Email marketing continues to be one of the best performing digital marketing channels. If done right, it has an incredible ROI: For every $1 spent on email marketing, the ROI can get as high as $42. While email marketing can enjoy a very high ROI, success is by no means guaranteed.
There are strategies to employ to ensure that you get the best out of your email marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re just getting started with email marketing or you’ve hit a brick wall in growing your email list, this article contains strategies that will improve your emails and help you develop a long-term email marketing strategy that works.
We will walk you through 7 important email marketing strategies that will help you optimize your emails, moving you beyond sending one off to building a sustainable email marketing strategy that imparts your business’ bottom line.
- Personalization:
This is one of the most important strategies in email marketing for increasing conversions. 74% of marketers say that personalizing emails has improved engagement rates while also improving several other KPIs
At the same time, the ever-increasing use of email marketing ensures that the average customer gets plenty of emails in their inbox on a daily basis. This is particularly true as businesses continue to rely more on email marketing in light of the changing landscape of other forms of advertising. Personalizing your email helps you stand out and helps your user get beyond the title into the body of your email and engage with your content
You can implement this strategy through a variety of means. When a user signs up for your email list, they share a variety of data like their name, email address, and any other relevant information. Your team can utilize this data in personalizing emails, increasing the probability that your emails are actually opened by your prospects, and beyond just opening, that your prospects actually interact with them.. Many email software tools and programs allow you to send automated and personalized messages to your customers.
For example, businesses have leveraged specific holidays and dates to personalize emails to their customers. One of the highest ROI dates that companies exploit are birthdays.
Sending an email to your customer on their birthday with promotion is a great strategy to increase sales and build a relationship with your customer. Experian found that birthday emails generate 342% more revenue than normal promotional emails.
- Use double opt-in email sign up:
Sending information and offers through email is a form of permission marketing, a term coined by Seth Godin in his book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers. Godin opines that you allow customers to opt in to marketing and decide when, where, and how they should be advertised to. He maintains that this is the most efficient way to turn visitors into customers.
Here’s what double opt-in email sign up looks like:
- A user fills a form on a landing page on your website
- They then receive an email prompting them to confirm their interest in signing up to your email list
- Once they confirm, they’re officially a subscriber who has opted in to receive emails from you.
- Get creative with your subject line:
Your subject line is very important to increasing conversion rates as they influence open rates. Research shows that 64% of all email recipients make a decision to open emails solely because of the subject lines.
No matter how great the content of your email is, it will be of no use if the reader never goes beyond the subject line.
The following are some of the top strategies to improve your email subject line:
Conciseness: Mobile is becoming increasingly popular amongst users today. This means that most people have only a few seconds to decide whether to read an email or not.
Keeping your subject line short is a good way of letting your customer know what your email is all about to help them decide on opening the email right on the spot. That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for longer subject lines. But you have to be strategic and careful about using longer subjects.
Personalization: Personalizing your subject line can be a genius move in improving your email marketing conversions. Many marketers use customers’ first names on their subject line to immediately draw the attention of the reader to the email.
Scarcity: People are always afraid of missing out on great deals. Capitalizing on this fear is a great strategy in improving your email marketing conversions.
You can achieve this with the use of phrases like “offer ends today”, “2 hours left”.
Including these phrases in your subject line suggests to the customer that they are about to lose out on an important discount and entices them to open the email.
- Segment, Segment, Segment:
You can create the best-personalized emails, use the most sophisticated of subject lines, if you are sending these emails to the wrong audience, you have only just successfully wasted precious time and money.
Customers come in contact with your business at various touchpoints, and you want to ensure that the emails they receive are relevant to the touchpoint at which they contact your business.
These touchpoints go a long way in telling you what’s most important to these customers.
Segmentation is critical to ensuring that your emails go to the right audience
- Use Lead Magnets:
The competition for growing an email list has grown over the years. People no longer give out their contact details just because you asked.
It’s not only challenging just because your audience has more than enough information choices, but also because some marketers have abused the privilege of getting into a subscriber’s inbox, sending them all manner of unsolicited emails.
This has resulted in website users being skeptical of filling out a form. Rather, website visitors are looking for value in exchange for their emails.
Offering your newsletter might not mean a lot of value to a web user, but a lead magnet can be a great way to offer value upfront.
Lead magnets, also known as incentives, or freebies, are the best way to overcome people’s skepticism.
A lead magnet can come in the form of a downloadable ebook, free webinar, coupon codes, special industry reports, calendar, or other exciting giveaways.
Here are some lead magnet ideas to inspire you.
A typical lead magnet looks like the image below.
- Test your emails before you hit send:
Don’t just focus on not making mistakes; also focus on making your email great. You should also avoid sending out your emails right after you complete them without testing them first.
While testing, you’ll identify mistakes, grammatical errors, broken lines, and formats and make appropriate corrections.
You can do all these by taking time to preview your email in popular email clients and send the emails to yourself before they reach your audience list.
This strategy will help prevent your emails from landing in the junk folder.
It is easy to implement, and with tools like getresponse, mailchimp, etc., you can use the email maker to run an inbox preview test in only a few clicks.
- Encourage Action:
In the end, to be successful in email marketing, your subscribers need to be able to take action.
You however need to encourage or induce these actions.
While designing your emails it is good practice to help your readers understand what to do next, otherwise, they’re not going to do anything and your desired goal for sending these emails will not be accomplished.
What do you want to achieve with these emails? Do you want recipients to register for a webinar? Or to come read a new blog you had just published?
Whatever it is that you want, ask for it!
To do this, you’ll need a call to action. This can be embedded in buttons or just simple clickable texts.
The fewer calls to action you have, the more attention you’ll gain.
Their design and placement also matter. Keep them visible and easily accessible, especially for small devices like mobile smartphones.
In conclusion, it is important to put the reader first when designing an email campaign. Focus more on delivering an excellent experience to them through your emails.
It might take more than a couple of attempts to finally get it right, but if you follow the tips highlighted in this article, you’re well on your way to becoming an email marketing rockstar.