Email marketing is more important than ever. A smart, purposeful, well thought out campaign can be critical to your success and can add to the already positive public relations plan you have in place.
According to Statista, more than 306 billion emails were expected to be sent and received each day in 2020. Email marketing is performing better than it has in a long time, and that is largely due to the pandemic and the fact that more people are spending time at home actually reading their emails. Here are five steps to make your email marketing campaign even more successful.

1. Know who your target audience is. Create content that speaks to them directly. Now is the time to look at your email marketing campaign with a really critical eye and determine if it is meeting both your company and your client/customers’ standards. If your content is not purposeful and up to par, you risk people unsubscribing from your database.
2. Understand that these are not normal times. We are in the middle of a global pandemic, and the situation is affecting everyone differently. Many people have lost their jobs, others are trying to balance homeschooling their kids while still working, and yet others may be having to take care of sick family members. Be sensitive to the type of messaging you are sending out into the world—and keep it useful to as many as possible.
3. Scrub your email lists. Again, things have changed a lot over the past six months, and in the U.S. the unemployment rate is currently over 11% which means a lot of your business contacts and their email addresses are out of date. If you are sending out email blasts and getting a lot of bounce backs, this could be one of the major reasons why. Don’t forget, most email marketing platforms penalize you for a high rate of bounce backs. If your bounce back rate is higher than 2 percent, it is time to review your lists closely and remove old addresses.
4. Be Consistent. Stick to a schedule. It helps train your target audience to know when to expect outreach from you. Whether you send something once a month or even once a week, be reliable.
5. Add high-quality video, photos and graphics. Something that is visually stimulating will have a much higher open and engagement rate. Don’t let this become an afterthought—creative visuals make a huge difference!
   It is more important than ever to be engaging your audience across multiple platforms and showing up in their inbox regularly with quality content and valuable information. Email marketing needs to be a crucial component of your public relations and marketing campaigns.

It is more important than ever to be engaging your audience across multiple platforms and showing up in their inbox regularly with quality content and valuable information. Email marketing needs to be a crucial component of your public relations and marketing campaigns.

Laura Burns

Vice President