Are your email marketing campaigns not performing the way you would like them to? Improve your strategy with these 7 email marketing tips.
As the Covid pandemic kept people homebound and shopping online, email marketing took on even more importance. Why more importance? Even before the mass transition to online shopping by nearly everyone, well-executed email marketing delivered a return on investment of around 4200 percent.
Of course, it’s the well-executed part that many businesses find an ongoing struggle. They put in the time on their emails, yet the results prove sub-optimal. If you find your emails don’t seem to pull their weight in your digital marketing strategy, keep reading for seven tips that will improve your results.
1. Build the Right List(s)
The admonition that you should build your list is old hat in online marketing circles. Yet, it’s also incomplete advice. Pouring your time and energy into building your list only makes sense if you build the right list.
What does the right list look like? The right list is a targeted list of warm leads or previous customers. The right list also pairs the right leads or customers with the right content and products.
If that sounds like more than one list, your head is in the right place.
As your list grows, you will find it necessary to segment the list into smaller lists. You may segment by product, lead vs customer, or even by demographic. By segmenting the list this way, you can address a much more specific audience, which generates better results.
2. Work Your Subject Lines
How many emails did you never open because the subject line left you cold? It’s probably in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. If your subject lines leave your leads or customers that cold, good luck converting them for your current product or sale.
There are several ways of writing good subject lines, such as:
- Humor
- Urgency
- Questions
- Deadlines
Let’s use questions as a case in point.
Here is a sample subject line: “Summer Clothes Sale.” It’s not very inspiring because it doesn’t address a customer’s needs or wants.
Here’s a subject line that speaks to what customers get from the sale: “Want to Look Great this Summer?” People buy new clothes because they want to look good. Appealing to that want dramatically increases the odds that people will open the email.
3. Consider Design
Customers might not give much thought to email design, but you must consider it. People read email on their computers or phones, which means you must design your emails the way you would any other online content.
Web content favors a lot of white space. It’s not because web writers are a lazy bunch who actually hate words. It’s because that white space makes reading on a screen easier.
Your emails should favor short paragraphs and even some images that help break up the text. Bulleted lists are also your friend because they break up the text and favor short phrases over sentences.
4. Develop Good Content
You need good content in your emails just the way you need good content on your website. If you don’t deliver good content, people might open one email but won’t open another. The problem is that good email content isn’t universal.
Your content must address the specific needs or wants of the different segmented lists. A newsletter needs updates, articles, or blog posts to prove effective. A list for customers who want discounts better deliver discounts in every single email.
Sit down and figure out what qualifies as good content for each segmented list and build an editorial calendar for each one.
5. Better Calls to Action
The people reading your emails or even reading content on your website are busy people. They cope with a lot of distractions. That’s why you need calls to action.
It’s unrealistic for you to expect readers to intuit what you want them to do after reading. You must encourage and direct them. That’s what a call to action does.
The best calls to action need three things:
- Visibility
- Clarity
- Contrast
Visibility and contrast often go together when creating your CTA. You can create visibility and contrast with a bold color choice or by creating a dedicated button that looks different than the rest of the email.
Clarity requires that the button convey a sense of urgency, while also conveying what the customer should do. Let’s say you run a remodeling business.
Most remodelers go with something like: “Get a Quote.”
You can up your urgency game with something like: “Get a Quote Today!”
You can take the whole thing up a notch with this: “Beautify Your Home Today!”
6. Testing
The world of online marketing comes with a host of free and paid tools that let you gather and analyze data. At the very least, you should track metrics and track analytics like open rates. Of course, all those tools also let you do things like run A/B tests.
That’s technical-speak for running sending nearly identical emails with one meaningful change. The most common change is an alternate subject line. This helps you understand what kind of language works best for the members of any given list.
7. Compliance
No matter how good your emails, they won’t do you much good if you run afoul of state or federal regulations like providing contact info and unsubscribe options. If your lists contain European subscribers, you must also watch out for GDPR rules.
If you work with an email list service, they often offer features that cover these essential compliance issues. If you run your own email server, make sure you understand all the compliance rules.
Better Email Marketing
Achieving better email marketing takes effort across several areas. You need effective list-building and list-segmentation in place. You also need solid writing across subject lines, content, and calls to action.
Give some thought to email design and how people consume web content. Do some testing with your content, such as running split tests with subject lines. Always make sure your emails meet the necessary rules for compliance.
EPS specializes in email testing, design, and analytics. For more information about our testing and analytics services or to get started, contact EPS today.
