10 Tips To Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns More Effective
While chat apps, social media, and other digital communication platforms have grown in popularity, email marketing continues to be an effective and important mechanism for companies of all sizes.
It’s not a surprise, considering that by 2025, it’s expected that the number of global email users is expected to reach a total of 4.6 billion. When used correctly, email marketing has the potential to generate impressive revenue – approximately $45 for every dollar spent – higher than any other marketing tactic.
Though so many businesses are using email marketing to launch products or promote services, what ensures that their efforts are successful?
LSC Marketing’s 10 tips for email marketing success
Email marketing is a science that takes careful planning and strategy. When done correctly, it can transform your business and make your marketing efforts that much easier.
Leverage the power of email marketing to grow your business. Here are 10 tips to help get you started!
1. It all starts with a good list, which should then be segmented into smaller groups.
Email marketing will be most effective when messaging is sent to engaged people that want to hear from your company.
That said, having a healthy email subscriber list is foundational. This collection consists of email addresses of customers who have opted in to receive your communications. From developing compelling lead magnets to adding dynamic CTAs to your website, email subscriber lists are built in a variety of ways.
Take a strong email list steps further by using segmentation, which means that the right message will reach the right person/people within this group.
For example: If you own a financial services company and have some new opportunities geared at high net worth individuals, you could segment your email list to target those with larger household incomes. Successful segmentation would guarantee that this message would be delivered to the most appropriate audience in your list.
Sending emails to subscribers that have been segmented using demographics, geographical or behavioral criteria will result in higher deliverability rates because the right people are being delivered the right message.
2. Determine the type of email you’re sending.
There are many different types of emails that can be sent to your customers. Once you’ve determined your business strategy and selected your target audience, you’ll need to decide the type of email that connects your objectives with your customers’ needs and wants.
Common emails include:
- Promotional: Include sales, special offers, company news, launches, etc.
- Relational: Create connections with subscribers by delivering what you’ve promised, like a monthly newsletter
- Transactional: Communication often triggered by an action on your website such as a signup, order thank you, or welcome message
Different emails will be sent at different moments, so it’s key to plan and execute understanding and determining which type should be sent when.
3. Plan, plan, plan.
A big part of successful email marketing is creating a schedule for content that strikes a balance between the different email types.
Knowing that good emails must be relevant, interesting, and valuable, the planning process should also keep in mind the frequency and timing for when your emails are sent. The average person receives over 100 emails per day, which means that it could be easy to overlook yours if they are not carefully thought out.
Appropriate timing and frequency of your emails can help build customer loyalty, as your base will not be overloaded by your communications. Campaigns should be sent regularly – think daily (if you have extremely valuable content!), weekly, or monthly – to create trust and comfort with your audience.
4. Don’t overlook the power of subject lines and preheaders.
Continue all the great work you’ve done to plan for a successful email campaign by creating subject lines and preheaders that will capture a reader’s attention enough to click for more.
Knowing that the average person receives 100 emails a day, if a subject line doesn’t take hold of someone right away, you run the risk of it staying stuck in their inbox. Or worse, deleted completely!
Subject lines should be short (approximately 50 characters or less), personal, action-oriented, relevant to what’s actually inside the email, and intriguing enough to click.
DO keep subject lines clever, personal, and beneficial to the reader.
DON’T use marketing/sales jargons, cliches, ALL CAPS, or give all the details away.
Users will also see a preheader, a short preview of the email, which accompanies the subject line. Without customizing a creative preheader, the email will automatically pull in the start of the email text, so take advantage of this prime real estate near the subject line! Preheaders should be six to eleven words that sum up why your message is valuable to your audience, and work with the content from the subject line.
5. Create content worth reading.
Once a user has clicked into your email, it’s crucial that you deliver body content they will care about. While you’re trying to promote your products or services, compelling content is about your audience, and what challenges your company is helping them solve.
Be respectful of their time by keeping your content valuable, simple, and concise. Good email marketing campaigns ensure that what they have to say is worth saying. Avoid marketing speak, technical jargon, and use a tone that’s friendly, powerful, and persuasive.
Use personalization within the body of your email to make a reader feel special and create a connection. Using a reader’s first name or some tidbit of information relevant to them (i.e. “Happy Birthday!”) will go a long way. Make the email feel like you’re having a friendly conversation versus a business transaction.
Within the content, be sure to include clear Call to Actions (CTAs) and links that provide more information for how they can contact your team, learn more about your services, get relevant tips, etc.
6. Good emails should be visually appealing.
Design is very important when it comes to the success of any email campaign. Without it, your message may go straight into the trash bin!
Studies suggest that a well-designed email includes 3 or fewer images to receive high clickthrough rates. As a result, users should be able to visually scan the email quickly.
Elements of good email design include:
- An on-brand look and feel, consistent to your other marketing, including your website and social media
- Ample white space with a nice balance of visuals and copy
- Clear and eye-catching visuals
- Shorter paragraphs and more clever headlines with bullet points
- Stick to no more than two complementary font styles
Also, ensure that a clickable company logo is at the top of the email so that users can easily go to your website.
7. Ensure that your email is built for mobile.
Our daily lives rely on smartphones and tablets, so it’s critical that all email content is mobile-friendly. With over 50% of emails being opened on mobile devices, and typically the first thing that people check in the morning, a huge key to any successful email marketing campaign is mobile optimization.
Some quick tips for making your email marketing mobile-friendly:
- Convert to a one column template for a clean layout
- Increase font size for improved readability
- Follow the iOS design guideline for mobile
- Ensure that CTA buttons stand out, are easy to tap, and located above the fold if possible
- Be mindful of ergonomics knowing that many users tap and scroll with their thumb, which means that important tappable elements should be placed in the middle of the screen
8. Stay out of spam.
Improve your email productivity by ensuring that your content and technical infrastructure follow best practices for deliverability.
Make sure that every person you send your emails to has given you proper permission to contact them. The users who have NOT subscribed to your marketing emails should NOT receive emails from you. Not included in this guideline are transactional emails such as order communications or password reminders.
Be aware of spam traps by sending consistent email campaigns to active members on your email list – this will also help you maintain a good reputation. Avoid sending communication to those who have not responded to your emails (i.e. clicked!) in the past 6-9 months.
Some additional tips include, but are not limited to:
- Regularly clean up your email subscriber list
- Authenticate your emails
- Communicate that users are free to unsubscribe from your communications at anytime
- Request that users add your sender domain to their address book
- Utilize an experienced partner to help deploy emails to acquired third party lists for prospecting new clients
- Provide a link to the online version of your email in all of your campaigns
- Always include privacy policy, company details, and contact information in every single campaign
- Avoid too many caps or special characters in both content and subject lines
- Avoid using phishing links in your content
Deliverability is a science, but as long as you’re compliant with internet privacy laws and understand your audience, your email campaigns should be delivered successfully.
9. Test, test, and test some more!
The beauty of email marketing is that you can collect data in real time to optimize future campaigns. Testing can be done on everything from your subject line to CTA buttons, and can help craft your strategies moving forward.
Analytics provide a wealth of information such as subscriber data including new subscribers and unsubscribes and performance.
A/B split testing will enable you to monitor the open rates, click rates, purchasing rates and more. You can analyze the winners and craft campaigns and messaging moving forward. Testing will allow you to track progress to help with the highest performing version of your campaign.
For example, you can slightly change up the language in subject lines to see which generate high open rates. If you’re running an upcoming promotional campaign, test language around the offer.
A: Get a FREE audit of your website today! VS B: Interested in a FREE audit of your website?
10. Leverage the full power of your email campaigns with marketing automation.
Save your time and money by using email marketing automation, which will send targeted emails to your customers through a pre-built and self-operating system. Regardless of what platform you use, email marketing automation works because it’s efficient, scalable, personalized, measurable, and relevant to your audience.
Examples of automated emails include:
- Welcome emails when someone joins your subscriber list
- Targeted emails based on what a user has clicked on your site
- Sending emails to those who have not engaged with your brand recently
- Seasonal messaging during holidays or key company moments
The more data you have on your audience, the more effective your email marketing automation efforts will be!
We’ll help you create better email marketing campaigns!
Email marketing is a process – the more you do it, the better you’ll be. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone!
Whether you’re creating email newsletters or sending drip campaigns, you can count on LSC Marketing Group to build and manage an email marketing strategy that will deliver results.
Our dedicated and experienced team will take your emails to the next level. With beautiful and responsive design coupled with clever content and tactics to collect loads of data for higher performing future campaigns, connect with us today to discuss how we can elevate your email marketing efforts.
Contact us and let’s get started!
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