Email marketing is no more an alien thing to anyone, being a part of every business type, big or small. Email marketing is viral, accredited to its targeted approach and higher ROI ratio, i.e., 42:1(USD). Email Marketing is one of the most powerful marketing techniques that allow you to reach out to your customers directly.
80% of business professionals admit that email marketing increases customer retention. However, an email marketing campaign can only be considered productive if it leads to the desired action. The action can be anything like product purchase, subscription renewal, etc.
You should always craft your email content so that it takes your subscribers to your website, increasing their chances of conversion. If the customer does not take the desired action, you need to revise your email copy.
An Email Marketing Campaign can work wonders in boosting up your sales if used in the right way. Here are some proven strategies that will help you create an outstanding email marketing campaign that drives more actions and traffic to your business.
15 Actionable Email Marketing Tips For Your Business
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Avoid Only Sending Sales Email Marketing
Email marketing is definitely meant for promoting your brand and selling products/ services. But that does not mean that you will talk about the same thing every time you send an email to your customer. With a similar sales email sent every time, the subscribers start losing interest in your email and the brand. And a time arrives when they stop opening your emails, pushing you towards the spam list, or leading to unsubscription.
Try sending some other interesting and engaging stuff to the subscribers that encourages them to go through the emails. You can mix different types of content in the campaign, such as newsletters, questionnaires, discounts, offers, etc. This tends to gain customer’s confidence, making your place on their favorite’s list. -
Design Newsletters that speaks Your Brand
60% of the customers prefer buying from the brand they are familiar with. The same is the case with emails. Customers always open emails that are coming from a recognized brand. This familiarity and confidence can be developed by brand consistency.
Remember, a brand is not the name and logo that you place in your email, but it is also the voice in the email. Hence, along with the email design, images, colors, text font, and logo, the content of your newsletters should speak your brand’s voice. The more meaningful your content will be, the most interested will be the subscriber to hear from you. -
Test Your Email Campaigns
Testing your email campaign is extremely important for the success of your campaign. Testing gives you an insight into your email performance, helping you find out the performing and nonperforming factors of your campaign.
The best approach is to assess the performance of previous years campaigns, based on the following factors-- The opening rate
- CTR(Click through rates)
- Conversion Rate
- Unsubscription Rate
Or, you can also do the A/B testing for your emails. A/B testing analyzes the campaign’s performance on slightly varying factors such as on 2 different times. The analysis gives you an idea about the most performant content and design, the most appropriate time, and the most potential subscribers. This helps you strategize your email marketing plan accordingly and make improvements where necessary.
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Create Engaging Subject Lines
Did you ever realize the foremost thing you notice in an email when it lands in your inbox? And after which, you decide whether to open the email or not.
The answer is – The Subject lines of the emails. The subject line is the first thing that interacts with the subscriber, giving them the email list at a glance. The subject line of the email plays a vital role in the opening rate of the email. Look at the following stats to understand the importance of the subject lines in the emails-- 33% of the recipients open emails due to their catchy subject lines.
- 69% of recipients tend to report an email as spam solely based on its subject line.
- An interactive subject line leads to 70% higher conversion rates than those who use static content.
Hence, make sure you use a compelling subject line in your email; it has to be extremely creative and powerful. For this, you can use power words in the subject line that encourages the recipients to open the emails.
Source: Coschedule -
Try to Establish a Real Conversation with Your Subscribers
“An engaging email doesn’t just talk to a reader; it also gives him a reason and an opportunity to respond, just like a real-world conversation.”- Marketo.
Customers like real conversations. A conversation coming from a human appears more genuine to them, making the subscribers feel special and attended. Computerized emails appear more generic and do not have that power.
So, to create a friendly and trustworthy relationship with the subscribers, you should incorporate your name in the sender’s field. Along with this, also allow your subscribers to respond to your email. Two- way communication tends to be more productive than one-way communication. This allows the customer to share their experience and put up their queries related to your brand. The more attended a customer feels, the more are the chances of future interactions. -
Personalize and Segment Your Emails
How does it feel if you are a grown-up man and someone gets you a toy car for your birthday? Or mentions someone else’s name on your gift? You will definitely get annoyed. The same happens with emails. Subscribers stop opening emails that do not serve them appropriately, increasing the chances of unsubscription and spamming. 67% of total unsubscriptions happen because of too many irrelevant emails sent to the subscribers. Personalization and segmentation can work here.
Personalized emails generate 6 times higher transactional rates. – Experian
Subscribers prefer personalized and segmented emails more than the general ones. To create a personalized experience for your subscribers, you can add the sender and recipient’s name in the email. You can also segment your email list based on factors like gender, age, interest, etc. A personalized email makes the subscribers feel special and attended. If you deliver appropriate and relevant content, the customers will look forward to hearing more from you. -
Use the Preview Text
After the Subject line, something that works like the Cruithne(second moon) for the Email is the Preview text. A compelling subject line definitely works great for the email performance, and preview text adds more to it.
Preview text is placed beside the subject line. Though it is not mandatory to mention a previous text, leaving it blank can take away the opportunity to strengthen your impression on your subscribers. In case you do not write a separate preview content, the email content starts appearing in its place.
The best approach is to craft a powerful preview text that intensifies the urgency of your email’s subject line. For example, if your subject line talks about the last day of the sale. Your preview text can be like- A few hours left to save 50% on your purchase.
You can also ask a question in your subject line; you can place a teaser of the answer in your preview text. Your preview text can help you to create a curiosity gap among your customers. This tends to motivate them to open your email and go to the content, thereby increasing customer engagement. -
Keep It Brief and Skimmable
No one likes to indulge with long and dragged content. The subscribers always prefer to quickly jump to the important part of the content as soon as they open the email. And if they fail to find out some, they will close the email without going through the content.
This also tends to prevent them from opening your email in the future as well. Hence whether it is the content of the email body or its subject line, it is advisable to use crisp and to-the-point content in your email copy. There are some of the standard practices that you can follow while creating-- Keep sentences short that are around 25 words.
- Break the long paragraphs into short 2-3 sentences, paras.
- Write crisp subject lines, not more than 25 characters.
- Only keep the sentences that are relevant to your purpose.
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Offer Something Valuable
A great email copy won’t get you desirable offers unless your company offers something valuable to your customer. Before you send an email to your customer asking him to buy your product or subscribe to your service, try to get into the insights of the customers’ interest and your product’s usefulness.
Please do not send an email copy for the sake of sending it or reminding them about your brand. You need to create quality in your email content. Try to match your email content to the customer’s preferences. In case you are doubtful about this, you can directly ask the customer about the same. This will help you to send more relevant content to them and therefore also so increase customer engagement. -
Try to Sell Benefits instead of Features.
People only indulge in something productive for them. You can consider this psychology while crafting your emails as well. Talk about their benefits or problems first. Instead of telling them about the features of your product, mold it differently.
Tell them about the benefits coming from that feature. For example, you sell a high power coffee blender. A customer will be more interested in its efficiency, i.e., how it saves their time and energy. -
Check the Relevancy of Your Landing Page
Imagine you received an email talking about a lucrative offer on your favorite book. You click on the CTA button to immediately place an order. However, to your surprise, you land on the website’s homepage instead of the product offer page. Don’t you feel disappointed and annoyed?
This kind of event leaves a terrible impression on the customers, preventing their future purchases. To prevent this from happening to you, always make sure your email content matches your landing page.
For Instance, Codecademy offers 25% off on Black Friday. They send an email about the same to their subscribers.
When the user clicks on the CTA button, he lands on the following page. Hence, they can proceed with further actions.
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Make it Simple to Unsubscribe
You have made many efforts to get people on your email list, so why on earth should you let them go and unsubscribe. You would instead like to keep them with you and never leave you. Though it is a great thought, you should retain your customers for a longer time. However, bounding them to do so is a bad idea.
Your unsubscription process should be as simple as your subscription process. Give your subscribers the authority to decide whether they want to stay or leave. This increases the chances of their returning. If a subscriber finds it difficult to unsubscribe, he might choose your competitor over you for their future purchases. -
Use Mobile-Friendly Design
Mobile contributes to 50% of the email open rate. Mobiles have been one of the most preferred devices to access the internet across the globe. According to Statista, approximately half of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Hence, neglecting it while designing your email copy can cost you some major losses.
Subscribers do not entertain the emails if their content does not appear properly on mobile devices. In fact, 52% of the subscribers do not even buy from such brands. Therefore, before you push your emails into your subscriber’s inbox, make sure to optimize it for mobile devices as well. -
Schedule Your Email at the Best Times
Along with the design and content, the email schedule is also crucial to the email marketing campaign’s success. You should send your emails at the time and days when it is most likely to be opened. According to WordStream, Saturday and Sundays are the least performing days of the month. Hence, you should avoid sending emails on these days. On the contrary, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays are the most performing ones, making it suitable to send your emails.
Source: Wordstream
A subscriber cannot be available for 24 hrs. Hence, along with the days, it is also important to figure out the most optimal time of sending the emails to get opened by the customer. According to Wordstream, the emails are most likely to be opened after 12 pm, in which 2 pm to 5 pm is the best duration.
Source: Wordstream
While deciding the schedule of your email marketing campaign, do not forget to consider your email frequency. Always try to maintain a standard frequency of your emails; it should neither be more nor less annoying. -
Include a Persuasive CTA on Your Email
You always send an email with a desire that your subscriber takes the next step after this. The only way to achieve this is to include a persuasive CTA in your email copy. CTA(Call to Action) is the most important part of the email, which guides the recipient about their next step. Hence, 90% of recipients that read your email copy also go through the CTA so that they do not get lost in the middle.
However, merely placing a random or general CTA is not enough. You have to be creative with it. According to Hubspot, CTAs with strong and personalized content can increase conversion rates by over 202%. So, if you want to drive action through your email, always use a compelling CTA in it.
Wrap-up
Email is not going anywhere anytime soon, it is here to stay. Hence, it would help if you leveraged the most-effective tool, i.e., Email marketing, to boost your business. And now that you know the most effective ways to make your emails more productive, you’re all set to take your email marketing to the next level. For any further assistance, Hire our Email Marketing Experts and add wings to your campaign.
