Email marketing is well past its prime. Most services automatically filter out promotions and spam, and if they don’t, people tend to do it on their own. However, there are still ways to make it work. As Larry Kim mentions in his video, by using custom audiences, you can narrow your email marketing to users who have voluntarily given their email through the use of your services. Since they already know your brand and have most likely engaged with your products or services before, they are three times as likely to engage with your content and twice as likely to convert. Some ways to make sure your email list only includes potential conversions is to make signing up for your email list a voluntary action for customers of your site. This way the only people who land on your list are people who have engaged with your content before and are more likely to convert.
Not only does this boost your conversion rate, it may also help you avoid being automatically blocked by spam filters. The more users who report you as spam the more likely it is that you start to be automatically blocked by spam filters. Being blocked by a spam filter means you aren’t reaching any of your customers, and that could potentially be a huge loss in conversions. One way to avoid this is to watch for bounces. A bounce is when you send out an email that doesn’t reach the inbox. This can happen when you send an email to a fake address, or a dead email. Another way to avoid being marked as spam is to include an unsubscribe link in all of your emails, that way rather than reporting you as spam, a consumer may simply remove themselves from your email list. This in the end will be a much better outcome. Email marketing may not be as straightforward or as easy as it used to be, but if done right, it can still be an effective way to reach your customers.