Email marketing is a common for marketing strategy to reach your customers. With everyone taking advantage of it though, it can be difficult to catch your audience’s attention. After all, you’re not the only one vying for it.
Every day, millions of businesses send out emails to gain new customers and earn new conversions. Your business certainly isn’t the first to use email marketing, and it won’t be the last either, so how do you ensure your customers see your emails?
While you can rely on digital marketing services to help you with email marketing, there are some essential do’s and don’ts that are good to know about.
To help out your email marketing campaign, here are our top ten most effective email marketing strategies to try.
Top 10 Effective Email Marketing Strategies
1. Use Unique Personalization
Personalization is a crucial aspect of your email marketing strategy, and it’s not just about addressing your customer by their first name in your email subject line. When talking about personalization, we’re talking about creating custom-tailored emails that match someone’s preferences and past behavior. In addition, you can customize the subject line and content to match a group of customers to make personalization even more effective.
Personalization increases the chances of someone opening your marketing email. As long as your emails contain something of interest to your customers, they’re more likely to click on them and see what your message says.
2. Optimize for Mobile Experiences
You might be more likely to picture a laptop or desktop than a mobile phone when you think of email. However, over 50% of all emails are opened on some mobile device. This means it’s vital that your emails are optimized for mobiles.
Email messages that aren’t optimized for mobile devices are much more likely to be ignored and deleted. To prevent customers from overlooking your message, ensure that your email can adapt to any mobile device whether it’s a tablet or a smartphone. This includes all images and text boxes.
Your emails should look clean and professional no matter what type of device they’re viewed on. Without the proper optimization, customers may think your messages are spam or too risky to open. For the best results, you should always optimize your email messages for both mobile and desktop devices.
3. Send Messages in the Evening or Later at Night
Your email marketing messages are likely crafted during work hours, and you’re probably sending them out as soon as they’re done.
Studies show that marketing emails are more likely to be opened in the evening than at any other time of the day. In fact, your open rate may increase to 20% or higher. In addition, the studies done have even shown that clickthrough rates and sales are higher in this period than at any other point of the day.
Most businesses think of sending their marketing emails out during the day or during business hours. This creates inbox crowding, though. If your customers’ inboxes are too full, they’re probably going to go through and delete all those messages that they don’t recognize immediately.
You aren’t at as much risk of inbox crowding by sending your marketing messages later in the evening. The evening also tends to be when people get off work and are winding down while checking their emails.
4. Include Dynamic Content
Just like your business’s website should have dynamic and eye-catching content, so should your marketing emails. No one will read a message that looks like a Word document, so make sure to create unique content and images that will catch your customers’ eye.
By making your content dynamic and unique to each customer, you’re more likely to increase conversions. In addition, dynamic content that adjusts to different types of customers will help make your marketing messages seem more personalized, which is related to the first point we mentioned.
Thanks to advances in technology, you can now create a single marketing message with the possibility to adjust and appear in a way that meets your customers’ interests.
You don’t have to worry about creating different email templates for each customer group. Instead, focus on creating dynamic content and tailoring it to fit your customers’ preferences.
5. Segment Your Customers
Segmenting your customers helps you further personalize and optimize your marketing messages. Segmentation helps target your emails and determine which customers to show specific content.
You can have thousands of email subscribers, but only a few that fit certain requirements for a particular event or sale. Segmentation can help you reach only those eligible and prevent ineligible customers from trying to participate.
The best part about segmentation for your email marketing strategy is that your customers will only receive relevant information, which makes them feel like your business cares only about them. For example, instead of inviting all of your customers to an event that only 30% of them are interested in, you can invite only the 30% and see a much higher turn-out.
6. Test the Email as a Whole
As you design your email message, you probably conduct several tests along the way. After you have the complete design, don’t forget to test it again. Testing your email as a whole can show any possible errors or problems that customers might see when opening or interacting with the message.
Every part of your email should be tested: the subject line, call to action, design, sender name, target audience, landing page, and more. All your buttons and copy should be thoroughly tested too.
Just like regular website testing can help reveal errors and ways to improve, testing your marketing emails can do the same.
7. Give Something Away
Everyone likes free gifts, even your loyal customers. Sending out a marketing message that gives your customers the opportunity to win something increases the odds of them opening and interacting with your message.
Your free gift doesn’t have to be something extravagant. Instead, your free gift can be something simple that all of your customers can receive. Send them a free template or give them a free quiz they can take. Make sure your free gift is relevant to them and your business, but make it desirable too.
Giveaways and incentives are a great email marketing strategy that can increase the chances of your email being opened by nearly 200%. You can use incentives to keep subscribers interacting with your website or as a way for new customers to subscribe to your business. It’s a great way to improve customer interaction and gain new subscribers.
8. Send Messages Over the Weekend
Paying attention to when you send your emails can be a significant factor in your email marketing strategy. As mentioned above, sending messages in the late evening can be more effective than during the day.
The same thing goes for messages sent over the weekend as well. Not as many businesses send messages over the weekend, so you lower the risk of inbox crowding.
Without the risk of inbox crowding, your marketing emails are more likely to be seen and opened. Rather than deleting a bucket full of marketing messages, your customers might pay more attention to your email and open it.
By getting your message to their inbox when other businesses aren’t, your emails stand out. Although you won’t see an increase as high as sending messages in the evening, you can still see a slight increase in clickthrough rate, sales, and open rate.
9. Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers
In many cases, re-engaging your inactive subscribers will be less expensive than trying to gain new subscribers. New subscribers don’t mean much if they soon become inactive. Even if you have a fairly long list of subscribers, it doesn’t do anything for your business if they don’t interact with you or respond to you.
Some studies have shown the rate of inactive subscribers to be over 60%. It’s a number that many businesses don’t often think about, but it does affect how effective your email marketing strategy is.
A great way to re-engage subscribers is by stating clearly that you’re interested in their interaction. Send out an email reminding them of what they’re missing out on, but give them the option to unsubscribe if they’re no longer interested. Although it may hurt to see people leave, it can help you direct your budget towards your current subscribers who are actually interested.
10. Take Advantage of Social Media
Although email marketing and social media are not the same, they can be used together. By taking advantage of social media, you can build your list of email subscribers. Whether you’re using ads on social media or you run a business account, using social media to help drive your email marketing can give you a significant boost.
Social media is a great platform to hold contests and giveaways on. As users participate, you can convince them to sign up for your email list.
More Tips To Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns
In addition to the top ten most effective email marketing strategies, here are a few more email marketing tips that you can apply to your campaign:
Automate Your Email Marketing Campaign
When it’s possible, campaign automation can be a great boost to your email marketing. They’re typically triggered when customers complete a certain behavior such as signing up, after completing an order, or as just a thank you.
Make it Urgent
Making your call to action sound urgent encourages subscribers to act fast. Many big brands use urgency and it’s no surprise why. Messages with a sense of urgency encourage users to act quickly and lead to them completing an action in record time.
Sound Inviting
Creating welcome emails that sound inviting can be a quick way to turn a new subscriber into an engaged reader. Your welcome email is your brand’s chance to make a memorable first impression, so make sure it sounds warm and friendly. Let your subscriber know what they can expect in your emails so they’ll be more keen to keep a lookout for your messages and open them.
Conclusion
Email marketing campaigns are a common way to reach your customers. Even if you’re hiring digital marketing services to oversee your email marketing campaigns, it’s good to know about some of these effective insider tips.
As with any other marketing efforts, email marketing campaigns aren’t a set-and-forget event. Instead, they are a process that you should constantly monitor, analyze and improve. Apply these strategies today and keep learning and experimenting to get the most out of your email marketing campaigns.
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
