Email Marketing Best Practices: Strategies for Higher Engagement

Email marketing should not be overlooked or dismissed. In fact, many companies are finding that email marketing is still a powerful tool for engaging with customers and building long-term relationships.

There are several reasons why email marketing is still effective and relevant in today's digital landscape. For one, email allows for more personalized and targeted communication with customers. Unlike social media, where messages are broadcast to a wide audience, email allows you to send tailored messages to individual customers based on their interests and preferences. This can help to build a more personal connection with customers and make them feel valued and understood.

Another reason why email marketing is still effective is that it allows for more detailed and in-depth communication. With social media, you are limited by character counts and the fast-paced nature of the platform. Email, on the other hand, allows you to provide more information and offer more value to customers. This can help to build trust and credibility with customers and position your brand as an authority in your field.

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Furthermore, basic email marketing can be a cost-effective way to reach a large audience. And if you're struggling to craft the perfect email you can always find free email templates online. While social media advertising can be expensive, email marketing allows you to reach a large number of customers without breaking the bank. Plus, with the right strategy and tactics, you can achieve a high return on investment and drive real results for your business.

In conclusion, while social media and other digital marketing tactics are important, email marketing should not be forgotten. By incorporating email into your overall marketing strategy, you can build strong, personal connections with customers and drive real results for your business.

The Effectiveness of Email Marketing 

According to Hubspot, email isn’t the newest channel, in fact the first email was sent in 1978 and resulted in $13 million sales. Email may not be new but it sure is an effective way to build an owned audience that gets results.

Think of the possibilities and greater outcome you could get from combining all of those tools with a proper campaign in email marketing.

Let’s do a fun poll to see where your thoughts are, read the following statistic and guess to which marketing tactic this statistic refers to:

“___________________ generates $38 for every $1 spent which represents an outstanding 3,800% ROI”

1. Email marketing
2. Social media
3. Influencer marketing
4. SEM
5. Blogging

The answer to this is: Blogging.

Just kidding,

This statistic actually talks about Email Marketing.

If you’re actively looking for ways to generate more revenue and ROI, and aren’t already doing email marketing, well, it’s time to start.

Or maybe, you are already doing email marketing but are getting no results from it.

That’s why today, I decided to talk about 4 email marketing best practices that will probably not get you $13 million in sales like that first email did but will surely bring a higher ROI to your business.

Before I dive into these 4 email marketing best practices I want to:

• Talk about how to get started with email marketing and
• How to analyze your email marketing efforts

So far, I’ve given you one statistic that proves how powerful email marketing still is, but you might still be a little hesitant.

If that’s the case, take a look at the following stats:

93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.

Active email accounts are expected to hit over 4.5 billion by 2025.

It's estimated that the U.S. is expected to spend over 10 billion dollars on email advertising in 2023.

73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.

More than 50 percent of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.

How to use email marketing

Given how powerful email marketing is, you must understand that one of the biggest purposes of using email marketing is to create meaningful and personal relationships with your current clients and with potential customers. And that remains true whether you're sending a B2B email or a B2C email.

Here are a few ways in which you should be using email marketing:

Build Relationships: You can build relationships through personalized conversations leading to engagement.

Create Brand Awareness: Keep your customers and potential clients engaged and have your business positioned as top of mind in your industry.

Promote Content: Email is a great tool to educate you customers and show them that you care. Promote your blog or any other content offer through email.

Generate Leads: You can use email to ask for personal information in return for you offering people some sort of gift (guide, e-book, tutorials, webinars, etc).

Nurture Leads: The purpose of nurturing leads is to help them, keep them engaged with your brand by providing them with useful and relevant content.

Market your Products: Email is also great if you want to promote your product or service. Even, the launching of a new product or website.

Now, you might be wondering,

Where do I start with email marketing?

1. Create an email marketing strategy

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is its ability to reach a wide audience at a low cost. It allows you to personalize your messages and target specific segments of your audience with relevant content. With the right strategy and tools, you can create engaging and effective emails that drive conversions and build brand advocacy.

To create a successful email marketing strategy, it's important to start by defining your target audience and understanding their needs and preferences. This will help you create tailored messages that resonate with your audience and encourage them to engage with your brand.

Next, establish clear goals for your email marketing campaign and create a plan to achieve them. This might include setting benchmarks for open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. It's also important to create a sign-up form that makes it easy for your audience to join your email list and receive your messages.

Once you have your audience and goals in place, you can choose the right type of email campaign to meet your objectives. This might include newsletters, promotional emails, transactional emails, or automated emails. Each type of campaign has its own benefits and should be chosen based on your goals and audience.

Once you have your campaign set up, it's important to stick to a regular schedule and send your emails at the right time and frequency. This will help you build trust and credibility with your audience and ensure that they look forward to your messages.

Finally, measure the results of your email marketing efforts and use the data to optimize and improve your strategy. By tracking key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, you can identify what's working and what's not and make adjustments to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Overall, email marketing is a powerful tool for building brand advocacy and driving conversions. By creating a well-planned and targeted email marketing strategy, you can engage with your audience and build lasting relationships that drive business growth.

2. Build an Email list

This is the part where you select the group of people that will be receiving your emails and you segment them into groups.

You create these lists with leads and/or email subscribers (newsletter subscribers for example).There are two ways in which you can gather leads for your list: lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is exactly that, something that attracts people and makes them want to sign up to your list. A great lead magnet example are free content offers.

These offers are given to people in exchange for some personal information and obviously their email.

Keep in mind that people don’t give out their personal information easily so those content offers must be something that your audience truly values and would want to give their email for.

Examples of lead magnets:

• Ebook
• Checklist
• Whitepaper
• Template
• Webinar

Opt-in Forms

The opt-in forms are precisely that, forms. They are the tools we use to gather the lead information.

Make sure your forms have the following characteristics:

• Has an attractive design
• Has an attention grabbing headline
• The copy is relevant to the offer
• The form is simple
• It provides a double confirmation
• The flow works

Now that you know where to start with email marketing, another important piece that it’ll ensure that you are doing a great job is knowing how to measure and track its performance.

How do you measure your email marketing efforts?

Analyzing your marketing efforts is the best way to keep you and your team informed and gives you the backbone to support your future decisions.

Here are the best ways to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns:

A/B Test:

You have to keep in mind that not all audiences are the same; some might like personalized content, and some might like a bit more spammy content. Some enjoy colourful CTA’s and some don’t.

That is why you should a/b test several items inside your email and stick with works best.

Here are examples of items you can a/b test:

• Subject lines
• CTA’s
• Images/Videos

KPI’s:

Now, which KPI’s should you be paying more attention to?

There are four main key metrics to measure in email marketing:

• Deliverability: This refers to measuring the rate at which emails reach your intended audience inbox.

How to improve it?

You should ensure that you are following best practices to avoid spam filters, remove inactive people from your list, check which emails hard-bounced and remove those emails from your list.

• Open Rate: It refers to the percentage of people that open up your email as soon as it reaches their inbox.

How to improve it?

Create engaging subject lines, adjust and play with the time and date you send out emails to see which one works best.

• Click Through Rates: Refers to the percentage of people that actually click on the CTA’s inside the emails you send.

How to improve it?

Write engaging copy and content, make sure that your offer provides some sort of value to your audience, A/B test different CTA’s (images, graphic vs in-line copy)

• Unsubscribers: This will measure the percentage of people who opt-out of your email list once they receive an email from you.

How to improve it?

Make sure your email is aligned with your brand and buyer persona, and it will help you check if you're promising one thing and delivering another.

Okay, so far, we’ve discussed how to get started with email marketing and how to measure your email marketing efforts once you’re done with them.

Let’s ensure that once you measure those email efforts, you see positive results from them.

These 4 email marketing best practices will help you do that:

1. Email Marketing Tips

Crafting an email that will entice a high open rate and that will increase your click-through rates takes a lot more than you think, a good email that keeps your customers engaged should have the following characteristics and components:

Copy: Copy should have consistency with your brand’s voice and stick to specifically one topic. Ensure that you make your email concise and demonstrate your value.

Images: Make sure that if you use images, they are high-end, eye-catching, elevant to the topic and double check that they can be viewed through different devices.

CTA: Make sure your call to action stands out and catches your reader’s attention with great copy, the cta must also be relevant to the main message of the email.

Timing: Make sure you are sending out your emails at the time that your customers usually open their emails.

Fun fact: A study revealed that Tuesday at 11 am ET is the best day and time to send emails.

Responsiveness: Most people check their emails on their phones, make sure they are optimized for mobile devices as well.

Personalization: You can use personalization tokens to get more familiar with your audience, always remember to use a friendly tone.

Subject line: Use a clear statement that is in alignment with the main message and content of the email. Try to be as captivating as possible with subject lines, this is the first thing your audience will see when they get your email so make sure you write an attractive line to your audience. You can even add emojis to your subject lines and make it look a little less serious and a lot more friendlier. 

Visual Elements: If you really want to make your emails stand out you can also include visual elements that actually have movement. Adding a moving element to your emails is attention-grabbing. 

2. Email Segmentation

The best way to segment an email list is to create separate lead magnets and opt-in email sign-up forms for the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

You can segment your list any way you want, basically; here are a few ways in which you could break them up:

• geographical location
• industry
• lifecycle stage
• language
• job title
• industry

3. Personalization

Having those lists will help you get even more personal with your emails.

Whatever email marketing platform you use it’ll help you gather and store information about a contact and create personalization tokens with it.

What do personalization tokens allow you to do?

-Add a first name in your subject line

-Include region-specific content

-Talk about relevant or personal events, specific holidays

-Use a personal signature to end your emails and not just a company logo

4. Automation

Automation is not only time-saving, but it also allows for better organization and personalization of your emails. Modern email marketers love automation. You can set up triggers to send emails based on specific actions taken by the recipient, such as opening an email or clicking on a link. This way, you can tailor the content of your emails to the individual's interests and needs.

In addition to automation, email marketing tools also provide valuable insights and data on the performance of your campaigns. You can track metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to see how well your emails are performing and make adjustments accordingly.

Overall, implementing an email marketing strategy with automation and data tracking can greatly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts. It allows you to focus on creating engaging and personalized content, rather than spending time and money on manual email sending. However, bear in mind that as your business grows, you may get to a point where you need additional email marketing tools to support your efforts.

How do you automate? There are two main ways:

Autoresponders:

These can be simply described as a series of emails that are immediately sent out from a mailing list once triggered by a certain action. For example, when someone downloads a guide or ebook, they get one of those autoresponder emails with instructions or thanking them for their purchase or download.

Workflows:

The word workflow might sound a bit scary, but trust me, they’re easy to set up once you get the hang of it.

A workflow is basically a flow with yes/no branches and it will execute certain actions based on the criteria you set.

Workflows are smart; they understand when email recipients have opened an email, and it will set off a series of actions based on that behavior.

Both autoresponders and Workflows will help you will help you send the right email to the right people at the right time!

Actually, companies see a 20% revenue increase when they send emails based on lifecycle stages.

Conclusion

An email marketing strategy is a valuable tool for businesses to increase revenue and improve customer relationships. So, take the time to find the right email marketing software for your unique needs. By defining your target audience, setting goals, creating a sign-up path, choosing the right campaign type, and implementing automation, you can effectively nurture your customer base and prevent buyer's remorse. Follow these best practices and regularly track your performance to achieve a higher return on investment through email marketing.

If you’re still unsure of where to start or need help setting up an email marketing software, you can always reach out to us; we are happy to help businesses like yours grow through digital marketing.  

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