Despite social media, email marketing is still an effective marketing channel.
According to DMA, email marketing, when done right, has the highest average return on investment. For each $1 you invest in email marketing, you can achieve an expected average return of $32.
To help you maximise your email marketing campaigns, we share 8 email marketing strategies that work.
1. Sending Personalised Messages
The average office worker receives over 121 emails a day. Most of these emails are spam or automated emails which are generic and most likely won’t be picked up.
To grab your consumers’ attention, you need to personalised your emails.
But personalising your emails is more than just sending an email with the customer’s first name in the subject line. You need to know the person your sending the email too. This is where consumer data comes into play. By analysing this information, you become more familiar with your customers and send tailor recommendations to them as well.
Personalising your emails will help to nurture a long-term relationship. And also, when you personalise your email, it shows that you made the effort to get to know them.
With personalisation, you need consent to access your consumer’s personal data to come in line with EU-regulation GDPR. Once you have gained access to this data, you can then use it to deliver personalised recommendations or content based on interests that they have explicitly stated.
2. Use an Automated Email Set Up
Automated emailing will eradicate the hassle of having to send the same email over and over again to multiple users whenever they ask a frequently asked question or to acknowledge they have received their email.
So to give you an example, if a user sends you an email for whatever reason, the automated email system will send back an automated response like “Thank you for contacting us, we will reply to you in a short moment.”
This kind of automated marketing messages will put your consumer grievance in to control, in case you are not able to reply to your consumers instantly.
3. Responsive and Visually Appealing Design of Email Templates
In today’s digital age, people are more likely to open their emails on their mobile phone. That’s why it is crucial that you develop and create email templates that are responsive to viewing on multiple channels.
But in addition to making sure your email templates are responsive, you need to make sure they are well designed and visually and aesthetically pleasing.
4. Use Less Content in Emails
They say less is more. And this also applies to your email content as well.
Consumers usually avoid reading large promotional emails, no matter how informative it is!
So the important thing to keep in mind when writing your email content is to get to the point.
Also, as opposed to text-based, if you can, make your emails as visually appealing as possible. Include images and infographics where possible. Visuals are easier to digest than text on first glance.
5. Segmentation of Subscribers
The idea of segmenting your customers based on various demographics and interests is an effective way for making your marketing emails work. For example, if you’re a travel company that sells to the masses, then sending content that informs about the best holiday destinations for young adults won’t really appeal to everyone.
With the customer data that you have, invest time in segmenting your email list into different customer groups. This will allow you to focus your content strategy for customer group so you can achieve the highest possible engagement.
6. Using Effective Email Subject Headers
Your subject header is the first thing your email subscribers sees in their inbox. And the email subject header that is the most captivating, will more likely encourage your subscriber to open up your email.
According to Optinmonster, 47% of email recipients will open an email based on subject header alone. But at the same time, 69% of email recipients will report an email as spam just on the subject header alone.
Image Source: Optinmonster
The most effective subject headers will resonate with the needs and wants of your target market. And the best way to do that is to leverage natural human tendencies and psychological principles.
For example, optical firm will Warby utilise psychological principle FOMO (Fear or Missing Out) to encourage urgency. Here’s their subject header:
“Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring”
7. Know When To Send Your Email
Do not send promotional emails during the working hours of your target audience, especially if your target audience is B2C. People who work in a busy corporate environment hardly find time to read emails about the latest trends. And when they do have time, your email will have been lost and forgotten.
According to research compiled by CoSchedule, the best time to send an email is at 6am, 8pm, 10pm and 12pm. When your consumer is out of work.
That said, for B2B marketing, this can depend on your industry or the individual themselves. The best way to identify the optimum time is utilise an analytics platform to identify when your readers will most likely to open and read your email.
8. Conduct Seasonal Email Campaigns
The email marketing channel is extremely effective for delivering seasonal campaigns. Whether it is for a promotion that you want to run during the bank holidays or Black Friday, email marketing is absolutely vital during these periods. According to a 2018 report by Shopify, email marketing played a huge role in during 2018 holiday period, with email marketing contributing to 24% of the sales.
To get these seasonal email campaigns right, you need to know your holidays inside-out and do the necessary prep work prior to starting your campaign.
Achieve a Higher Return on Your Email Marketing Efforts
With the above strategies, you should start seeing an increase in your email marketing efforts. The important thing that you need to keep in mind is to make your emails are well structured, are well-designed and that the content engages with your audience.
