Even today, email stands at the top of the marketing game. Businesses and marketing teams can feel overwhelmed and lost with each shiny new social media channels coming up by the day. However email marketing differs from social media in that it’s dependable and unchanging long-term investment, and it helps businesses understand exactly where they are headed, and what they need to focus on.
Due to this, an increasing number of businesses prioritise the use of email marketing over social media. With email you aren’t trying to fight for a consumers attention like on a news feed. Rather, with an email you gain their undivided attention on their inbox, with a higher chance of your email being opened and read.
Still today, email is an untapped resource for many businesses, while some may even be doing it all wrong. Therefore, we are here to give you 7 email marketing tips that are relevant and current today.
Keep adding your subscriber list
It’s important to keep passively growing your subscriber list even after you reach a break-even stage with enough subscribers. The best way to do this is by placing your subscription forms on your home page, and make it easily accessible and separated from the primary content.
One great tip is to build new subscribers through a more conventional sense is through in-person inquiries. This means, for example, gathering people to sign-up for your newsletter at trade shows, conferences and industry meetups. This also provides a great way to connect with your subscribers personally.
Personalise your approach
Emails needn’t always be standard and routine – you can get creative and personalise your newsletters. You can make them fun and humorous, along with being informative and relevant. With creative subject lines and personalised messages (using your recipient’s name), you have more chances of keeping people hooked in the long-term.
Don’t send spam
No matter how many subscribers you gain, if your emails are marked as spam they will never generate the ROI they would otherwise garner. To avoid this, you can follow simple tips such as:
- Make sure that your emails are well received. You can do this by ensuring your emails only go to recipients who clearly have a use for it and those who are genuinely interested and invested in your content.
- Another important element is to construct your email well. A well-formatted email or newsletter does impact how a user views you as a brand. For example, you can ensure that your subject lines or headings do not contain all caps or any exclamation marks.
- More often than not, loud and annoying advertising messages do not sell products or hold your reader’s interest in the long run. Revisit the reasons that can place your emails into spam folders and ensure that they don’t get flagged by one user or the other.
Link important information and add calls to action
As a reader, it is off-putting when interesting information isn’t hyperlinked to its original source. Also, the key factor for adding links is to increase the traffic to a specific landing page or your blog, and failing to add links can affect you significantly.
Therefore, seize this opportunity to interact and inform your readers by adding links and precise call to action buttons wherever necessary to effectively reach your audience.
Must add an unsubscribe option
Giving your users a chance to opt out or seeing your clients go may not be anyones favourite thing on earth, however, if a user doesn’t find your content relevant and wants to opt out they would likely spam your newsletters.
Therefore, giving them an easy way out is better than spending your days out in the spam folder. Being marked as spam by one user might make your email go automatically into the spam folder of other users, which is the worst thing that can happen to your email marketing.
Customise and make sure its mobile in a friendly way
Increasing numbers of people check their emails and respond to their mobile devices since it’s either the last or first thing they do in their day. Optimising your newsletters to be able to view on these devices gives you an added likelihood of your emails being opened and actually read by your subscribers.
Don’t forget to test and track your data
Regardless of all the above steps, the most important thing you can do is test your draft by sending them to your employee accounts and make sure it works properly on a variety of email accounts and messengers such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. Make use of robust testing tools such as Litmus, which shows the templates of your email in different email tools.
In addition to these, be sure to monitor your data and metrics to see what’s working and not. For example, a simple thing such as sending your emails or newsletters at that time of the day when they are most likely to be opened can significantly influence the performance of your email marketing.