15 Email Marketing Strategies that can be the Gamechanger

The industry mullahs had been predicting for quite long now that Email Marketing would soon be replaced or will eventually fade away. But alas, that day hasn’t arrived yet. The reality is that Email Marketing remains one of the best ways to reach out to your prospective and would-be customers. Here is how:

1. Segregate the email lists.
According to Sarah Vandenberg, founder and CEO of Vandenberg Digital Communications you will rarely have subscribers on your list who will be interested in all types of emails like coupons, events or news all at the same time. So it’s very important to understand first as whom you are sending your emails to. For instance, if you are offering discounts to students or retirees, try to prepare or segregate your email lists by that age group. When you provide email messages that are relevant to your subscribers or customers, it results in higher opening and click-through rates and few instances of unsubscription.

2. Ensure Mobile Friendly Emails.
According to research conducted by Litmus and BlueHornet, it is seen that 71 per cent of users delete an email immediately if its display isn’t correct. To avoid this kind of fate for your emails, plan a perfect E-mail Marketing strategy. It’s vital to concentrate on creating email contents for mobiles that are eye-catching and looks quite appealing on smartphones.

It is recommended that marketers go for a design that comes in single-column and works well with vertical scrolling. Always use big size images and bold out the headlines and put in lots of white space for scanning easily. Always trim your subject lines to a minimum. And the CTA buttons should be large enough, at least 44 pixels square, to easily tap them. According to Yesmail’s latest report, it is found that the brands who have highly amiable designs in all of their emails, stands the chance of getting 55 per cent higher mobile click-to-open (CTO) rates.

3. Go for text-only emails
According to Copley Broer of LandlordStation, it is seen that a simple text-based email along with links to content or products works much better than the image-based ones. Although images look prettier, most users block them instantly which means that most people does not appreciate the prettiness. So write very paragraphs that are specifically descriptive with site links and tag those links so you can see what people are clicking at and what they aren’t.

4. Let emails come from a real person.
About 64 per cent of the subscribers open an email after seeing the name of the sender as per Steven Macdonald, digital marketing manager of SuperOffice. As no one likes to receive emails from do not reply, send your email sent from the marketing or customer service team of your company, or from your CEO so that people know whom to respond to. It is also to ensure that their reply won’t get returned, ignored or rejected.

5. Write A Compelling Subject Line And Be To The Point.
According to Michael Weiss, co-founder and managing partner of C-4 Analytics, a digital marketing agency, plan some offers that your customers will find highly lucrative like 50 per cent off on most popular software and so on. This kind of subject tag will instantly drag the users towards you. This becomes all the more target oriented if you have a segmented mailing list specifically based on the buying trends of your customers.

A specific yet irresistible subject line can make or break a campaign as per EJ McGowan, senior director and general manager of Campaigner. They should always compel your reader so that he or she is forced to open the emails, but at the same time, they should be friendly enough to not to turn them off. Firstly, always try to keep them brief. It is seen that subject lines within 50 characters have higher opening rates, and anything over 50 often gets truncated. Also, the emails should carry a note of urgency in its subject line along with a special announcement like a limited period sale, but don’t be too assertive.

6. Customize your emails.
Emails that have no customization don’t impress your contacts that much. Customization, when done in the right way, encourages your contacts to open the emails and also to read through the content seriously. Begin with the basics, like adding your first name in the subject line. You can use more advanced data in the email body to make it compelling. For example, you can encash on the past purchase behaviour to find out which things particularly appeal to certain sections of your contacts. The more you use the recipient data to personalize the messages; the campaign will have all the more impact.

Instead of mass emails from the past, subscribers want to see messages that are highly relevant and fit their exceptional interests and points of dissatisfaction according to Kraig Swensrud, CMO of Campaign Monitor. This very fact is also portrayed in a Janrain study that showed that 74 per cent of online customers become frustrated when they get contents that have no relation with their interests. The good news is that personalized Email Marketing increases the number of clicks. Emails carrying personalized subject lines are opened more.

7. Always Try To Have A Clear Call to Action (CTA).
The most prominent mistakes in Email Marketing involves not having clearly defined calls to action as per Milan Malivuk, director of Marketing at itracMarketer, an email marketing and marketing automation provider. Regardless of whether you’re driving traffic to a page or not, or directing people to call a number, the reader should come to know exactly what they’re expected to do within 5 seconds of reading it. Or else chances are that they may delete it instantly.

So whenever you design an email for a marketing campaign, test it first by showing them to a friend or spouse and allot 5 seconds to look at the email and see if they understand what they are required to do. Each email that you mail should have a clear cut purpose of whether you want your subscribers to purchase, know more or sign up as per Vandenberg. Don’t be casual at your approach. When you place a bold call-to-action in the form of a button or a graphic in an easy-to-spot area, it will definitely get more clicks and engagements. The lesser scrolling and searching done on the part of your subscribers, the simpler it becomes for them to engage themselves with you.

8. Don’t ignore the preview pane.
Always remember that almost all recipients view emails through a preview pane with blocked images according to Malayna Evans, vice president, marketing and business development of PWR New Media. For this reason, make sure that the main information and calls-to-action appear above the upper left quadrant in email and is visible even when the images are blocked. Most of the recipients take a quick glance at the preview pane, from and subject line and pre-header if they’re on mobile. They take a quick decision about whether to open your email or not.

9. Customize your pre-header text.
As observed by Litmus, 55 per cent of all emails are opened on mobiles. For this reason, pre-headers become all the more essential and critical for response improvement as per Pam McAtee, senior vice president, digital solutions, Epsilon, a global marketing company. Make sure your pre-header text supports your subject line and provides the right reason to open it. It should carry an offer when relevant and have personalization and a note of urgency like ‘endings soon’ or ‘expiring soon’ to attract the subscriber.

10. Maintain The Attraction Quotient Of Your Readers.
If the amount of content to share is huge, think of adding teasers in each section. Also, try to add ‘read more’ link all throughout the copy. This will aid in stopping the readers to scroll past a considerable portion of your content to reach the other parts of the content. This is especially vital for mobiles where contents get vertically stacked. There is a chance that your reader may browse past the first topic, and not even connect with it. They may also delete the email even before reading the full content.

11. Select The Most Suitable Time To Reach Your Target Audience(s).
You should come out of the common belief that all businesspeople respond between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. all through the week as per Nancy Gerstein, CEO of Creative Marketing Associates. The time of opening of the emails varies from profession to profession. When scheduling the time of sending your emails, take into consideration the time zone of your targeted audience in your database as per Jake Diserio, digital marketing manager, etouches, a global event management software provider.

It is always good to segment the sending times so that each one gets their messages within the conventional opening times. You can segment your sendings by North America, APAC and EMEA regions. It is seen that when the APAC region gets its messages in the morning time, the opening rate is much more in contrast to North America, which generally prefers the afternoon slot.

12. Let Your Customers Manage Their Email Subscriptions.
One of the easiest solutions for reducing attrition rates comes in the form of a preference centre as per Shelly Alvarez, director of client services at PostUp, an email marketing company. The landing page on your brand’s website is the preference centre that lets your subscribers change their preferences about the emails. You can put in sentences like ‘We understand that your needs will change’ or something else that allows the subscribers to select how often they want to get emails from you.

13. Follow your emails.
Use UTM codes to track post-clicks and visitor engagements as visualized by Tara Chambers, director of marketing communications of Scott’s Marketplace, an e-commerce platform to sell products of local businesses. Often these are automatically generated by some of the email providers, but if you haven’t done it yet, take time and add them to each and every email link you have given. If you are consistent in putting UTM codes in the correct place, it will help you to see if your subscribers are converting, the pages they’re visiting etc.

14. Keep on testing.
Email marketing demands constant testing on everything, including subject lines, contents, creativity and sending times as per Meghann York, director of product marketing of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For instance, if your customers manly belong to the young age group, then, design your email contents that appeals to that very age group. Also by constantly testing your contents and changing the sending times, you can find out whether your customers are in a buying mode on particular days of the week or not. This type of critical data will help you to increase your opening rates many times more.

Just remember one vital thing and that is while you conduct the testing keep the variations as much subtle as possible so that you can find out what is bringing about the difference in open rates, click-throughs or conversions. If you want to boost your opening rates, test the same email by just changing the subject lines. If you want higher click-through rates, use the same email, but change only the button position of your CTA. When you keep on testing constantly, you place yourself on the way of consistent improvement in your marketing efforts.

15. Constantly update and clear your email list.
Keep in mind to maintain your recipient list as light as possible as per Victor Amin, a data scientist at SendGrid, a cloud-based email delivery platform. When the lists are well kept constantly, you will have a higher rate of engagement in contrast to old, neglected lists. Feel free to remove addresses that haven’t shown engagement for quite some time and segment your list based on engagement rate. About 40 per cent of your subscribers remain inactive as per a common observation. When you send email marketing campaigns to subscribers who do not bother to open or read your emails, actually negatively impacts the email delivery rates.