Last year, the Radicati group conducted a study that found that an average business email user sends and receives over 120 emails a day, a number they predict will only grow over the next few years.
With all of those emails going back and forth, how can you make the best of your email marketing investment? These are some of the best tips we’ve learned over the years for making email marketing a success.
Use Email Automation
Are you still sending all of your emails manually? When you’re trying to reach a large database of contacts, leads, or prospects, email automation is a lifesaver, allowing you to write and schedule your emails ahead of time. With a good system of workflows and automation logic you can nurture leads automatically through almost their whole lifecycle with a single push of a button, saving you time and labor while maximizing your email marketing efforts.
Be Mobile-Friendly
Last year, Gartner reported that over 70% of users check email on their mobile devices and that number is only expected to go up. If your email is opened first on a mobile device, do you know how it will look? Make sure that your emails take advantage of mobile-optimized responsive design. Nobody wants to open an email and then have to squint, resize, and scroll horizontally just to read what you’re saying. Make sure that your hard-won email opens aren’t being sabotaged by a mobile-unfriendly design.
Measure Everything
Don’t send emails and just guess about what happens to them. Whether you’re using HubSpot or a similar platform to collect data about email opens, A/B test results, and clicks through by time of day or operating system, or if you’re just creating a few simple tracking URLs so you can see whether anyone is clicking on a link, email that isn’t gathering data is only doing half of its job. Testing and measuring the performance of email marketing is crucial to your success.
Make it Personal
Personalizing email appropriately to your contacts can be a huge boost to engagement. Using contact records to personalize emails or their subject lines with things like first names can turn a boring form email into an interesting and engaging conversation-starter. Take advantage of the information that your audience is sharing to get a little more friendly. Remember: what is friendly enough for one business may be too friendly for another. Know your audience and the voice and tone you want to maintain when deciding how personalized your emails should be.
Start Segmenting
Don’t send every email to every contact on your list. While it can be tempting to cast the widest net possible, especially if your contact database feels small, your best engagement is likely to happen when your emails are carefully targeted. Break your contacts down into lists segmented by buyer persona, product need, pain point, or any other category that makes sense for your marketing goals and start getting focused.
Don’t Forget About Text-Based Readers
Once you get the hang of creating great HTML email templates it can be easy to forget that some people still prefer text-based email. When you’re finished with your graphic email template don’t just auto-generate a text-only version. Take the time to review and make sure that what you’ve created makes sense to someone who has opted out of HTML email. Nobody likes being treated as an afterthought.
Drop the Tricks
It can be tempting to use clickbait or tricky subject lines in order to get people to open emails. If all you care about is opens (and not whether those opens lead to quality engagement or eventual sales) then go for it. If you want quality engagement, though, remember that people don’t like to be tricked and bait-and-switch tactics leave a bad taste behind. Interesting and eye-catching subject lines are great, but make sure they also provide an honest preview of what a reader can expect to get if they click.
Always Keep Learning
Digital marketing grows and changes every day. Keep reading, researching, and learning what’s in, what’s out, and what’s new in the email marketing world and incorporating them with the tactics that are already tried and true.
What is your best email marketing tip? Share it in the comments below!
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