5 Smart Tips To Take Your Email Marketing Campaigns To The Next Level 

Email marketing doesn’t guarantee a quick sale, but it’s certainly not dead. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the most effective ways to nurture cold leads into warm prospects, which adds incredible value to your business. Whether you’re just sending out a monthly email to keep subscribers in the loop or sending emails on a daily basis to sell out, there’s always room for improvement. Inboxes are more crowded than ever, and attention spans are shrinking. Here’s how you can rise above all the noise and stand out so you can achieve your goals now and in the future. 

#1 Know Who You’re Sending Emails To 

The old spray and pray strategy, where you ‘spray’ generic messages across a massive audience and ‘pray’ that it resonates with anyone, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Create more targeted campaigns to increase your email ROI. More specifically, know who you’re speaking to so that you can craft content that meets their needs and encourages engagement with your brand. To better understand your subscribers, look at the following types of data:

• Known data: Dig up any information you have that’s tied to a specific, unique person, such as contact info (name, physical address, phone number), preferences (language, topic/product interests), and demographics (age, gender, job title). 
• Behavioral data: Figure out what users click, how far they scroll down pages, and at which point they start to lose interest. Email marketing isn’t about watching numbers go up. It’s about understanding what actions your audience takes. 
• Purchase data: What, when, and how many times customers have made a purchase from you tells you what they’re actually committed to. Purchase data can provide opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, increasing average order value. 

Dividing and separating email subscribers into groups is much easier to do if you’re using an email marketing platform that supports dynamic segmentation. You can organize contacts using tags and scores based on behavior and engagement to ensure your messaging stays hyper-relevant, and it’s more likely the recipient will act upon your call to action (CTA) and click through your website. 

#2 Optimize Your Emails For Mobile Devices 

More than half of users delete emails that don’t display correctly on their mobile devices without giving it much thought. By some estimates, as many as 55% to 65% of emails are first opened on smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches, and so on. Take a more conscious approach to designing your campaigns, that is, make sure your emails look great on every device, irrespective of the size of the screen they’re viewed on. It’s recommended to bring the CTAs as far up within the copy as possible and, above all, to keep your messages clear and focused, since text-heavy emails aren’t mobile-friendly. 

#3 Offer Useful And Relevant Information 

Emails aren’t magic bullets. Not by a long shot. You can’t just send out a message and expect the world to stop what it’s doing and rush to open it. In case you didn’t already know, people have countless unread emails in their inboxes, ranging from newsletters and promotions to a couple of ‘quick questions’. If you don’t communicate an idea that resonates, change will never happen. You have just a few seconds to capture the attention of audience members and convince them to take action on your email content. The best way to do that is to move beyond the one-size-fits-all model. 

If you treat all customers the same, you speak to everyone, and hence, no one. The secret isn’t more reach. It’s a deeper resonance. Deliver personalized content to people in different audience segments to ensure your message lands with precision and impact. Include only one or two offers in each campaign, and link each offer back to your website. Most importantly, avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Images look nice, but many email clients, including Outlook and Apple Mail, block them by default for security and privacy purposes, and to prevent tracking.

#4 Have Emails Come From A Real Person 

We’ve all been there. You get an email from a company you know or trust, only to find out it comes from a no-reply address. It gives the impression that they couldn’t care less about hearing from you, helping you, or building any kind of real relationship. The next campaign, have your email come from a member of your marketing or customer service teams, or even your CEO. Only use no-replay emails when responses aren’t absolutely necessary. Examples include but aren’t limited to receipts, appointment notifications, and system-generated confirmations. 

#5 Improve Your Email Sender Reputation 

Anyone who’s even run an email marketing campaign knows all too well that landing in the main inbox isn’t easy. Messages die out after clicking the send button, but even if they manage to get past that checkpoint, they end up in the recipient’s spam or junk folder. Though several factors contribute to your deliverability numbers, your reputation as an email sender tops all others. Your sender reputation is akin to your online credit score, in the sense that it comprises different elements, including your email infrastructure (hardware, software, and protocols), data quality, campaign engagement, and the type of content you send. 

There are third-party and mailbox-specific tools that can help you find out what your sender reputation is. The higher your score is on a scale from 0 to 100, the more trustworthy you are as a sender; a strong reputation signals to mailbox providers that your messages are legitimate, relevant, and safe. If you’ve recently made the switch to a new domain or email service provider, mailbox providers won’t recognize the new domain when the email is delivered straight away. This is why you should send a small number of emails at first, then progressively increase your volume over the next 30 to 60 days. 

TL;DR 

Email is an incredible tool in digital marketing, but it’s not child’s play. Hopefully, now you have an idea of how email marketing should be done and what steps you need to follow for your campaign to be as successful as possible.