fields set up in your forms, you can create segments of your email list under the Segments tab. 

Once you have a list of contacts and you’re ready to send an email, you’ll want to navigate to the New Single Email tab. There, you can draft an email, set the subject line, and choose which segment of your email list to send it to. 

When you’re writing an email, remember that it will be received by a real person. Eye-catching subject lines, personalized greetings, and brief, compelling content will help your email stand out in a busy inbox. To help create elegant emails, FormKeep supports both HTML and Markdown formatting. While HTML is a more robust method for formatting text online, Markdown is simpler and easier for beginners to get the hang of. Check out this guide for an overview of how Markdown works. What your emails look like is as important as what they say, and both should be tailored to support the goal of your email campaign.

Building successful email campaigns

Before you start an email marketing campaign, make sure you know what your goals are, so you can maximize the campaign’s effectiveness. Possible goals include increasing your website views, growing your email list, turning those email subscribers into paying customers, or getting subscribers to share your content on social media.

Once you have a goal in mind, you can tailor your content to support that goal. For example, you can include a call to action that directs email recipients to your website or blog. Alternatively, you could include social media sharing buttons and ask recipients to use relevant hashtags that will boost your reach. Successful campaigns often incorporate weekly or monthly newsletters, sweepstakes announcements, promotions or coupons, industry news alerts, or invitations to events, based on what the company operating the campaign wants to achieve.

There’s no need to include all of these types of emails at first, or at all if they don’t serve your campaign goals. Don’t bombard your subscribers with irrelevant emails that will probably just get deleted. Start by identifying the information that will be most relevant to your subscribers and build on what’s successful. The data you collect from your subscribers, from the way you set up your fields in forms to open and click rates, can be a guide for further personalization. Email subscribers who consider your content impactful will be interested in continuing a relationship with your company, which will further improve your email campaign’s statistics.