Among many digital outreach methods and tools that we use, email marketing is the mighty one. Email marketing can deliver better results than others when it comes to audience outreach. Thus, it’s always a better idea to rely on email marketing to reach a huge number of people who are interested in your offerings.
Throughout the years, digital marketing has evolved exponentially. Whether it’s SEO, PPC or Social Media Marketing, they helped marketers explore, find, and refine their customer search and convert them into buyers.
Though all those strategies are still the staple food for any digital marketing campaign, email marketing outshines them all.
Isn’t it?
Email marketing even lets you dive deeper into data collected through mining. Based on the mined and acquired data, you can evaluate the performance of your campaign and outline the steps to be taken for improvements. So, what may be the ways to power up your email marketing? How you can get the best of your email marketing campaigns?
Email Marketing Best Practices
And being the most well-established outreach method, Email marketing is till the show stopper if used properly and with discipline. Bombarding inboxes with random emails and blatant sales pitches is indeed not an effective method of outreach.
The article brings forth some of the established and ethical email marketing best practices to engage more people and increase the open rate.
1. Use a Clean and Validated Email List
This is the first and foremost thing to do. Since your email list is the main ammunition of your campaign, make sure it’s filtered, validated, and clean. You might have thousands of email addresses in your list. But as time goes on, the list needs to be purged.
You have to check if the list contains fake email IDs, email IDs that are eventually not in use or the email IDs that you collected without taking consent of the ID holder. If campaigns are sent to these mail IDs, they may end up hitting the spam or junk mail folders. It will skyrocket your campaign’s bounce rate. And if the practice goes on, you may be labeled as a spammer.
Avoid sending communications to non-validated email lists. Run a validation test to filter junk and deleted IDs from the list. It will ensure that you are working with an accurate list.
2. Give Each E-Mail a Personal Touch
Generalized emails can never generate great recipient responses. Don’t agree? Tell me, how many emails containing dry sales pitches do you open? Even I don’t open most of the emails I receive since they are cranky sales offers. These emails are sent randomly to a list of people who might be an unrelated audience.
Unless you engage your recipients with personalized attention, they will most likely delete the email before scrolling down. Begin your email with a simple ‘Hi’ before the recipient’s first name. This small gesture will surely help you to engage the readers.
3. Use Emojis
Sounds interesting? You aren’t the one who found it surprising to use Emojis in the email subject line. Even I was. But the fact remains that using Emojis in email subject line improves attention, engagement and open rate. Ace marketers say that Emojis are an effective way to communicate with your email subscribers. The trend is gradually growing.
When testing an email subject line with and without Emojis, one with emojis sparked more attention and opened more times than one without.
4. Test Different Mailing Schedules
A mail sent is worth nothing if there is no one to open and read it. I never read an email when I am watching my favorite business show. In the same way, you will not like to open an email when you are heading to a pool match.
The idea to pitch is –
Run multiple tests to find the right time when your emails are opened most. Don’t ever assume that everyone is waiting for your mail. Do experiments with multiple deployment times. Send a bunch of messages to your recipients in the morning, and shoot the rest in the evening.
Now, go straight to your analytics to measure the metric. Check which deployment time received more open rates. If the report shows that your evening open rates were significantly higher, schedule your next email for several different times in the evening. This way you can ensure a high-performing and most successful email campaign.
5. Use Double Opt-in Lists
Most of us who are in digital marketing can distinguish between single and double opt-ins. Just to recall, with href="https://mailchimp.com/help/about-double-opt-in/">double opt-in, subscribers are told to re-authenticate their subscription by clicking on the link sent to their email inbox they provided while subscribing.
Marketers are apprehensive about asking readers to go for double opt-in. They assume that taking extra steps may annoy users from staying on the site. It could result in a smaller list. I think otherwise. You won’t believe but a smaller list is more responsive to your emails. A person who didn’t take the next step to authenticate the subscription will hardly open your email. It’s not like that he will never open the email, but the chances are lesser.
A reader who thoroughly followed the process to complete double opt-in is genuinely interested in your services and offerings. So, always rely on double opt-in. It will help you create the most responsive and engaging list.
6. Create List Segmentation
Your email list is significant to your campaign's success. But that doesn’t necessarily allow you to send a communication to the whole list. Emails sent to the right people receive good open rates. Email list segmentation is a process to create a list of targeted people who would be interested in your offerings. A message sent to targeted people can receive more open rates since recipients find the message relevant.
List segmentation provides marketers with the best results. Segmentation eventually lets you offer your subscribers what they want.
7. Blast Emails with Goal
Days of standard emails are now numbered. Emails with general messages are futile and convert rarely. Who else would ever be interested in knowing the infra of your newly constructed office space? An email should aim at something. It should be triggered with a goal in mind.
To improve the conversion rate of emails, write hard-hitting and catchy email headings. The title of the emails should tell the audience what they will get for opening the email. The content within the email should be in sync with what you’re offering to the recipients. The only aim of an email is to impress and entice people and give them a reason to click over to your website.
8. Target the Right Audience:
Now that you have pulled the plug on your goals and offers, the next destination would be picking up the right bunch of audience who are going to click your link. Even a wisely drafted email with a great offer can fail to make any impact if it targets the wrong audience.
An email promoting a male cosmetic range won’t get enough traction if hits the recipients who are female. Your target audience would be the group of individuals segmented into specific email marketing lists, at which a campaign is focused. Your target audience should be selected as per the target demographic for each email marketing effort. They are the right people who would be most likely to convert.
9. Refrain from Annoying Email Blasts
Till now, you are up with a beautiful email and a list of targeted email audiences who would consume your campaign. The next thing in the loop is to monitor the frequency of your email blasts. Respect one’s privacy and personal preferences before sending an email. Your emails are kind of advertisements and announcements, and certainly not suitable for every buyer in your list.
If your emails are found to be hitting everyone’s inbox blatantly, you will see a spike in the bounce rate. This is because annoyed recipients won’t think a second before dumping your emails in the junk folder.
Treat every recipient in the list as your follower. Stay connected with them with the right communication at the right time.
10. Keep Refining Your Email Campaigns:
Success doesn’t come at once. So, don’t expect the best outcomes from the very beginning of your email campaign. An email campaign requires hard work, multiple A/B tests, and refining of email strategy to grab all the potential.
Collect your campaign data to determine the progress of email campaigns and tweaks in strategies if required. This is why it’s integral for marketers to gather their data on target audiences and other demographics as well as to dive deeper into campaign details.
11. Make Offerings Clear and Visible
Emails with blatant sales pitches are a complete nuisance. Don’t ever try to sell things via email. Emails are a medium of engagement to connect with your potential customers. Once they are on the same page and connected, you can ask them to buy something as at that point in time this shouldn’t be too hard to do.
If recipients feel that you’re trying to force them into buying something, they’ll probably just hit that delete button.
12. Build Relationship
Recipients take time before starting to believe you. They tend to take time and explore the possibilities before making any advances. When you build and send your first email campaign, the response may take time to come. The audience may not respond immediately but will start looking at you in due course.
When it comes to converting prospects into sales and revenue, email marketing beats every method. Just a single click and your service email throngs directly to the prospect’s inbox. In a mobile-driven society, emails are the most powerful and convenient way to tell your customers about your services and offerings.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.