Email marketing is often not in the discussion of digital marketing. However, creating email marketing campaigns can be some of the most lucrative business decisions you can make. It all comes down to effort and creativity. The reason why email marketing is not in the discussion anymore is because there is SEM, SEO, and paid social media marketing. However, email marketing is much cheaper and it’s still one of the most efficient ways to reach your customers. For email marketing, it’s best to use an email automation tool that will schedule your email sends according to the date and time you set. Today we we go over the best practices of creating effective email marketing campaigns and what tools are great to use for email marketing.
Personalize Your Emails
The difficulty of setting up automated emails with a personal message is not that hard at all. Instead of “Dear Customer”, you should probably use their name like “Dear Susan”. That’s the simple way to make an email personal to your customers. Your open rates will be higher if the recipient’s name is on display on the subject line. Next, you want to personalize the message if your customers already bought something. With previous buyers, you want to give them a complementary item that will go well with what they previously bought. Sometimes this can be called upselling which is justified if the buyer bought something before and the upsell can make them happier.
Email Template Should Look Great
What’s uglier than sending out an email and your email template looks like it was made by pilgrims. Luckily for you, Mailchimp has pre-built email templates that will bode well for your marketing campaigns. Besides pre-built templates, Mailchimp also has customizations that you can make on your own so your email template can look appealing. You can download two sets of templates for your content emails and promotional emails. You’ll want to make sure that you can use your brand logo in your email templates to showcase brand recognition.
Segment Your Emails
Segmenting your emails is one of the best practices you can make for your business. Let’s say that your a home improvement company that sells windows, siding, doors, and roofing. In that case, it’s better to segment your email by 4 services that you provide. One email can be for window replacement, the other one can be for door replacement, and so on. Segmenting your emails by the different products you offer and sell is a successful strategy that lots of businesses already use. To go even further, you should segment by open rates and send additional follow up emails to people who didn’t open your previous emails.
Mobile Friendly Emails
The truth of the matter is that most of us use our phones to check our emails. Ever since the blackberry came out in late 2000s, email checking by phone is still popular today. Once again, you should be using Mailchimp because their email templates are mobile friendly. If your email templates don’t have a mobile version then you’re subscribers will most likely unsubscribe. Phones are good for messaging and if the message is unclear because your email template is hard to read then it’s time for a change.
Email Timing
Email marketing campaigns are all about timing. Sending out emails during the peak times when people look at their email is the best time to send. You don’t want to send your emails really late in the day or even the morning. However, the worst days to send out your emails are probably the weekends. Let’s face it, weekends are not meant for opening and reading emails. In fact, Saturday has the lowest average open rate with Thursday becoming the best day.
Digging deeper into the time, the best time of the day to deliver them was between 8am to 9am. And for the worst time, anytime after 6pm the open rates start to decline. Nonetheless, you should probably track your email open rates on Mailchimp and Google Analytics to determine what the best days and times to send out emails are.
Compelling Email Subject Lines
This is one of the surest ways to create a successful email marketing campaign. Writing boring subject lines will not help your open rates. With spam emails becoming a concern, lots of people will determine if the email is a spam based on the subject line. With that in mind, companies should work on creating subject lines that capture the attention of people without alarming them that it might be a spam. Adding the recipient’s name on the subject line is a safe approach to ensuring your customers that this email is not a spam. Other subject lines using humor, seasonal topics, and creative rhymes are a great way to catch customers attention.
Effective Call to Action
You’ll need buttons and messages towards the end of the email that have a call to action. Call to action means to instruct your audience to take an immediate response. This call to action on a email could be “Visit Our Website” or “Get a Free Quote”. The buttons and messages should have a link that directs recipients to the website or quote page. When a call to action is missing from the email then the results may look unfavorable on your conversion rates.
Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns
With Mailchimp and many more automated email marketing tools, the urgency of sending out emails becomes easier. When you need to send out over 1,000 emails to customers, the headaches of doing that manually can be a deal breaker. But it’s more practical today, you can send out emails months in advance with all the subject lines and messaging you have created. You can setup times and days you want to send out your emails. On top of that, you get analytical results such as open rates and conversion rates with tools like Google Analytics and Mailchimp.
Clean Email List
You’ll want to have remove people who have never engaged or they have not used that email in a long time. Sometimes, subscribers will remove themselves with unsubscribing. Other times, they don’t bother to unsubscribe and they are not interested. Then you have people who message to be unsubscribed which is a good reason to go on and unsubscribe them manually. Cleaning your email list can speed up your delivery automation and improve your open rates. When you have thousands of emails, the emails that are usually sent out during 8am to 9am is no where close to being done. But the more you clean your list, the likelihood that an email will reach the customer on time.
Share Your Content with Subscribers
Promotional emails are fine but its important to do something different. Sharing your blogs and video content in your email will most likely keep your subscribers engaged. People like to see what companies come up with whether its an article or a video on YouTube. For that reason, you want to segment your promotional and content emails separately.
Keep Your Emails Short
Emails are not meant to be lengthy. They are supposed to be short and simple. This is the case with many emails, you don’t want your customers and subscribers to be bombarded with information that they can easily find on your website. Furthermore, short emails are typically better with views and engagement. The quicker people read to the bottom of the email and get to the call to action then it’s one step closer for them to convert.
We Create Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing has been diminishing with the rise of SEO, SEM, and paid social media. Fortunately, we do email marketing for many clients with small to large email lists. We go over the schedule, types of emails, subject lines, messages and many more important things that we discussed here. You can book a call with us today or you can email us with email marketing as a subject. We are confident that we can provide the most successful email marketing campaign that you have ever seen.
