If content is king, then email marketing is queen. There are many businesses that fail to understand the true potential of email marketing. A successful email marketing strategy can reveal the potential of your brand.
After a few emails that receive no engagement, plenty of marketers label their activity as ineffective. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can do right now, as email marketing is one of the most productive communication channels that allows brands to shape relationships with their customers.
More than 86% of business professionals are leveraging email marketing when communicating messages of a business nature. Another interesting statistic shows that the customers who purchase their products through email are likely to spend 138% more than those who are not being part of a list.
Whether you run a small business, promote an eBook, or lead a multinational company, email marketing is probably your best “weapon” against your competition. A perfectly nurtured email list represents a significant investment that can be constantly used to boost the performance of your business results.
In today’s post, we’re going to explore several important guidelines, tips, and tricks that will help you skyrocket your email marketing performance. Pay attention, take some notes, and take action!
Know Your Target Audience for Defining Email Marketing Strategy
If you’re fairly new to digital marketing, I’m warning you right here. This is the most common advice/tip you’ll hear in the close future, and one of the most important ones.
To know your audience means understanding the mindset, problems, needs, and desires of your prospects. As a business, your role is to provide value. If you have a good understanding of your target audience, the content and the products you’ll offer will have a strong impact, thus improving your performance.
- Pay attention to your social media engagement. What type of content and topics does your audience prefer the most?
- Pay attention to reviews. Whether they’re social media reviews or product testimonials, note down everything that helps you develop a more concrete buyer persona.
- Get in touch with your prospects. Offer them a discount and ask them to help you get to know them better. Ask questions and feedback.
- Use niche forums and Q&A platforms to figure out the most pressing issues that your target audience faces at the moment.
Keep Your Emails Short, Concise, and Valuable
Email marketing isn’t supposed to be long and boring. Your emails need to add value, so you’ll need to adapt to your customer’s preferences.
Generally, the best performing type of emails are short, concise, and valuable. If you want your prospects to consume a long piece of content, it is ideal to redirect them to your website.
Your main goal is to make your subscribers aware of the value proposition you bring. If you promote an article, briefly describe the topic and the benefits of reading it and end your email with a CTA. If you sell a product, send them to your landing page after telling them about the offer.
Write only relevant words. Cut everything unnecessary and put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Whenever you want to present more information, make sure you break it into chunks. Use more paragraphs and leverage bullet points to make the text more skimmable.
Optimize Your Email Subject Line
When it comes to headlines, you’ve got to impress immediately. Not only are you competing with every other subject line in your customer’s inbox, you’re competing with the entire internet for their attention. Luckily, there are tools to help you optimize your email subject line, like Omnisend’s free subject line tester.
The subject line tester analyzes your subject line based on the best practices, tested by the entire Omnisend marketing community. This tester will score your subject line, and give you tips on how to improve it immediately. While each subject line should be tweaked to make sure it’s perfect for your email and your customers, it’s a great launching point for finding that perfect subject line.
Properly Optimize Your Headlines
Your email headlines are extremely important. They can make a huge difference between a mediocre email marketing campaign and a successful one, mostly because they’re the first element that users digest before choosing to click or not to click. Here are some headline optimization tips:
- Before you decide on a headline, use Coschedule’s email subject line tester to get an approximative quality score
- Use your subscriber’s name in the sender field
- Leverage power words. These words are emotional and they directly impact the subscriber’s subconscious perception. They are known to be great conversion boosters.
- Use numbers and stats to make your headlines catchier.
- A/B test your headlines.
- Leverage the preview text that appears right near your subject line. These are the first words that you’re typing in the body text, so make sure they’re properly optimized.
Provide Quality Content Written by a Unique Voice
If you want to run a truly successful email marketing campaign, you need to understand the real deal behind all this.
An email subscriber will get used to clicking on your emails for as long as he receives valuable information, opportunities, and products. If your content’s quality is mediocre, people will stop consuming it.
That’s how the world works. We don’t like to waste our time doing the things that don’t bring value to our lives.
For that reason, I’d suggest you approach a quality over quantity approach. Write fewer emails but make them stand out. Develop a unique voice and get your subscribers used to it. When you write, imagine that you’re standing in front of a small audience. Value is the main keyword here, so focus on that.
Segment Your List and Personalize Your Emails
Email marketing segmentation is an extremely useful strategy that will help you deliver the right content to the right people.
Since your list is made up of more types of personalities and responds to different needs and desires, the best way to improve conversions is to leverage list segmentation.
For example, if you run an online shoe eCommerce store, separate the men from the women in the first place. Then, you can make additional categories that separate the individuals who are looking for sports items from those who are looking for elegant ones. For a better understanding, check out Neil Patel’s guide.
Get Your Subscribers Used to CTAs
Salespeople never allow their clients to take the lead of the discussion. They’re always prepared with additional questions, remarks, and calls to action.
When it comes to email marketing, things work exactly the same. Your readers are passive by nature. They open your emails, read them, and move on.
Your job is to convince your email readers to click on your main CTA button and pay attention to what you have to offer. Ideally, you should use only one call to action per email, but you should make it very tempting.
A successful email is an email that preserves the reader’s attention until the end of the text and makes him take action (CTA). To improve the efficiency of your CTAs, include social proof by showcasing your subscriber count.
Test, Test, Test, and Optimize
Email marketing campaigns are everchanging. Trends change, people change, everything changes. In addition, you’ll never know if your email marketing strategies are really effective until you test and analyze your performance.
A/B testing is the most popular way to conduct research. Simply create different headlines and use different approaches that can be compared. If you’re using a popular email autoresponder, split testing should be very easy.
Tell the Benefits, Not the Features
Whenever you send promotional emails, make sure that you’re focusing on the benefits of the users rather than the features of your product.
There are very few customers who put more emphasis on what a product or service can do in general compared to what it can do for them. Most copywriting experts understand the consumer’s psychology, and for that reason, they always start with the benefit. Use the same principles when you write headlines!
Never Pay for Lists
Purchasing email contacts might be tempting, but it is definitely not a feasible approach. You should always build your list naturally because that’s the only way you’ll be able to have control over it.
When you purchase random subscribers from third parties, you have no idea whether those emails are actual people. Secondly, you will hardly be able to segment them in relevant lists because you don’t know what they like, want, and need.
Final Words for Email Marketing Strategy
Perceive your email list like your most valuable asset. One thing is certain: your list will never stay the same. You’ll have to constantly optimize your headlines, topics, and approaches in order to take your game to the next level.
Staying up to speed with the latest digital and email marketing trends is absolutely helpful. Moreover, if you study your competition and their email marketing performance, you’ll have a much easier time discovering new solutions for the aspects that dissatisfy you.
Take our tips and tricks into consideration and start improving that list immediately!
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