There are lots of online marketing options available today but email marketing is still one of the most effective means of reaching customers directly. Because of its personal nature and its ability to reach the target audience right up to their inbox, email always proves to be a strong tool for marketing. Email marketing can be personalized, can directly go to a customer’s digital doorstep and is cheaper than many other marketing tactics. Whatever the size & type of your business is, keep the following email marketing strategies in mind in order to design a successful email marketing campaign in 2018-2019:
1. Identify & Understand the Target Audience
When you are more in touch with the audience you are dealing with, you know their pulse, and that is what you must capture in your email marketing campaign. For example, unless you are a company or a professional organization, no ecommerce customer really cares for the nature of your business and operations, unless you are offering a discount or a sale. Bottom line, if you are targeting an ecommerce customer base, stick to your objective: offer discounts, provide information about the current deals and keep the customer’s interest piqued. Have a mixture of original content but keep up the visual appeal. Up to 40% more marketers have reported having had successful leads generated through email marketing.
2. Get Personal
Don’t be shy to use someone’s name, if you have, along with the email address. The customers are likely to pay more attention if they get the feeling you know them. However, email personalization is more than just using a subscriber’s name. Predictive analytics is widely used in email marketing to help create personalized email campaigns. There are other tools and predictive platforms as well that can help you easily create personalized messages for your different customer segments.
3. Connect The Subject Line to The First Line
The customers read the email subject line and decide whether to click or not. Spend time to create and improve your subject lines to reach the top of the sales funnel in email campaigns. Then the first line of the email should give the message clearly. Be brief and descriptive rather than being too cryptic or too general.
4. Time it Right
One of the best email marketing tactics is selecting the right time for sending emails. While the right time can be different for different businesses, there are some basic guidelines. The best time to send emails in the morning as the open rates are highest early in the morning. Studies have shown that people tend to respond well to emails after they get off work i.e. ― between 7 and 10 p.m. Avoid Mondays as your customers will most probably be busy sizing up the week ahead and would not have the time reading an email that doesn’t have bearing on that. Avoid the middle of workday and weekends as well. People are busy with work at the middle of the workday and usually, want nothing to do with work during weekends. You will either be ignored or you will end up annoying your customers.
5. Keep it Short and Sweet
A detailed backstory is not needed in email marketing campaigns. Your reader does not have free time, so you need to show some urgency too so that they read your message and don’t delete it straight away. Your subject line should be short and your email should be concise. Keep most of your content on your website and use emails to get the readers there. If your readers want to know more, they’ll go to your site and that is how you drive traffic to your website.
6. Be Clear and Conversational
Be clear in your message. Nobody has the time to figure it out if it is hazy. Don’t make your email a billboard or skywriting, make it conversational. Avoid resorting to the hard sell and don’t reduce the value of your brand by being pushy.
7. Remember Mobile Users
Ensure that your email marketing design best practices are sensitive to mobile users as well because people use mobile devices to read and interact with emails. The users should find your website mobile-friendly and it should load fast. You should use a responsive sending program which will adjust your message for mobile users.
8. Try A/B Testing
From subject lines to your calls to action (CTAs), it is essential to do A/B testing every section of your email. The best digital marketers keep testing and analyzing their email marketing tactics. The right platform can be helpful especially for small business owners for whom testing might be too hard. You might end up losing revenue if you ignore email testing.
9. Measure, Tweak, Repeat
Once you start to A/B test and measure, you need to keep testing and tweaking in the months ahead. While measuring, collect as much data about your readership as you can. See what subject lines get you the most opens?
10. Keep Sharing Option Easy
After your readers saw and liked your message, make it easy for them to share it. Drop a “share” button at the bottom of a message but provide some kind of incentive as well, if you can. You can offer a promo code or a giveaway to new subscribers and to those who share your message. In case the promo codes or offers aren’t right for your business, just ask directly for a share.
Email marketing strategies can help you in revenue generation. Although it can be a challenge to organize and analyze your email marketing, you can do wonders in your own email marketing campaigns if you keep following the above email marketing practices.