Email Marketing is an effective medium of sending out emails to clients, customers, prospects, etc. It is the most successful marketing platform on the web. It’s a powerful tool for not only mailing and getting back responses from clients but also for building and strengthening client relationships. Over time, studies proved that it generates more sales compared to social media giants like Facebook, Twitter.
Using Email Marketing makes your work cost-efficient, easy-going, fast and flexible way of reaching out to customers and hanging to existing customers by frequent website visits.
Despite what people think, Email Marketing is a straight-forward and the most reliable way of generating business and eventually converting its small business prospects into customers. Speculating that your customers and prospects are shelled daily with ‘n’ number of emails, you must keep in mind to work competitively in the current scenario.
Tip 1: Make new subscribers list every 24/7 hrs or Build subscription list
Apart from maintaining a long list of subscribers, it is very important to make a list of new emails of clients every day. You should never stop adding new emails. Subscription forms should be made available on the home page, blog page, and all over where important content is.
You can also build their list through traditional means by setting up a booth at conferences, providing to sign up for your newsletter, and by getting someone to sign up for your newsletter, you can convert that into a business opportunity.
Tip 2: Know your Target Audience
Knowing your audience is the most important and the main point of Email Marketing.
Every subscriber on your list has a different taste. It is necessary to send relevant emails that match your subscriber’s interest. Emails relevant to receivers’ interest tends to drive 18 times more returns compared to general emails. By understanding your target audience’s interest, it gets easier to send them emails that can capture their attention.
So how can you make sure your emails resonate with your audience?
This can be done by email list segmentation. This segregates emails into small and more sub-targeted groups. Segmenting lets you target your audience according to their interest and promotes your business in a personalized manner.
For instance, your business is selling exercise equipment, you can ask your subscribers, what type of exercise are they into such as Yoga, Pilates, Weight Lifting, etc. Segregated lists can be made based on these exercises. Based on the results you can plan for single or multiple campaigns.
The segmentation list is based on the age, gender, geographic locations, and buyer personal information to send emails. This way, sales increase in the long run. Some other ways of segmentation are:
- Survey results
- Sending frequency
- Purchase cycle
- Past purchases
- Email activity
As long as, you are able to stay connected with your subscribers and provide valuable them with valuable information, Email Marketing becomes much simpler. By maintain an Email list segmentation you can get more leads.
Tip 3: Keep emails short, crisp and concise
Our inboxes are bombarded every day with several emails and most of them end up in the trash or the spam folder. Emails that are short, concise and have more white spaces, grab the attention of the receiver. Simple emails help in getting better response from your campaign. The basic idea is to make your subscribers aware of the offer you are giving.
The subject-line of your email should draw the customer in. Once the customer opens your email after reading the subject-line, it is equally important to keep the reader’s interest. Keep the following elements in mind while you draft your emails:
- Use Short Paragraphs: No one wants to read long essays. It is important for you to get to the point and highlight what you are offering to the customer.
- Use Relevant Keywords:The contents of your email must either inform the customer orhelp them in some manner, this can be achieved by including keywords and phrases your customers/clients can relate to.
- Bullet points: It is important to use pointers when informing the client about your product or your service. This draws their attention to key information. They can simply skim through your email and understand what you are offering them.
Therefore, by not beating around the bush and following the trait of brevity one can convey the message easily with few sentences.
Tip 4: Subject line matters the most
Amongst all the tips, what stands out mainly, is the subject of the email. The more transparent and straightforward you are, the better it is. Because the sole purpose is not only to just open the email, but also to build a good relationship with your customer.
If an email isn’t opened, then the content doesn’t matter at all. Few things to keep in mind are:
- Keep your subject line natural. Let your user know the emails are from a person and not from a robot.
- Keep the subject line to the point. Longer subject lines are confusing and hard to understand. According to a study done by Retention Science, 21% people have opened emails with a subject line in this falling in range of 6 to 10 words. Anything with less or more words had a poorer open rate. Thus, it can be inferred that the optimum length of your subject line must be within this range.
- If humour goes good with your subject line, go ahead with it. Emails with a personality are liked and shared. But remember not to overboard.
- Question marks and numbers are proven to get high open rate if used correctly.
Tip 5: Personalize each email
Email marketing is effective when it gives the users an exciting experience. By investing your time in personalising each email you send out, makes the receiver feel special and increases your business opportunities. It is observed that emails with personalised subject line have a 26% more chance to be opened rather than generic and regular emails.
Remember that the quality matters more than the quantity or number of emails you send out.
For instance, reaching out to people with their names like “Hi Amit…etc” adds a sense of personal touch. Learn to think out of the box, you can also add their details, email and photograph to their email.
People are now overwhelmed with spammy emails every day. Thus, while using email marketing to promote your business, it is important to have the essence of personalization as it has a direct impact on the number of conversations you get and the leads you generate.
Tip 6: Send Regular, Consistent emails
To keep in touch with your subscribers and to create a friendly relationship with new users, it is necessary to send emails regularly.
Fear of being accused of spamming is rational even if you are sending out emails to those who have willingly joined. But don’t step back, because this results in the increases of sales. Spamming is essentially sending emails to those people with whom you don’t share any relationship with and who haven’t given you access to email them.
It is said that people open their email daily. Therefore, you are doing the right thing by sending emails every day. Sometimes readers open the email and might forget to respond and sending regular emails helps in reminding them to respond if they are interested.
When you are building, and strengthening your relationship with your loyal customers, who open, read and respond to your mails, you shouldn’t have any problem in sending daily, weekly or monthly emails to them.
Tip 7: Repeat Your Already Successful Emails
If one of your email campaign turns out to be successful and reaches out to already existing customers and new ones’ effective. It is important to replicate such campaigns.
You can also use email marketing program to resend emails to those subscribers who did not respond for the first time. It’s a good opportunity to add different elements to your email like CTA- Call to action and adding links and test how those emails perform.
Tip 8: Include CTA button per mail and add hyperlink
Many recipients scan through your email without reading the copy. Call to action buttons need to be placed strategically so that it is easy to spot and grab’s the recipients attention. Buttons designed colourfully and attractively attracts the recipient to your website landing page.
For instance, you may put a CTA button to download an e-book that briefs new strategies for using the product.
Many email clients block your images and CTA button. If they do so, your already existing group of loyal audiences cannot see your beautifully designed CTA buttons. You can either edit the alt text in the email or manually edit by entering in the HTML editor of your email tool like this:
<a href=”HTTP://YOURLINKHERE.COM”><img class=”alignCenter shadow” src=”YOUR CTA BUTTON IMAGE SOURCE HERE.JPG” alt-text=”YOUR ALT-TEXT GOES HERE”/></a>
Secondly, the main objective of email marketing is getting the users go to a web page through hyperlinks. Besides adding links to the copy, another way to increase the Click Through Rate (CTR) is adding links to images.
For instance: you are inviting readers to download an e-book and you have included a picture of the e-book in your email. Don’t just add hyperlink with the text ‘download it here.’ Instead hyperlink the e-book picture as well. Images, Call to Action buttons and hyperlinks are often intended to make the users open links, which can help your business significantly.
Tip 9: Make emails mobile-friendly
In the current techno-savvy world, the first and foremost thing everyone does after they wake up is pick up their phones and scroll through mails. It is said that 66% of emails are viewed on smartphones. If your emails are not designed accordingly, then you are missing out on a large chunk of your audience.
As people are always on their phones, it is important for marketers to design their emails with mobile users in mind. Otherwise, the user experience will not be upto the mark.
For instance: The first image below crops out essential details of the email. Whereas the second one is very clear and mobile user friendly.
Few ways to optimise mobile friendly emails are:
- Reduce the size of images according to mobile view
- Use CTA buttons, links larger than 45-57 pixels, which is of best view for user.
- Invest in email responsive templates.
Tip 10: Declutter your Inactive Contacts from Active Ones
It is fascinating to send emails to all your contacts. But you will have a few users/subscribers who are neither supportive nor interested in your product or service. These users will leave an impact on your emails and click through rates.
To make sure you have good click through rates, you need to identify and remove these inactive users, who haven’t opened a single mail sent by you.
This will help you track the interests and behaviour of your active users, they might open one type of emails more than the others. You can note what emails are working and resonating with your active users
This allows you to track the users’ interests based on email opens and click through which helps you to figure out what is working and what is not.
Another good point is that by decluttering your contacts you tend to remove invalid, abusive emails which tend to degrade sender reputation. Simply chuck them off!
Conclusion
If you follow the above-mentioned email marketing tips, you will yield good business results.
Overall, it’s always important to maintain a good relationship with your customers or subscribers. Knowing their interest, personally appealing to them might attract them to start working with you. Following a user-friendly approach, using catchy subject-lines, keeping your emails precise and straightforward, not only helps you gain customers but also helps your business grow.
Since, it was noted that more people view emails on smart phone, it is important to design your emails keeping in mind the mobile interface.
On the whole, email marketing is a creative way to reach out to your clients and to build a strong relationship.
