Even after all these years, email remains a dominant player and one of the best ways to market your business. Furthermore, it is still one of the most versatile methods of digital marketing. You can use email to build trust, collect valuable feedback, announce new features, reduce customer churn, and so much more. However, with billions going out every day, you need to put in some effort to stand out to your readers, maintain their interest, and crush your marketing goals. This article will provide you with 13 email marketing tips that can help drive the best possible results from your email campaigns. We’ll start with the basics and move our way forward from there.
13 Email Marketing Tips for More Powerful Campaigns
Email marketing best practices are relatively evergreen in nature. However, the best ways to implement said best practices evolve along with the rest of the world. The following list provides evidence-backed marketing tips based on recent studies and digital marketing trends. Please note that these email marketing tips apply to both B2C and B2B email campaigns.
1.) Segment Your Email Subscription List
You can use email for any number of marketing purposes: to welcome new customers, guide them down your funnel, announce fresh releases, share promotions, and more. However, you can only apply these strategies if you’ve segmented your email list.
There are many ways to segment your list, but here are a few of the more common methods:
- Demographics: This requires you to use your CRM to segment your emails into groups based on reader characteristics
- Engagement: YOu might want to re-send or send out a second, slightly tweaked email to subscribers who fail to open your first one
- Stage in Customer Journey: Tailor your messaging and offers based on where your readers are in your funnel
- Source: How did the reader end up on your email list?
You need to set up rules and conditions in your email marketing platform to make this happen. In an ideal world, this is a 100% automated process.
2.) Personalize Your Message
Janrain and Blue Research report that 96% of consumers have received poorly treated information or promotions. Examples of misguided information or promotions include:
- Offers that fail to show knowledge of customer
- Errors pertaining to basic customer information
- Miscommunications across different platforms (e.g. email vs. social media)
Per the same research, 68% of customers automatically delete emails with blatant errors and 54% unsubscribe.
On the flip side, personalization can bring about a wealth of benefits. Some of these benefits include:
- Personalized subject lines can generate 50% higher open rates
- Personalized emails have an ROI of 122%
- Birthday emails can generate 342% more revenue per email than regular promotions
Due to the nature and best practices of digital marketing, you have tons of information at your fingertips about your prospects and customers that you can use to personalize communications.
- You can use your website and social media analytics to develop an idea of the topics, products, services, or messages that generate the most engagement
- Develop lead forms to collect email addresses with a few additional fields so you can customize your marketing efforts to each individual
- If you have a smaller subscriber database, you can use an email lookup tool to get basic info about your customer (name, company, location, socials, etc.)
3.) Optimize for Mobile
A less than stellar mobile experience makes 52% of users less likely to do business with you. Furthermore, 53% of users said they would leave a site if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less. Seeing how 70% of emails are opened on mobile devices and the CTAs within your emails lead back to your website, it is critical that your website is mobile-friendly.
Here’s what a mobile-friendly website looks like:
- All relevant text can be read without having to pan over
- Both the email and landing page load fast
- All buttons are clear and tappable
- Font type, size, and color are easy on the eyes
4.) Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers
While earning a steady flow of new customers is crucial, you cannot forget about your existing ones. Oftentimes, you can reengage a passive customer or reader with a mouthwatering offer and the right email copy. All you need to do is review their previous orders and send them a better version. Heck, you can likely get away with sending them a discount code.
5.) Employ A/B Testing to Identify the Perfect Email
You can use A/B tests to learn a lot about your subscribers. Test your subject lines, copy, layout, CTA language and color, images, and just about anything else you can think of. As with any A/B testing, you can only change one thing at a time. Doing so allows you to draw clear conclusions.
For instance, you may want to consider testing the following subject lines if you’re promoting a post about how to drive traffic to your website:
- X-number of Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
- Are You Missing Out on Easy Traffic: X-number of Tips
- X-number of Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website [Free Guide]
This way you can see which words click with your readers, or whether they engage more with prevention-based or goal-based tones.
6.) Set Up Event-Based Emails to Prevent Missed Opportunities
Event-based emails (aka triggered emails) are automatically sent after a customer completes a certain task. Event-based emails have a 70.5% higher open rate since you’re reaching readers while they’re actively engaged. Examples of event-based emails include:
- Reminder emails shortly after visitors abandon their carts
- Feedback requests after visitors complete an order
- Review requests shortly after they purchase your product or service
- Welcome emails once they’ve subscribed to your product or service
7.) Nurture Leads into Customers
For B2C businesses and low-cost offerings, a new subscriber may become a customer right away. However, the same doesn’t ring true for high-cost purchases and B2B marketing since the purchase involves more research and careful thinking. With nurture emails, you send a series of emails that build trust and provide offers that gradually increase in value.
For example, your series could look something like this:
A visitor subscribes to your list and gets a welcome email. Subsequent emails ask them to do the following:
- Download a pocket guide
- Download an ebook
- Attend a webinar
- Read a case study
- Book a consultation
All of the content that you provide is of high quality and useful. Furthermore, each “ask” is only a small step up from the previous “ask.” This baby step approach casually and gently nudges your prospect down the funnel until they finally convert into a customer. In short, nurturing is a total must for any lead generation process.
8.) Use Emotion to Connect with Your Prospects
Every pain point and desire for your prospects and future customers trace back to an emotion of some sort. If you’re a financial advisor, your clients want to stop worrying about their retirement savings going up in smoke. They want peace of mind knowing that they have an intelligent professional looking after their financial future.
So get going and earn more engagement by filling your emails with copy that is powerful and rich with emotion.
Email is a phenomenal avenue for marketing with emotion, especially since it allows you to cater to specific readers and tweak your copy via A/B testing.
9.) Put the Spotlight on Your Values
Modern consumers expect far more from an organization than they did in years past. They want to hand their hard-earned money to companies they support, whose missions align with their core values, and who look at them as more than just a source of revenue generation. Modern consumers also tend to admire vulnerability and transparency.
You can showcase your values in a number of ways:
- Clearly state your values upfront
- Share milestones in your social responsibility efforts
- Close each communication with a meaningful quote that ties into your values
10.) Tell a Story
It doesn’t matter if it’s a quick three sentences or a lengthy three hundred pages. Stories are compelling and typically make an indelible impression. Here are a few ways you can use storytelling to improve your email marketing results:
- Share a short story behind your most recent product/service and how it came to be. Readers will become interested in the end result. Furthermore, it’ll remind them of why your offerings are top-tier and worth paying a premium.
- Share a brief vision of a success story and then link to the full, more detailed version.
- Add a slight wrinkle to the success story…
- Start by describing the customer’s problem in a way that resonates with them (think P-A-S formula)
- Close with impressive (quantifiable) results
- Top it all off with “How did we do it?” and “Find Out Here” CTAs
- Get creative and share your own story as a warm-up for the rest of the email.
11.) Find the Right Time to Send
As a general rule of thumb, the best times to send marketing emails are Tuesday through Friday during business hours. You definitely want to avoid sending anything on Monday. Lastly, you’ll likely find more success in the middle of the week than you will if you were to blast your email list at 3:30 on a Friday.
However, these are very general benchmarks, and your industry’s email best practices may be different. Furthermore, with the rise of remote work due to COVID-19, peoples’ schedules have changed so it’s a good idea to step back and reassess the email marketing landscape. Just like the subject line and main body of the email, you’ll want to run A/B tests and collect your own data to identify the optimal times to send marketing emails to your customers.
12.) Use Dynamic Content
Dynamic email content is another way you can personalize your marketing strategy. With this strategy, the content of your email campaigns automatically changes based on reader criteria such as gender, geographic location, purchasing patterns, or visitor behavior on your site. Customers receive the same general email template but see different images, offers, CTAs, etc.
You can also add a countdown or a live feed from your blog or social channels to your emails.
13.) Give Plain Text Emails a Shot
Plain text…you’re kidding, right? Nope! Even with the ability to incorporate animated graphics, complex designs, and trendy features, consumers who enjoy minimalist content are on the rise. Not only do plain text emails align with this trend, but they also read better on smartphones, smartwatches, and voice-assisted devices. More importantly, they also advance with ease through spam, security, and privacy filters in most cases.
