5 Email Marketing Tips for Rising Businesses
In today’s world, the basic use of email is business as even the casual conversation has basically moved onto platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. One of the most successful marketing platforms via internet is email. According to popular studies, email marketing campaigns help in generating much more sales than a business can get form social media giants like Facebook and Twitter. It is seen that for every one dollar spent by the companies on email marketing, they get a return of about $40 in sales.
Always keep this in mind that your targeted list of customers and prospects already gets bombarded with innumerable email newsletters and offers daily. For this reason, your approach should be to plan an effective strategy to be competitive and in line with the current best practices of email marketing. Otherwise, your marketing e-mails may become a part of the useless deluge of unopened and unread emails.
From the point of view of a marketer, this can be quite a big bad news for you because for your email marketing is quite important. You may face a string obstacle if your email campaigns aren’t unique from others. Otherwise, your emails may also become a part of another that useless deluge of unread contents which is considered a waste of time going through. So it becomes vitally important as to how you create an email marketing campaign that can draw people’s attention and the one’s that they will actually appreciate.
You might have many questions by now and one of the basic queries in your mind is does email marketing actually work? The answer is absolutely, but only if you get to use the right email marketing tips. Now, there are businesses that really don’t have faith in the strength of using email marketing strategy. This happens often because most of them fail to get any positive results with their email marketing plans due to some shortcomings of their own. The only thing required in this situation is a few effective email marketing tips to enhance the affectivity of their emails.
It really does not matter much as to what people really think about email as it is one of the best and sure-shot way to generate real business. If you are an owner of a small business, then you should always try to tap in the power of email marketing to get more quality leads. And also connect with your prospective clients at a much higher level and convert them into your customers in the end. This is applicable to almost all industry or niche out there.
However, if you want to get the most out of your email marketing, you have to trade further from just sending emails to your list. You have to plan yourself perfectly and chalk the right steps so that your email marketing campaign stands out from the rest. Let us take a look into the five practical and approachable email marketing plans that you can take up today to improvise your sales substantially.
#1: Try To Understand and Get To Know Your Targeted Audience
In this post, among all of the email marketing tips that we’re going to discuss about, the first and foremost will be to know your audience which is by far the most important. It’s also the starting point of all of your endeavors. You should be absolutely sure about the content of your email messages that you are sending out to your subscribers as they need to fit with the interests of them. To do this effectively, you should know and understand your target audience thoroughly and flawlessly.
One thing should always be kept in mind that the personal taste of each and every person subscribing on your email list will vary and are completely different. This is because no two individual is the same. That is why it would be a grave mistake on your part to send them the same kind of email messages to each one of them. As per a survey, it has been seen that emails of relevance sent to a recipient tend to generate eighteen times more revenue in comparison to sending emails in general. So you can see very clearly that when you take a targeted approach towards email sending, it will definitely make a difference to your business.
So as an email marketer, what should be your perfect plan of sending the right message? What are the things that you should make sure whether the email content is relevant enough for your targeted audience or not? How exactly will you make sure that your email will not be sent to the trash bin? The perfect answer to all this is that you should carry out segmentation to your mail list. This very step will allow you to segregate your email list into smaller, and more targeted sub-groups. List segmentation lets you target your consumers in a more scientific way and that is based upon their personal likes and dislikes. It also lets you to carry out the right kind of promotion of your products or services in a much more personalized way.
For example, if you sell exercise equipment through e-commerce sites, you can first begin your campaign by making a survey among your subscribers as to what type of exercise equipments they are using at the said moment. Then you can create a segmented list for weightlifting, cardio, yoga, Pilates, etc. And depending on what they are using at that instance, they can be put on either on a single campaign or on multiple campaigns.
Also, segmentation of your email list based on age, gender, geographical location, and buyer personalities help you to send emails that are particularly relevant to that particular person. This in return improves your chances of generating sales quite impressively in the near future. Let’s learn about some of the positive results that you can get with the segmentation of the email list and improve on your return of investment:
- Assess the survey results
- Assess the sending frequency
- Assess the purchase cycle
- Assess the past purchases
- Assess the email activity
You should never make email marketing complicated. So long it is letting you connect with your subscribers at their interest level systematically, and giving them a feeling that they are connecting with a real person and not bots, and are providing them with contents of relevance and value, success will come to you without fail. With email list segmentation, you can achieve all that. Now let’s see what else is there that you can do for email marketing.
#2: Send Emails Regularly and Consistently
When you are working with your heart and soul to legitimize your email marketing campaign, the last thing that you want to face is the blame that you are a spam star. The fear that your emails will go directly to the spam folder of your subscriber is quite irrational because you are sending out emails to your subscribers who have willfully joined your email list. So there should not be any hesitation in sending emails regularly to your list because when you do so, be sure that most of the times you will get impressive results by getting an increase in sales.
Moreover, studies have shown that almost all people check their inboxes on a daily basis. So when you automate the sending process of your emails on a regular basis, you are heading towards the right path. You are doing something that your competitors might not even thought of doing or are ready to do, which is showing up in your sales results.
Do you know the real definition of spamming: it is sending of emails to those people with whom you have not shared a relationship with ever, and all those who have not given you the access to send emails to? The word spamming will never arise when you are emailing to your existing list of subscribers. When you have built and nurtured a list of subscribers who have shown consistent loyalty to you by opening and reading all your emails, you shouldn’t face any problems in sending weekly or daily emails to them, and generate more sales.
Keep on adding to your existing list of clients and prospects even if you’ve already have a long list of emails in your hand because it’s not at all hard to do no matter how tough it sounds. For instance, ensure that your list always grows passively with a positive signup feature on your website. The subscription forms should be always there on your home page, blog page and anywhere where you can fit it best without creating problems for important contents.
You should always carry out the vital task of collecting your email subscribers towards your home page that should include your sign-up box that moves around the page and follows your users as they carry out the scrolling. It’s actually impossible to miss without annoying your subscribers and explains in a simple way the importance of subscribing to your email list.
#3: Always Try To Keep Your Emails Brief
You will find many email marketing tips online that talks about ways and means to improve your email opening rate. But what these discussions do not talk about is how to sustain the attention of the reader once they open the email. What we’re trying to state here is that the email messages that you compose should be clear and precise so that your subscribers get the message that you are trying to convey to them, and act upon it.
You can always expect impressive response from your email marketing campaigns by keeping it simple. Even if you keep it simple, then also you can make them aware of the offer that you have for them. Selling of your offers won’t be tough if you give them a soft nudge to do so. If they find your offer lucrative, they will definitely visit your website to know more about it. By keeping your emails brief and to the point, it becomes much easier for people to take action on it.
One more thing that has come up from a popular survey is that people are accessing their e-mail inbox through their mobile devices. For this reason, you should always keep in mind the simple fact that the emails that you are sending out to your subscribers are being read on via their mobile devices rather than on a desktop. So quite evidently, you are actually trying to access people who don’t have much time on hand and are always in a hurry. They’re too busy to sit and check their e-mails in a relaxed atmosphere. They go through their email and most of the time read them while they are commuting to and from work or during a work break. Keeping them in mind, here’s what you can do to keep your emails brief and eliminate the miscommunication all together:
- Never beat around the bush and write exactly what you want to convey to them via your message.
- If you want to forward lengthy information through the email, use of bullet points to break them pointwise will be an excellent idea.
- Keep one major call-to-action (CTA) per email message rather than putting multiple ones. According to a recent survey, having too many CTAs distracts the reader and is very annoying. And it also creates a lot of confusion among the readers and makes them indecisive as to what their next step should be. This simple confusion can eventually result in deletion or moving your email to trash without giving a second thought.
#4: Always Give a Personal Touch To Each Of Your Email
To create a unique experience for your prospective customers, email marketing is the most perfect way. And on top of this, when you leverage the personalization factor to each of your composed emails, you will instantly make them feel special and exclusive or special. This enhances your chance of doing business with them in the very near future. According to a Campaign mentor of a email marketing company, emails having that personalized subject line stand a 26% more chance of getting opened in comparison to emails that begins with a non-personalized subject line.
To give that small personalized touch to your emails, get to know the first name of your email recipients at the very beginning. It will instantly fill them with a very warm feeling as if you have a long acquaintance with them. Use the first name in the subject line and as well as in the body of your email. Keep on spreading that warmth by asking simple and relevant questions in the body of the email and make them more close to you. Now from there, go one step further by adding your own personal details to the emails like your name and image. This is simply because to think something out side of the set rules.
When you are business owner, you should always feel about the strength of adding personalized touch to your email marketing as it directly impacts on the number of conversions that you will eventually get through this. Whenever and wherever possible, add a personal touch and feel to your all your emails. The email tools allow you to put in shortcodes that replaces the recipient’s name when the email is sent to them most of the time. Emails, according to Treehouse Co-Founder Ryan, are always funny and personal. The subject lines should always be creative, messages are to be sent with “from”, and the content should always carry a personal tone according to him.
Whenever you get a reply from the mail, you should instantly respond yourself! Apart from this, you should segment your messages in specific areas and put in your personal touch in these places. If your business works with multiple industries, think of sending out different types of emails, each one providing data which is specific to that particular industry.
#5: Reap The Most From Your Subject Line
We are almost at the end of our list of email marketing tips and it would never be complete without providing enough information about framing of the subject line. Take this part as the main and as the prime thing after opening of your email. That is why this portion needs utmost transparency and now way should it be shady or contains gimmicks. The more you make it straight, the better. Your main aim is not to make your subscriber open your emails once, but to build a relationship of 100% trust that will make your subscribers open your emails time and again. The opening rate of your email fully depends on what you are putting in your subject line. If your subscribers don’t open your emails, the content actually doesn’t matter as much. So invest fully on this and it will immensely help you in your email marketing campaign.
Here are a few things to keep in mind while you create your subject lines:
- Always try to connect to your subscribers emotionally so that they always enjoy reading your emails. Try to maintain a subject line as natural as possible and convey the warmth of getting emails from a human being rather than a robot.
- Maintain a subject line that is brief and to the point. Long subject lines are confusing and also hard to read and understand. As per a study conducted by Retention Science, the minimum length of a subject line should be within six to ten words max. According to the survey, 21 percent of people opened their emails within this subject line range. Anything longer or shorter than this had almost no opening.
- If your brand advertisement carries a humor quotient to it, then definitely use it in the subject line of your email. Emails that have a personality of its own are liked and shared many times. You can add emojis on your email subject line as a email marketer. But, always keep in mind not to go overboard with it as it may portray an unprofessional nature of yours.
- Emails with queries and numbers often get higher click-through rates when done correctly. Use can use them together with other kinds of subject lines, but in the process always make sure that you’re not creating any confusion for anyone. You can take the help of New York Times best-selling authors and use some of the best subject lines that they use:
If you want to take yourself a step further and reap the most out of your email personalization from using their name, you can do the following:
- Interact with your subscribers and discuss with them if they are comfortable with addressing them by their first name or their nickname. Most of the businesses don’t ever think in this line, but this can indeed make a huge difference in the opening rates.
- Avoid making spelling mistakes in names and initials so that no wrong impression is conveyed to your customers while seeing their names in your email.
- Always avoid using the subscriber’s name more than twice in your emails. It should be completely avoided and may sound unnatural as well. And never go overboard with your personalization for getting the best results.
- The most common reasons of emails getting trashed immediately is simply because they aren’t personalized. So spend some quality time on your subject lines, as it makes a direct impact on sales generation. By now you have half of the best tips on email marketing on offer. Keep them in mind to become a email marketing pro.
See what works best for you
These are nothing but tips that have worked for many in the past, but depending on your industry and audience type, you are required to improvise on these methods. As mentioned already, track your metrics on email marketing and watch out on how your subscribers are reacting to your campaigns. Always remember that the last thing you want is to stagnate your email marketing campaigns in social media. Whenever you see that your open and clickthrough ratings are dipping, it’s a sure sign to change your tactics. Make adjustments on the number of emails per week that you send out, make new changes to your subject lines, and contents in the bodies of your emails.