Fearless Foundry’s Top 6 Email Marketing Tips
Use these tips to level-up your email marketing efforts
If you run a business, you need email marketing in your corner! Did you know that 99 percent of email users check their inbox everyday day? Of these people, 58 percent check their email first thing in the morning. Implementing the right email marketing strategies can help you generate leads and convert more prospects for your business. Being at the forefront of your customers' minds through emails will help them be aware of where you stand and what's available to them—it's an extremely effective method to help your customer navigate which of your products and services are best suited to their needs.
Use these 6 email marketing tips to effectively promote your products and services, and communicate authentically with your audience:
#1. Make Emails Personal
Personalizing your emails to your customers is a great way to show that your company is putting in the extra effort to communicate in a genuine way. No one wants to feel like they’re having products or services shoved down their throats, or that the soul purpose of a company is to sell, sell, sell. You need to be able to speak to your customers' needs and add value to their lives. Marketers are aware of the value of sending personalized emails, as 94 percent of companies say that personalization is critical to current and future success.
Personalizing emails can help you:
Increase open and click-through rates
Decrease unsubscribe rates
Improve customer satisfaction
Decrease the chance of your emails getting flagged as spam
Re-engage with customers
Here’s how to personalize emails in order to stand out:
Create Buyer Personas
A buyer persona is a detailed description of an imaginary person who represents your ideal customer. By creating your customer persona (you can have more than one!) you’ll be able to write and design your emails in a more genuine and authentic way. Ask yourself who your ideal customers are. You’ll need to consider their:
Demographics
Education
Career paths
Size of their company
What their biggest challenges are
Gather Information
Once you have your buyer personas and know what type of customer you want to attract, you can start gathering more specific information from people when they sign up for your emails via your website or social media platforms. Gather as much information as you can from your email sign-up forms:
First and last names
Birthdays
Locations
What kind of content people are interested in (blogs, promotional emails only, etc.)
Segment Your Emails
Personalizing your emails based on consumers’ information and how they interact with your content is called email segmentation, and marketers who use segmented email campaigns note as much as a 760 percent increase in revenue.
Use the information you gather about your email subscribers to personalize the emails you send to them. You can also incorporate what you know about a customer based on their purchases and email interactions. Here are some examples:
Thanks for downloading our e-book
Based on your past purchases, we recommend these products
We know you travel a lot, here are some product recommendations
This email is relevant to you because you’re a CEO
Happy birthday! Here’s a coupon
Use Name Tags
Using name tags, which will automatically populate emails with the recipient's first or last name (“Hi, Sally” or “Here’s what I mean, Loren...”), add personalization but will also help your emails avoid being flagged as spam. Name tags make your emails stand out, and help your customers feel like you took the time to create an email specifically for them. For name tags to work appropriately, your email list must include the customer’s first and/or last name beside their email address. Make sure to collect that information from all new email sign-ups, if you weren’t already doing so.
Encourage Replies
One final and creative way to personalize your emails is to encourage replies—and stay on top of responding! If someone responds to an email, write back. Get ahead of the curve and start engaging with customers before your competitors beat you to it.
#2. Implement a Nurture Flow
A nurture flow is a sequence of emails that are sent to subscribers after they sign up for your emails or enter their email to receive a discount code, e-book, or similar item. The purpose of a nurture flow is to educate people about your company, products, and services in a way that provides value to them. This can help guide them through the buying process—from your perspective the goal is to create sales, but in an educational, not salesey way. Sending nurture flows is about building trust, establishing credibility, and creating lasting relationships with your email subscribers. The emails are based on consumer behavior, and can be adjusted in response to a customer’s activities on your site.
#3. Make Emails Mobile Friendly
Having mobile friendly emails can improve your click through rate and increase visits to your website! Nearly 1 in 5 email campaigns are not optimized for mobile devices, but around 55 percent of global website traffic is generated from mobile devices, excluding tablets. Mobile-friendly email is the second most-used tactic email marketers use to improve their performance.
Creating mobile friendly emails is critical, no matter the age of your audience. Here are our top tips for making that happen:
Keep It Clean and Simple
Use a responsive email template that will adjust the look of your emails based on whether or not they’re being viewed on mobile or desktop. You can search for this feature or templates inside your email marketing platform, or reach out to your platform’s customer service department if you need additional guidance.
Concise Copy
Keep your subject and preheader text short and to the point. If they’re too long they may not show well on a mobile device, and people could lose interest. Mobile devices only show about 25-30 characters—don’t be afraid to use emojis every once in a while 😱!
Mind Your Pixels
Running tests at WebPageTest show that keeping the pixel size of images under 500KB gets a score of 100/100 for image compression, even on old phones and slow 3G connections. To have your images show up the best on mobile devices, try to keep images 500-650 pixels wide.
Above the Fold
Keep any calls to action (CTAs) and important messaging above the fold. The fold is the first part of an email that customers see on their mobile device before they have to scroll lower. CTAs should have verbs that create a sense of urgency like “discover savings now.”
#4. Split Test Emails
Email split testing is the process of creating an email, and then changing one element of that email in an effort to test which version will be received best by subscribers. Both the original and changed emails get sent, but to different subsets of subscribers. Email service providers like Active Campaign, Campaigner, ConvertKit, and Hubspot have software that will do split testing for you. Once the software determines which email does better, it sends the better version to the rest of your subscribers. If one of the emails gets better open or click-through rates, this can inform content creation best practices moving forward.
Split testing, also called A/B testing, can help you get better open and click-through rates, which results in more website visitors, and hopefully, sales. Brands that always include an A/B test in their emails generate a return on investment (ROI) of 48:1. You can A/B test email subject lines, text length, word order, email copy, visuals, CTAs, and best times to send. For example, you might try A/B testing to find the best time to send emails, since your subscribers are likely in different time zones. Or you could try sending emails on different days of the week. Globally, Fridays see the highest email open rates (nearly 19 percent), compared to the lowest open rates (17 percent) on Saturdays.
#5. Send Re-Engagement Emails
Since emails are the best way to control communication with your audience, it’s critical that you keep as many customers engaged as possible! Sending a sequence of triggered emails to inactive subscribers may help them re-interact and re-engage with your company.
It’s cheaper to re-engage a customer than acquire new customers. It can cost up to 5 times the amount to acquire a new customer instead of retaining an existing one, and the success rate of selling to customers you already have may be as high as 60-70 percent.
Sending re-engagement emails isn’t just about reconnecting with your subscribers. Your deliverability will go down and your emails may go to a spam folder if you’re sending them to inactive subscribers, so it’s important to see who wants to re-engage with you. You need to show people why it’s worth their time to read and reconnect with your email content!
Why People Ignore Emails
They’re getting too many emails already
The emails are too long
Too salesy—no one likes product pushing with no substance
Confusing design
They aren’t optimized for mobile devices
The content is repetitive or irrelevant
They only signed up for a one-time offer, not daily emails
Fostering Re-Engagement
To get subscribers to start reading your emails again, send a re-engagement email sequence of 3+ emails starting 30-60 days after a subscriber becomes inactive.
These can be short and simple:
Offer to let people take an email hiatus or opt in for fewer emails
Promise to send more personalized content
Offer something for free or at a discount
Remind them why they signed up to begin with
#6. Clean Out Your Mailing List
If you’ve already tried a re-engagement sequence and it’s not working on certain subscribers, it may be time to let them go. Keeping your least-engaged recipients on your mailing list can kill your open rate.
It may be time to scrub, or clean out your mailing list, if you’re getting reduced open rates, reduced click-through rates, lots of unsubscribers, or spam complaints. You’ll want to remove unsubscribers, spam emails, purchased subscribers, and duplicate email addresses. You should aim to clean out your email list at least once per year, but if you have lots of new subscribers coming in, it may be worthwhile to clean it out more frequently.
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The intricacies of email marketing are almost endless, and it can be difficult for businesses, especially small ones, to keep up with best practices. The 6 tips mentioned here will help you drive user engagement and connect with your audience in a genuine way.
When working on your email marketing campaigns, don’t expect results overnight. It can take time to see your open results, click-through results, and customer satisfaction levels go up. Making a commitment to creating consistently high quality emails will pay off for your customers, and your business, in the long run.
If you need help getting started on a new email marketing strategy, reach out to Fearless Foundry! Our team of overqualified creatives can uncover the best strategies for your business.