Email marketing is one of the oldest digital communication channels and yet very popular due to a number of unique features. The past ten years saw a dramatic development in social media, content production, influence marketing and data analysis. However, emails continue to be the most cost-effective form of direct marketing that generates the highest ROI for marketers. Check it out: according to DMA, email marketing produced $32 for every $1 spent in 2020.
Most businesses promote themselves both by email marketing and social media. The latter is also engaging and powerful in terms of marketing campaigns, but its main drawback is in the limited reach. The performance is limited to social media users, and even particular platforms, to be precise. According to Statista, roughly 4.1 billion people send emails across the world, while the most popular platforms Instagram and Facebook have 1 billion and 2.91 billion monthly active users, respectively.
Apparently, email marketing secures very important business objectives, such as:
Email campaigns can be compared to a spacecraft launching: it demands a lot of initial effort and testing, while all the actions of the team should be well coordinated. If you are determined to succeed in your email marketing strategy, check out these insights and expert opinions.
Personalization in email marketing is widely seen as addressing a subscriber by name or sending congratulations on occasional holidays. However, data analysis allows you to treat your customers with emails as if they were handwritten and delivered at the right moment.
Advanced personalized content includes a customer’s interests, shopping behavior, location, etc. For instance, it helps to get a customer back on track and complete the order. Just look: Epsilon research indicates that roughly 80% of customers would make a purchase following a personalized email.
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Email specialist and author Kath Pay has described a non-personalized approach as ‘blanket batch-and-blast messaging’. Why use a tool which is easy to personalize and then not take advantage of it? If you want to create engagement though, you need to go beyond simply referencing someone’s name. Show them what you know about their aspirations, motivations and previous purchases.
Investment in personalization results in:
At the same time, please be careful with handling personal information, otherwise too familiar messages can simply freak people out.
Personalization goes hand in hand with other tools, such as email segmentation. As the name suggests, segmentation means separating your contact list into groups based on different criteria, e.g. location, interests, demographic data and many others. All the stereotypes about inefficient email marketing are related to irrelevant spam letters, with one and only being sent to the whole contact list. Certainly, it doesn’t work that way. According to the latest Hubspot research, segmented campaigns result in a tremendous 760% increase in revenue.
Both personalization and segmentation require a big scope of customer data. However, they differ in the depth of the knowledge, target metrics and chosen content strategy. Audience segmentation fosters an increase in all campaign metrics including unique open rates and clicks while reducing unsubs. Note that the broader your identified group is, the less relevant the content will be. At the same time, one campaign may involve several groups at once. There is no ideal formula, just try to get to know your audience better, and it will definitely result in a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship.
As opposed to an email campaign, an automated email is sent when a subscriber meets a particular trigger. It may refer to a welcome email or similar product recommendations, as well as unique customized features based on a customer’s data analysis.
Automation has indisputable benefits both for the brand performance, as it increases customer loyalty. But it also benefits the team: automation exempts from routine work and allows to focus on more complex issues.
Sometimes, we all need a bit of drama. Why not add it right in the subject line? The notion of a cliffhanger originates from fiction as a plot device in which an ending element of a story remains unfinished or even suspended in an intriguing way, compelling the audience to strive for continuation.
The cliffhanger technique in your subject line captivates the audience and motivates them to open the letter.
A/B testing is generally a process of setting up two content variations of your emails sent to a subset of your subscribers. The aim is to find out which variation works better with your email list.
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A/B split testing will give you a good sense of what works and what doesn’t and can be used to measure everything from subject lines to offers and calls to action.
There are at least three reasons to start A/B testing email campaigns:
A preheader is a text following the subject line when an email is previewed. Sometimes marketers neglect the importance of this feature, while mistakes in the preview text may significantly undermine customer experience. Note that one and the same subject line and preheader may be previewed differently on user devices.
Among the things that ruin any chances of opening your email are simply grammar mistakes or unsupported characters and emojis that won’t be displayed on a particular device. Quite often the placeholder text is mistakenly sent out. Remember that a tiny and correct preheader allows you to bypass the spam filter and increase deliverability.
According to a recent research by Litmus, mobile clients amount to 41.6% of email opens, followed by webmail opens at 40,6% and desktop opens at 16,2%.
Obviously, your email marketing campaigns should be mobile-friendly. Remember to keep your subject line and preheader short, though eye-catching and compelling. Make it cohesive with the email content. It is preferably to fit in 40-50 characters (8-10 words). Avoid large and vague paragraphs: save your customer’s time with simple and clean-cut messages.
Note, that over 70% of consumers delete poorly optimized emails or even go further and unsubscribe, according to Adestra study.
Make Your CTA Buttons Contextual
Obviously, it is not enough to make a CTA button in a high-contrast color: you should ignite curiosity instead of asking to ‘click here’ or any other vague phrases.
Engagement rate is an important and meaningful piece of data about your subscriber’s interactions with your emails. It allows ranking activity, subscription time, which is helpful in segmentation. E.g., on the basis of this information, you may diversify your content and launch different campaigns for your active and passive customers with various company’s special offers.
Moreover, the recent iOS has changed the game: users may now choose to “Protect Mail Activity”, making it impossible for you to track which emails really got opened. Hence, the open rate metric, which has been widely used as a primary performance indicator, fades in comparison to the engagement rate.
There are also other points that are important in the context of the engagement rate:
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Frequency is a big part of this, I feel. There is evidence that people who feel bombarded with communications are likely to become disengaged and may unsubscribe. At the same time, you want enough contact that you maintain awareness and brand loyalty. A difficult balancing act. In terms of the actual communications, different techniques may be applicable in different contexts. In B2B, usefulness and knowledge sharing is key. In consumer markets, humor and the use of incentives tend to play a much bigger role.
The effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns directly depends on the accuracy and relevance of your email lists. Managing the lists ensures you’re not wasting time and resources on the ‘dead’ subscribers. Otherwise, you won’t be able to assess your performance – an outdated subscribers list will never result in a high engagement rate, no matter how creative, say, your subject lines and CTA buttons are.
So, managing your email list comprises a number of elements:
Unless you set up a clear goal for an email campaign, you won’t be able to measure performance, track progress, clearly plan your content and work out next steps.
To make it easier, you may start with SMART goals, meaning they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. It may refer to increasing engagement rate by, say, 15% during the next three months – this is a SMART goal.
Do not forget to ask yourself direct questions about the goal for the upcoming campaign – it will help you to choose the right strategy and adjust it, if necessary.
This may seem obvious, but if you fail to get to know your audience, no strategy will succeed. For that purpose, all the email marketing tools may be helpful.
So let the data come first: by capturing zero party data, i.e. the information that a user provides freely upon subscription, you will definitely understand the focus area for the content.
Think of it carefully to collect relevant and helpful info.
Also, use the analytics to find out what content is particularly interesting for your audience, what time of the day they prefer to check their inbox, what content inspires them to interact.
When you have primary information about your customer, you may go further: opinion polls are also helpful in creating a customer portrait. Do not get people scared by the amount of questions in the subject line, but a few stirring ones may result in a good engagement rate. At the same time, you may flirt with your subscribers by letting them influence your product, e.g. asking them to choose the design.
When it comes to launching an email campaign, planning is essential. Depending on the sphere and scale, it is a good idea to have your email content plan per week/month/year. Your emails should be not only engaging but logically connected, in order to let a subscriber feel cared for, not just being pushed to buy something.
More than that, this is important for your business team, since the production cycle of email campaigns usually engages a number of specialists, including a copywriter, a designer and a SEO manager, and they need time for brainstorming.
Follow-up emails contribute to the idea of being selected and cared for, if you don’t bombard your clients’ inbox, of course. Certain trigger events, particular actions, as well as data-based information should be the basis for follow-ups. It is unacceptable to plan your content only in accordance with a calendar. And all the follow-up emails should convey a certain message, starting from a subject line, and contain a call to action.
An option to unsubscribe is both an obligatory legal requirement and a matter of digital etiquette.
If you deal with any subscription services, you may also launch reactivation campaigns to win back your suspended users.
There are dozens of email marketing metrics, but it doesn’t mean that you need to blindly apply all of them. At the very beginning of an email campaign it is highly recommended to define the proper KPIs for your product or business. Email marketing software will help you to track chosen metrics, while you should work out an evaluation plan to process the data adequately. For example, you may check out open rate daily, while CTR or conversion – weekly, and mobile or desktop usage even more rarely. Draw conclusions, amend your content strategies and you will have success.
Email marketing campaigns aren’t easy, but it doesn’t mean that you need to dive into all the aspects and implement everything at once, while getting closer to a nervous breakdown. First of all, you need to define the most important and applicable features for your business and evaluate your resources. Just keep in mind the following tips:
