By | Megan Isola
Email marketing is an effective marketing strategy that allows you to effectively target your audience to increase sales, offering a high return on investment and giving you the ability to communicate with your customers. However, without the right strategy, your emails may go unopened, unclicked, and even unsubscribed. Sending emails here and there simply isn’t enough to convert your audience into paying customers or boost customer loyalty. If you’re considering revamping your email marketing strategy, check out these simple tips:
Segment Your Audience
Audience segmentation allows you to send email campaigns to your email lists based on where they are in the sales funnel. Users who take actions on your site, such as filling out a form or completing a transaction, can be grouped to create highly targeted campaigns that are relevant to each segment, allowing you to personalize your offer based on data you collect through your CRM and website analytics.
The easiest way to begin targeted email marketing is by behavioral segmentation. Through this type of segmentation, you can set up your emailing list to track users based on behaviors or actions they’ve taken on your website, including transaction histories and different types of conversions.
Consider Dynamic Content
Your audience doesn’t want to read large paragraphs of block text. Instead, they want to look at something more engaging. You can use different types of content in your emails, including videos, photos, gifs, interactive polls, and even surveys, to get customer feedback.
Convert Abandoned Carts
If you’re an eCommerce business, you’d be surprised to see how many people add items to their cart just to abandon it. Luckily, you can recover some of that lost revenue by sending abandoned cart emails to remind customers they still have items waiting for checkout. Sometimes a reminder is enough for someone to return and finish the transaction. However, sometimes you’ll need to sweeten the deal a little more by offering them a discount to bring them back to your website. You can set up abandoned cart emails in any email marketing platform, allowing you to set up when customers should receive notifications after abandoning their carts.
Have an Onboarding Process
When customers give you their information, whether it’s just an email address or more personal information, they expect something in return, such as a welcome email to set their expectations. While your privacy policy should already state how you plan to use their information, your welcome email should help customers understand the benefits of being a subscriber. Welcome emails establish the value of your brand quickly, allowing you to open a line of communication with customers.
Use Email Preview Text
Unfortunately, many people never open their emails from brands because the subject line wasn’t descriptive or enticing enough to get them to check out the rest of the email. Since you only have so many words to excite your audience in the subject line, consider using the email preview text as a sneak peek to entice customers to open the email. Additionally, try to make your subject line and preview as attention-grabbing as you can while also being descriptive. This will help increase your open rate for your email marketing campaigns and avoid getting ignored by the rest of the many promotional emails users are getting.
Test Your Emails
You can test every element of your email, including the copy and design elements, to find out what works best to increase open rates and click-throughs. All email marketing platforms allow for some level of A/B testing that can be set up using a drag-and-drop editor, or you may choose to work with a developer to design two versions of the same email and send them out to different subscribers. Testing everything from your email subject to offers and even calls to action can increase open and conversion rates to ensure your emails are successful, allowing you to learn what makes your customers take action.
Combine Different Marketing Channels
Your email marketing strategy should never stand on its own. While email marketing is effective, it should always be part of a greater strategy, allowing you to combine it with other channels to deliver a seamless customer experience. If your main goal is to increase traffic to your website, you can use reviews on your website in your email. Meanwhile, you can invite your subscribers to follow you on social media for exclusive offers and news.
Never Buy Emails
Gone are the days when you could get away with purchasing an email list and cold emailing strangers to try to get their business. Now, those actions will get you labeled as spam, making it harder to reach your actual customers. Buying email lists can hurt your marketing strategy because it violates GDPR and can get your domain blacklisted as spam, which means email systems and apps will send your marketing emails straight to your customers’ spam folders.
Send Your Emails From a Person
Consumers no longer trust brands like they once did and expect a more personal experience. Sending emails from a real person within your company can increase open rates and engagement because it’s a more personal experience for your audience.
Use One CTA
While you may want your customers to perform a few different actions, like purchasing a product, following you on social media, or reading a blog, you should only have one CTA per email to enhance clarity. Of course, you should also never forget to include the CTA. Without a CTA, your audience won’t know what to do next.
Optimize for Mobile
Many people check their emails on their phones, so your email campaigns should be easily readable on any device. Always design your emails with mobile users in mind to increase conversion rates. You can optimize your emails for mobile by reducing image sizes or using responsive email templates from your favorite email marketing platform that allow you to drag and drop different elements into a template. You can also purchase templates from developers and email marketers.
Monitor Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Always monitor your campaigns to determine what works and what doesn’t. You might find that some emails are performing better than others, allowing you to find patterns to help you create email templates for different uses that are sure to increase opens and clicks.
Author Bio:
Megan Isola holds a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and a minor in Business Marketing from Cal State University Chico. She enjoys going to concerts, trying new restaurants, and hanging out with friends.
