Since the early nineties, when the Internet became much more affordable and mainstream, emails have completely seeped through into our everyday personal and business lives. Thirty-odd years later, emails still remain the mainstay of successful and proactive marketing.
According to research conducted by The Radicati Group, the number of worldwide emails is estimated to grow to over 347 billion by the end of 2023. And to make every business email out of them all count, your marketing strategy should be well-researched and thought out.
Let us help you with that – below, you will find ten proven tips to make your own email marketing strategy fruitful and pleasing for both your existing and potential customers.
Email Marketing Strategy
A precisely constructed and carefully presented email gives you the ability to reach everyone individually, even though everyone knows that this is just a mailing list and thousands of other clients are getting almost the same ones. How to do that?
1. Personalize Your Email
Personalization remains the primary tactic used to improve campaign performance. This report has shown that personalized emails can generate $20 in ROI for every dollar you invest.
Personalization comes in many forms. For example, use a person’s name when greeting (only if they provided it themselves) and analyze purchase history and patterns to make an offer more valuable. Don’t forget to personalize subject lines as well, plus keep them brief and concise.
Be also very deliberate and straightforward about which data your email marketing tools collect from customers to encourage loyalty and trust. In our time of constant data breaches, personalization should be extra cautious and attentive.
2. Segment Your Subscribers
Segmentation helps you neatly organize your mailing list by purchase history, interests, industry, sales cycle, demographic differences, etc. It also allows you to target customers more accurately, and all you need for that is CRM.
Constantly rummaging through an extensive database leads to misaimed campaigns and over-generalization in scheduled emails. HubSpot’s study revealed that KPIs such as open rates, revenue, deliverability, sales leads, and transactions have better outcomes if segmented.
Another study reported that the segmented email campaign received a 94% open rate, compared to 42 % of a non-segmented one, and the click-through rate has risen 8 times.
3. Use One Call-to-Action in Each Email
To boost engagement and not disperse the customer’s attention, it’s usually better to use one distinct call-to-action per email. You may include multiple buttons or links, but not too many, and their purpose must stay the same.
A few other tips to help your CTA perform:
- Make perfectly clear what you’re asking your clients to do – whether it’s a purchase, a download, or an event;
- Make rewards understandable, and clarify any emerging concerns beforehand;
- Make your call to action appear more urgent. That way, customers won’t have the urge to delay their actions until some better and more convenient time.
4. Send Out Exclusive Content
Use your marketing campaigns to send content your customers wouldn’t otherwise receive without subscribing to your newsletter, neither casually on your websites (promo codes) or social media. Make people feel like they’re VIP members of your club, and they may even recommend you to others.
Besides exclusive perks, many customers love free content, which is not unexpected. Most appreciated were various templates and relevant tools and resources – ebooks, guides, helpful lists, interviews, and pictures.
5. Design Your Emails
More than 20% of marketers stated that email design helped them improve their email engagement. Design should always accommodate the email’s purpose and primary audience. While almost 67% of responders acknowledged that they prefer HTML-based emails, preferably with images, open and click rates were surprisingly way up with plain-text ones.
Lovely visuals and an easy-to-the-eye presentation show clients your thoughtfulness, creativity, and professionalism since you took the time to make it aesthetically pleasing. Make sure to break your content into more precise chunks with headings and lists, pick a non-distracting palette, and size your images correctly.
6. Use Email Marketing Templates
Email marketing templates are a valuable and productive addition to your campaign if you want to save time and upgrade the efficiency of your marketing department by delegating several routine tasks.
Search for responsive email templates that have proven efficiency and a lesser unsubscribe rate.
7. Test Your Emails
A/B testing every email helped multiple companies increase their marketing returns by up to 37% compared to those never testing their emails. Test any potential decision to make it more practical. Usually, elements that get the most testing are subject lines, design, call-to-action, messaging, personalization, and target audience.
Here are some of the super helpful email testing services:
8. Mobile-friendly Emails
More than 61% of emails are opened on mobile devices, which definitely makes mobile-friendliness a priority when creating and designing your marketing campaign. If an email is not optimized to perform adequately on smartphones and tablets, customers are more inclined to delete it or even unsubscribe entirely.
Yet, almost 20% of all email campaigns are still not mobile-friendly, which is mind-boggling since it has been reported that the revenue per mobile click is four times higher than desktop click revenue.
9. Send Emails at the Right Time
51% of people open an email within the first seven hours after receiving it. Which elevates the necessity of finding out what the right time is. The recent report by GetResponse has shown that the best day is Friday, and the best-performing hours are in the morning, sometimes even as early as 2 am. Engagement is relatively stable and correlates with standard business hours.
The second addition to the “right time” is trying to send your welcoming emails right after a person subscribed and still vividly remembers who you are and what you offer. Long-overdue emails usually collect dust in the mailboxes and are rarely opened.
10. Use Automation
Email marketing automation is considered to be one of the top three tactics that help boost performance. The most significant advantage is saving time, as reported by 30% of companies. Plus, automated emails have approximately 300% higher open rates.
Automation allows you to make emails trigger-based, adjust your email frequency, and make them more stable, which in turn helps avoid unnecessary unsubscriptions since more than 40% of people admitted less frequent and better-targeted emails will encourage them to remain subscribed.
Successful Email Marketing Campaigns Examples
No list is complete without some examples to prove a point or simply show you that if others can do it, you can as well. So, here are a few outstanding marketing campaign examples.
BBC
Last year’s promotional email campaign regarding the BBC series A Perfect Planet, narrated by David Attenborough, incorporated full-scale interactive elements and astounding design. Each episode section of the series expands when you click it, and the background image changes according to your choice of natural force in the email.
Campaign Monitor
As a part of their prominent Marketing & Mixology event, Campaign Monitor has sent this email to all their clients to previously registered for this event but weren’t able to make it. To minimize their fear of missing out, the company included a few articles that discussed themes. This interactive email has stated to generate a 58% open rate.
Litmus
94% of Litmus’ emails are mobile optimized. This email is no exception. They did an interactive and quite creative letter encouraging customers to build their own accessibility switcher. The company added a mini-switcher to the email to show how it works, allowing to change between standard, large text, and contrast modes.
Judy
This email came from the company selling hand-picked emergency sets and several other practical ready-made item bundles. They managed to distribute successful 10% discount alerts by placing a 48 hours deadline and quirky, static yet effective countdown counter. The email itself is minimalistic and only shows the most essential elements.
Conclusion
Even by using half of the suggested marketing strategy tips, you can significantly elevate your emails’ performance and expect much higher conversions. Most marketing campaigns 2024 are already implementing automation, personalization, templates, segmentation, etc., and all the statistics mentioned above show they are on the right track.