You’re offline. This is a read only version of the page.
Written by Professional Academy Guest Blogger Sonia Bell
Many predicted the death of email marketing. With the rise of other forms of online marketing, many analysts claimed that it was only a matter of time before email marketing fades away. Years later, email marketing still remains one of the most effective ways to reach prospective customers and interact with existing ones. Studies put the ROI from email marketing at a staggering $38 for every dollar spent and it is easy to see why marketers are still relying on this form of marketing for their subscriber campaigns.
However, the presence of an emailing list and marketing content doesn’t mean that you are making the most of your marketing campaign. Your emails could be getting trashed even before they are opened and your marketing efforts rendered worthless. Businesses, therefore, need to find ways to make their marketing emails engaging to improve open rates and eventually generate more business for the organization. In this article, we will share powerful tips to improve email marketing campaigns, spur subscriber engagement, and improve CTR.
The era of one-size-fits-all email campaigns is over. Blanket marketing emails are usually not well received by customers and that is why brands need to make personalization a key aspect of their marketing strategy. Personalizing your emails could be as simple as using the recipient’s name on the email. This, however, is just the basics of marketing personalization and brands are advised to go deeper and learn the specific characteristics of their customers and use this information to craft highly-converting emails. You need to gather information about your users such as their location, their past purchases, their age and gender. Luckily, there are a lot of tools that you can use to extract this information from the people the business interacts with.
This information adds a personal touch to your emails and increases the chances of the recipient actually opening the emails and reading the content. Personalization goes a long way to make email recipients feel special. It makes them feel that they are not just another contact in your mailing list and this feeling makes them more receptive to the content that you have to share in your emails.
The subject lines of your emails should be catchy if you want the recipients to open them. Most people usually scan the subject line to determine if the email is worth opening and if the subject line doesn’t capture their attention right away, the chances of them deleting the email are very high.
Marketing expert and health writer Dylan Menders explains that for personalization purposes, have the recipient’s name on the subject line. Then give a compelling description of the email to give the recipient an idea of what the email is about. If you are emailing them about your latest offer, have it in bold on the subject line to get the user excited about opening the email. When developing your subject lines you need to pay attention to the character count. Long subject lines could get truncated and as such, the recipient may not get the intended message. Most people also usually open emails on their phones and this means that your subject line should be short for it to fit on the screen on a mobile phone.
There is the desire to have images in your emails to make them more appealing but if you want to run an effective email marketing campaign, send text-only emails. Most email clients block images and as such, your subscribers may not be able to see the image content that you had shared. Instead, they will see a broken version of the image and this could put them off from reading the rest of the email. Images also take a lot of time to load and those on slower speeds may not be patient enough for this. They may end up abandoning the email and this will decrease the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
The best thing to do is, therefore, to send text-only emails. Share links to your website or product pages for those who are interested in the offers you are promoting.
Your users are basically at different points of the customer journey and your email marketing campaign should be tailored to reflect this. There are those who are still on the onboarding stage and as such, your email communication should strive to help the subscribers familiarize themselves with the company and the products offered. There are those who have tried your products and liked them. Your communication should, therefore, aim to inform them of other products or services that you are offering for them to try. Fortunately, there are a lot of marketing tools that will help you understand at what stage a particular customer is. Use this information to effectively target your customer and achieve more from your marketing campaign.
Don’t send emails from a noreply@company.com account. Your customers want to know that their concerns will be listened to when they contact you and this is why you need to avoid sending emails from such accounts. Use customer service email account to communicate to your customers and make sure that concerns are addressed promptly when they are raised.
Conclusion
Email marketing stands out as one of the most effective channels to reach out to customers. When used properly, you will be able to increase user engagement and generate more business for your organization. Above are useful tips that will help you in that regard.
If you are interested in Sales, Marketing, Management or Digital Marketing then you are in the right hands, Professional Academy will help you progress further into your career! We offer both electronic and printed copies of learning material and the chance to undertake a professional qualification within a time-frame that suits you. If you would like to find out more you can speak to a qualifications advisor today or download a prospectus.