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I experienced the bitter taste of a marketing setback a few years back. If you are a fellow marketer or a business owner, you know how it feels to see a campaign fail. To make things right, I read through every marketing journal and followed every tip that blogs had to dish out. And, yet people weren’t engaged. But how was that even possible? What could have I possibly missed?
In the milieu of Facebook and Instagram, we often tend to forget about the old-school option of email marketing. If you think emails were a thing of the yesteryear, then you have no idea of what you are missing out on. Most marketers swear by email, and there is a solid reason why.
With the highest ROI of all marketing channels, email marketing (if done right) can lead you to better contacts and also help you maintain better relations with your customers. If you are focusing your efforts solely into other channels of marketing, it may be time to take a step back and incorporate email marketing into your digital marketing mix.
Now that brings us to the question – How do you improve your email marketing campaigns? Having lived to tell the tale, I have some fantastic but simple tricks up my sleeve that I am about to share with you today. Let’s start to unravel them, shall we?
8 Practices to Fuel up Your Email Marketing Campaigns like a PRO
Here are eight tricks to implement into your next email marketing campaigns.
1) Increase your Clicks with Split Testing
In my opinion, split testing is the best way to test the success rate of your email marketing campaigns simply because you get to pick up new tricks. Your first step towards email marketing success is to get the recipients to open the emails. For that, you need to evoke emotion right at the beginning with your subject line. Your subject line should arouse curiosity, excitement, or even concern so that they open your email.
Click-baits likes “Get this now before it’s gone” will arouse curiosity and scare tactics like “Your card has been blocked” will raise concern among your recipients. But my favorite is to make it personal.
I have seen myself opening mails from Netflix and Etsy addressed in my name. Somehow, it made me feel that the email was written specifically to me. So I used the same tactic while sending out my emails to build a stronger relationship with my recipients.
2) Experiment with your Content-Format often
Many companies make the mistake of using the same template over and over again in their newsletters. Yes, this will save you a lot of time. But that way, you will never be able to tap the potential of your email marketing campaigns. So you would want to rectify your lacklustre efforts and change the templates often. This way, your recipients have something to look forward to when you send them an email.
While most marketers like to pack the promotional emails with product images and shop-now buttons, I would suggest that you steer clear from that slip. Make it a blend of unique content, catchy phrases, fewer images, and soft CTAs.
A “shop now” CTA might seem too pressing, and you give an impression that you are coercing your potential buyers into buying what they are not ready to invest in. Instead, a milder CTA like “Learn more” or “Check out our shop now” would give them the window to know more about the product and make an informed purchase decision.
3) Segment your List for Maximum Engagement
Fasten your seat belts for this is going to be massive. Segmented email campaigns can drive a 760% increase in revenue. 760%!!
Yes, you read that right. If you want to make sure that you are sending relevant content to the targeted audience via your emails, segmentation is what you need to fall back on. Once a user signs up or purchases a product from you, you can send them a “Thank You for Shopping” email and attach survey lists to track their preferences and interests.
This will give you an insight into what your buyers are looking for and help you build your products, services and content around them.
“For an e-commerce brand that caters to academic needs, you can ask your subscribers what kinds of other services they need that you do not cover already. You could also ask your customers for feedback on what they liked or didn’t like about the assignment expert delivering their task,” suggests Emilia Eckhart, the digital marketing head for MyAssignmenthelp.co.uk.
4) Use the Art of Storytelling
Storytelling traces back to millenniums and all my praises for the art will be an understatement. The human brain responds better to well-crafted narratives. Moreover, we tend to connect more with emotional stories than we do with sales pitches. So you need to start applying the same tactic in your email marketing campaigns for direct response sales. Choose a writing paradigm that adds a personal voice to your content. Use drama, humour, suspense and other tenets of storytelling in your emails.
In the end, remember that a story is all about overcoming adversity. So your email story should address a problem and provide a solution. Narrate the plight of a flesh and blood person to provoke feelings in your recipients and pluck at their heartstrings of people. When users resonate with your story, they will be more interested in buying your product and services.
5) Build Stronger Relationships with Welcome Mails
Tell me honestly – don’t you feel a little disappointed when you turn up to a friend’s party, and he/she doesn’t greet you well? From the point of business, welcome emails serve the same purpose as that hearty hello from the host of a party. Welcome emails set the tone of your relationship with your customers. Every time a new person signs up, make sure that you forward the customary welcome email straightaway so they feel special and a part of the family.
While at it, remember to address the mail recipient with his or her name. This will make your move seem more genuine and personal. Another way you can improvise is by removing the no-reply tags from your emails. This will make your customers feel that you value their feedback and will help them get in touch with you right away.
6) Check the Consistency of sending Emails
The last thing that you want to do is crowd your subscribers’ inboxes with an overwhelming number of mails. 67% subscribers unsubscribe from newsletters and recipient lists when they receive too many emails, too frequently from brands. So you need to learn to determine the thin line between consistency and spamming. You can try my method and keep a close eye on a few (say, 10 of them) subscribers from your list.
Check for the exact moment when each of them hit the ‘unsubscribe’ button after you have sent a host of emails to them. Note down the results and get an average figure to gauge how often your users want to receive emails from you. You can also consider adding a section in your email’s footer that gives your subscribers the prerogative to choose how often they want to receive emails from you.
7) Avoid Hitting the Promotions Tab for more Opens
A few years back, Gmail came up with an update that helped users sort promotional emails in a separate tab, safe from the primary emails. Soon, other email service providers followed suit. So if you are wondering about the debacle of your last email campaign, Promotions Tab may be the culprit you want to nab here.
Emails that reach the promotions tab are more than often ignored. Now the question is – How do you bring them back under the Primary tab? Since the sceptre of the destiny of an email rests with Gmail, you really have no button that you can click to change the destination.
However, what you can do is make your mails look less “spammy”. Limit your use of backlinks and images in your email content. Also, chuck out words like a free, urgent, winner to make it look less promotional.
8) Measure Metrics to Track your Email Campaigns
Unless you track how your email campaigns are performing, you will not be able to trace the shortcomings in your efforts. While there are metrics to measure the success rate of our emailing strategies, most professional marketers focus on the open and click rates.
I suggest that you keep tabs on the total number of people who have clicked on your emails and opened them and followed your CTAs for every 30 days. Based on your findings on inactive and active subscribers, you could create segments and tailor your campaigns.
There are several other ways to measure the performance of your email campaign. Metrics like click-to-open rate (CTOR) allows you to check the percentage of subscribers who have clicked through after opening your email. This will help you determine long-term engagement and the effectiveness of your CTA in your content.
Wrapping up
There is never just one thing that you can do to make your email marketing campaigns a success story. Like every marketing strategy, you need to experiment with different tactics to figure out what works best for your business. Just like your campaigns should be user-concentric, the measures you take should be based on your niche and business practices. So in a nutshell, here are some of the things that you can do:
- Play around and experiment to see what hits the right notes.
- Avoid stagnancy by changing your email and content format often.
- Segmentation is the key to better user engagement.
- Tell a story and provide a solution through it for better click-throughs.
- Make your users feel welcome into the family for better relationships.
- Determine the number of mails per day that does the trick for you.
- Learn the tricks to avoid the Promotions Tab at all costs.
- Keep track of how your campaigns are performing and revise them.
Hopefully, like me, you will see improvements in your email marketing efforts and be able to reach more leads. So call for a team meeting today and revamp your plan today!
And if you have more tricks up your sleeve, do let us know in the comments below.
Author Bio:
[thrive_testimonial name=”” company=”” image=”https://dsim.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Kady-Smith.png”]Kady Smith is a digital marketing guru and a business keynote speaker. In her free time, she extends educational insights to students pursuing Digital Marketing as an assignment writer through MyAssignmenthelp.co.uk. Besides being the marketing mogul, she is a coder by passion.[/thrive_testimonial]
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