Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways of engaging and reaching prospects, retaining customers, and encouraging them to take action. This post offers some tips on how to improve results from your email marketing campaigns and optimize performance.
- Define Your Audience And Goals
The first step to any email marketing initiative is to define your audience and goals for the attack. Determine who you are sending your email to and what kind of content your audience wants to receive – blog posts? Exclusive offers? Business updates? News? Why would they want to win your email?This will help you to define the purpose of your email campaign and envisage how it fits with your overall marketing strategy. Understand the goal of your drive so that you know what you want to achieve and can measure its success.
- Segment Your Audience
Once you have identified your audience, build a list and segment it into more specific viewers so that you can target different groups with custom campaigns. Not all of your list will want to receive the same content, so this allows you to tailor content, so you send relevant messages to relevant audiences at different stages of the customer buying cycle.
- Avoid Spam Filters
If you want your email to be read and acted upon, you need to ensure your email avoids the spam folder, as this negatively impacts deliverability rates. You can do this by avoiding spam filters. This involves ensuring you have received permission from the recipient to send them emails. Use a double opt-in form to provide the recipient has subscribed to receive emails from you and you have been added to their address book.
- Get Personal
Personalizing your email for every individual recipient can improve open rates, engagement rates, and click-through. Write as if you are writing personally to one person by using the recipient’s first name, speak directly using ‘you,’ and sign off with your name rather than your corporate brand name so that the email is coming from a real person. You can further make your email more personal by using personalized past purchase data to tailor the email to what the recipient engages with. This will create more impactful emails as you send relevant messages related to their unique interests.
- Write Valuable Content
Your email should always contain content that is valuable to your reader. Ask why your audience would benefit from reading your email. What do your contacts gain from reading your email? Why would they open it? Your content should be positioned with your goal to help you achieve it. Create content that is informative, helpful, useful, entertaining, educational, more inspiring, and convinces the user to take action.
- Write Like A Human
Always write like a human in your emails. This means expressing your personality, using humor, and being friendly. Directly, write to another human in your natural speaking voice. This will make you more trustworthy to prospects and help you build a stronger relationship. Your email will also be more impactful if you evoke emotion in your reader. This will make readers more likely to engage in your content and compel them to click your call to action.
- Be Wary When Using Images And Videos
Visual media is proven to be more engaging than just text, so your email is more likely to perform better if you use GIFs, videos, and pictures to illustrate your message. However, you should be wary when using images and videos in your email as not all email providers display images by default and pictures may be automatically blocked. Hence, use photographs sparingly and don’t focus on image-heavy design or rely on images to convey main messages as most recipients will not see the photos in your email.
- Add Social Sharing Buttons
Include links to your social media accounts in your email with social sharing buttons. This will allow you to promote your email further and let subscribers share your content to generate new leads and ultimately will enable you to access a higher audience than those already subscribed to your list.
- Write A Subject Line That Makes Your Email Irresistible To Open
Your subject line is important as it ensure your email is opened, read, and acted upon. It’s the first thing that users see and use to decide whether to open your email, so you need to use a subject line that readers have to begin. Make your subject line stand out amongst the hundreds of emails you are competing against in subscribers’ inboxes. Keep your subject line short, simple, bright, punchy, and relevant to the content in your email. Use action words and power words to evoke urgency, emotion, curiosity, and excitement to encourage opens and compel action. Don’t forget to test subject lines by resending your email with a new subject line to those who didn’t open the first time.
- Make Your Email Scannable
Most readers will not read your whole email and only scan it – 81 percent skim the content they read online. Hence, you need to ensure your email is scannable and easy to understand and the messaging is clear. Use plenty of white space, subheadings, bullet points, and headings to break up your content into sections. Highlight main points, avoid long blocks of text and keep your messaging succinct, short, and to the point.
- Be Consistent
As with all your marketing material, you need to ensure your email branding is consistent with both design and tone of voice. This means using the same fonts, colors, logo, images, sound, messaging, and sound that is used across your website, social media profiles and all other marketing collateral so that readers recognize your brand and know that they can trust you.
- Optimize For Mobile
Ensure your email is mobile-friendly, responsive design, content that is easy to read and engaging, and a clear CTA, and make sure it automatically fits all screen sizes.
- Send Emails Regularly
Send emails regularly. Whether you send monthly, weekly, or daily, stay in prospects’ minds and inboxes through regular updates, news, and offer to increase your success rate. Keep your emails consistent, so readers look forward to receiving your email. However, don’t overdo it and overload subscribers with emails or you’ll be sent straight to spam or trash.
- Make It Easy To Unsubscribe
Make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe from your emails and let them manage their subscriptions with a simple ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘manage subscription’ option in the footer of your email. Let them change their email preferences and decide which emails they want to receive and how often. It is essential to make it easy for users to manage their emails as users can get frustrated and relate this negative feeling to your brand if they find it difficult to unsubscribe. If users cannot unsubscribe, they may mark your email as spam or junk instead, making your email more likely to be labeled as spam in others’ inboxes. Giving users the option to manage their subscription gives them a choice to opt down instead of entirely out – this way you still keep your customers and they’re happy receiving your emails on their terms. When first building your list you should also provide users with a double opt-in option to ensure they are thrilled receiving emails from you.
- Clean And Update Your Email List
Regularly clean and update your email list to keep contacts fresh and relevant. Keep your list as maintained and organized as possible by removing inactive users who do not open or engage with your emails and deleting undeliverable email addresses.
