Statistics show that email is the most effective marketing channel that businesses can use. It’s an easy and efficient way to communicate with subscribers and to promote your products or services to them. It also has a better ROI than Pay Per Click, SEO, and content marketing. To help you make the most of your email marketing, we’ve put together five tips to make your strategy even more successful.
- Make your emails personal
When something’s got your name on it, you take more notice of it. Just think of how people handle their snail mail: if it’s addressed to householder or customer, it often gets unceremoniously chucked into the recycling without the envelope being opened. That’s because we know important letters always have our names on them.
As we get far more emails than we do letters, we are even more judgemental when we work our way through these. So, if you want your emails to get opened, the first thing you should do is put the customer’s name on. The facility to do this is built into every email marketing or newsletter program: Dear [user_name].
But that’s only the start.
Making something personal should go further. Today, businesses should be using the data they hold on customers to make sure that emails are focussed on their interests or needs. If you sell clothing, for example, it would make sense to send your new men’s collection to your male customers and new women’s collection to females. If someone has browsed or bought children’s clothes in the past, then they might be more likely to be interested in emails about children’s clothes.
The use of personal data can have a big impact. Subscribers are more likely to open and read an email that contains content aimed at them and are subsequently more likely to make a purchase. It’s a no brainer.
The key to success here is in obtaining that data. You can keep records of a visitor’s browsing and purchasing habits, you can give them the option to make wish lists, or you can ask them information when signing up, by getting them to complete a simple form: To help ensure we send you relevant emails, please tick which of the things below you would like us to email you about. - Use segmentation
Splitting your email subscribers into different sections is another effective way to improve the chances of conversion. Firstly, segmentation is another form of personalisation. If your clothing shop puts men and women on different email lists, it means that people aren’t going to unsubscribe when they keep getting irrelevant emails.
The other way to segment subscribers is to divide them by the stage they are on in your sales funnel. When optimising your sales funnel, you should send targeted emails to those who are one each of the different stages: lead magnet, tripwire, core offer, profit maximiser and resale. This has been proven to radically increase conversion rates.
So, if a subscriber has been intrigued enough by one of your lead magnet mails to follow the call to action, you should remove them from the lead magnet list and add them to the tripwire list, and so forth. - Create mobile-friendly emails
Mobile phones are now the dominant way we access the internet and this includes viewing our emails. Between 2012 and 2016, the percentage of marketing emails opened on mobiles doubled from 27% to 54%. Today, nearly two thirds of us check our phones for emails, news and Facebook before we even get out of bed.
With this shift towards mobile internet use, it makes sense to have your emails optimised for mobile viewing. In other words, you need a responsive email design. Unfortunately, over 50% of companies don’t do this. Their emails are much less likely to be opened or read.
To make mobile emails have a better chance of being successful, make sure both the subject line and the snippet are succinct and put keywords at the beginning. Also, try to make your call to action a prominent feature that is easy to click on.. - Use automated email campaigns
Automated emails make marketing so much easier. For newsletters and email subscribers, it’s reassuring when emails always arrive on the same day and at the same time. Not only does this help them see your company as reliable, it also gives them something to look forward to. Your regular Friday email might be what they read over breakfast or on the commute to work. Emails with erratic arrival times can slip through the net and lead to customer disappointment.
You can also use automated emails to respond to customer actions. Not only are they useful for confirming orders and other transactional communication, they are the perfect channel for seizing short lived opportunities. If someone has just bought a product from you, an email offering 10% off a related product is a clever way to maximise profits. Congratulations on the purchase of your new golf clubs. As a thank you for buying them from us, we’d like to offer you a 10% discount off our new range of golf bags.
These latter types of emails, known as trigger emails, are opened twice as often as standard emails and have twice the click through rates. It’s definitely something you should consider including in your marketing strategy. - Improve trust: make your emails secure
One of the problems with email is that scammers use it to defraud customers. There are some very clever criminals out there that can make emails look realistic enough to fool recipients that they are from legitimate companies. This is why many people don’t open emails if they are not 100% sure about their authenticity.
The best way to stop this happening to you, is to make sure that your emails are authenticated and that the information in them is encrypted. You can do this very cheaply by using services such as PersonalSign. This way, when you send an email, your customers will know that it definitely comes from you and that its content has not been tampered with.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains the most successful way to market your company but the techniques businesses use to increase its effectiveness continue to develop and improve. Hopefully, this post will have shown you five ways to make your email marketing strategy even more effective.
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