Yes, you heard us, it’s no longer that simple.
Even if social media has become one of the most important communication channels, the email hasn’t lost its supremacy. It’s still as relevant as before, but crowdier. Hundreds of brands send their hundreds of emails, all before 8:00 a.m. hoping to surprise you.
With that being said, the question is: how do you make sure that your email marketing strategy is beating the competition?
And how can you avoid some of the most common mistakes?
Master the art of personalization
You want your email to shine, and more importantly, increase your open and click-through rates. Personalization is a sure-fire way to beat the competition. This can be done by knowing your audience and custom-tailoring your messages. There are 2 ways you can do this:
- Creative subject lines
47% of email recipients open an email based only on its subject line. So, it’s necessary to create a killer subject line that will arouse curiosity. We know, it’s not easy to cut through the noise, but with some good customer research you will have a great response.
Don’t forget to include their first name in the subject line, use catchy keywords and keep your messages short.
- Storytelling
A story can be told in a million ways. Using storytelling in your email marketing campaigns by offering original and captivating content for your audience, stimulates their imagination and creates a desire to find out more about your brand.
Establish an empathic bond with your readers, they are the heroes of your story! Keep them hooked with quality content and visuals and surely they will come back for more! You can apply storytelling in your daily newsletters, automatic campaigns, or transactional emails.
Proper segmentation
Segmentation allows you to send more relevant and personalized content to your audience. This means that you should analyze their preferences and buying habits and send them relevant content based on their current behavior.
Another important aspect is that your customers are at different points in the sales cycle, their behavior is never the same. Sending an email to everyone in your newsletter list is like sending the same size dress to 100 women.
It’s 2022, testing segmentation is your way to go if you want to boost your conversion!
Mobile friendly design
Always test your emails on mobile! Over 60% of emails are opened on a mobile device and nearly half of your audience spend only 3 seconds reading your email. Thus, putting a little bit of effort into building a quality & easy readable email is very important.
- Start with a powerful CTA. Your call to action button should be placed near the top of your email or in the middle to ensure maximum clickability.
- Keep your copy short and concise, use bullet points to allow your audience to identify key information.
- Avoid keywords that are spam filters: FREE, DISCOUNT, EXTRA or too many emojis.
- Test your emails across multiple email providers (gmail, yahoo, outlook) or use an email testing platform like Litmus or Email on Acid.
Ensure a good deliverability rate
Over 95% is considered to be the best deliverability rate according to all email service providers. In order for your emails to land in your recipient’s inbox, you need to take a look at the service provider, sender’s domain, quality of your newsletter list, email frequency and sender’s reputation profile.
- Start by cleaning up your list, remove invalid email addresses that cause a high bounce rate.
- Always reassure that your recipients have the ability to unsubscribe.
- Set up a good sending infrastructure with a dedicated sender domain by updating your DNS records.
- Set up double opt-in confirmation for your new audience. This way you will benefit from a more engaged list and avoid fake email addresses.
Monitor your data
For an effective email marketing campaign, it’s important to monitor your data! Most email communications are practiced without an analytical basis, so it’s imperative to track the customer’s journey to find out how many of your subscribers actually opened and clicked your newsletters. Don’t rely only on your recurrent newsletters, improve your metrics by developing a good email automation strategy. Do A/B tests, segment your lists, try to learn about your customers with better targeting and retain your VIPs.
In the end, we can say that email marketing is not that hard, if you have the right tools, knowledge and a little bit of creativity. Don’t forget to test everything, stay connected with your audience, invest in good writing, clean visuals and implement crucial marketing principles like segmentation, automated campaigns and personalization.
Seems like a lot? It can be, but we are here to help. 🙂