Why you need a solid email marketing strategy
About 78% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement over the past year; email remains one of the highest ROI-driven marketing channels. What makes emails so powerful is that at whatever point a lead is in the customer journey, emails can be used to reach and connect with them at a personal level. For instance, welcome emails are a great example of creating awareness, whereas promotional emails are good for getting new leads to make their first purchase.
Email Marketing drives about $42 for every $1 spent on emails. However, this ROI is only possible if you have a sound email marketing strategy. A good email marketing strategy places your brand at the forefront of your subscriber’s mindset. Its job is to take potential buyers through the different consumer journey stages and turn them into paying customers. Emails are perfect for maintaining long-term customer relationships even after converting them. To get started with email marketing, read this article on How to set up an email marketing strategy. With that said, let’s dive into 22 top email strategies you can use in 2022.
22 Best Email Marketing Strategies - Part One
1. Provide value
People do not give out their email addresses unless it will benefit them. It’s like your phone number; you only give it out to people you trust or when it will be beneficial to you. For that reason, you need to provide something so valuable that people would want to give you their email addresses in return. When it sounds like a steal, giving out a little personal information is worth it. Craft a resource that customers want and share it for free. Before they can download it, make a request for their name and email address. It will be a small price to pay for a valuable resource they like. You can even add the monetary value of the resource to let your audience appreciate it further. Also spell out clearly the benefits your resource gives to entice them.
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Take a look our own example above. The value of the resource is stated clearly. This is a simple and honest offer that provides value upfront. Once enough momentum is built with quality resources, you would have gathered a sizable amount of emails to be reaching out to. You can start a weekly newsletter, for instance. Let your creativity lead the way!
2. Use Segmentation
Segmentation is the practice of dividing your email subscribers in groups. These groups are based on demographic, interest, purchase history and previous interactions with your brand. Segmenting email subscribers increases engagement and conversion rates significantly. In fact, email segmentation is one of the top 3 email marketing tactics used by marketing. It is a highly targeted form of marketing that generates 760% increase in revenue. It’s little wonder why marketers love this strategy. Adopting segmentation starts with having enough data about your audience to group them with. When you have that, you can segment your subscribers into the following categories.
Demographic information are the characteristics of a population like age, location, gender and income level etc. If you brand has intercity or international reach, you can consider segmenting your audience based on location. Send content that is relevant to a particular location such as events. Peloton executes this strategy brilliantly with the email below. You can clearly see the email speaks to their audience in the Bay Area and invites them to an event as well.
Other points for demographic segmentation include age and gender. You can divide your audience into different age groups and send content that appeals to them. Segmenting based on gender works exceptionally well, especially for fashion brands. Send the latest summer wear for women to your female segments. Got men’s clothing in stock? Send promo offers on men’s shirts then.
The beauty of segmentation is that only your intended target sees your email. This is likely to increase your chances for a response or sale. Extra ways to segment your lists are through purchase history and past engagement. For purchase history, separate your most frequent buyers and give them exclusive rewards and incentives to encourage them to return. For the less frequent buyers, you can send them promos and offers that will entice them to engage. It is a similar principle for past engagement. Detach your most active audience from the least active and message them accordingly.
3. Personalize your emails
Personalized emails deliver a unique feel to recipients that makes them feel special. When done right, a recipient feels like the brand knows their preferences. 91% of consumers say that they are willing to buy from brands that provide personalised offers and recommendations. Birthday emails which are an example of personalized emails, generates 342% higher revenue than standard promotional emails. I can go on and on about the benefits of personalization. At the end of the day, the point is personalizing your emails is a strategy you should not overlook.
Get started by collecting data from your audience. Personalized data includes names, birthdays, user behavior, location and even purchase history. Some of these data may come via analytics and tracking tools. However, others like birthdays will have to be given explicitly by your subscribers. Always seek permission from subscribers for their data, and try not to ask for too much details. It can spook them off.
Now that you are armed with enough user data, it is time to craft the emails. You can address subscribers by their first name to create a friendly tone in your email. They are also more likely to open the email if their names are called out. In tinyEmail, you can do this by using merge tags. For birthdays, sending a birthday wish with a gift or promo often gets your audience to take action. Also try personalizing emails through location. You can send recommendations of places and activities influenced by location. For instance, “5 new restaurants to try in Toronto” for users who live in Toronto. User behavior is also another effective way of personalizing emails. Users who have abandoned carts can be sent the items as a reminder. Another one I see often is the reminder to check out previously viewed items on a website.
Finally, you can use personalization to create exclusivity. People like the feeling of exclusivity. It makes them feel special. Capitalize on this by sending out highly valuable and exclusive content to your most engaging subscribers. You can reward them with early access to a new product or special VIP access to events and resources.
4. Create an appealing welcome email
You know what they say about first impressions: you never get a second chance at them. Welcome emails are the first impressions in email marketing. These emails are what make a subscriber decide to engage you or not. A good welcome email should appeal to the recipient. It should leave them wanting to engage more with your brand. Keep your welcome emails simple yet memorable. A clutter free email with clear call to actions will allow your subscribers to read it easily and take the actions you desire.
It is also a good idea to let new subscribers know what to expect from you and how often. Should they expect a newsletter every week? Tell them. Furthermore, use welcome emails to introduce offers or discounts that entice subscribers to make a purchase. This example by Saje illustrates this very well.
Another practical use of welcome emails is to help your subscribers with their next steps. This kind of welcome emails invites your subscriber to take an action. You can share help articles, recommendations and How-to video resources. I love this example from Domestika because it includes more than one features of an appealing welcome email. It contains a discount offer with clear call to actions that tell a user what to do. Additionally, they try to get subscribers to tell them something about themselves. This information will be used to create a personalized experience down the line.
5. Keep Subject Lines Short And Interesting
Did you know 47% of email recipients open their email because of the subject lines alone? Another 69% of recipients report emails as spam based on the subject line only. They are literally the deciding factor for whether your emails get opened or not. Being so crucial to the success of your campaign, you need to put in effort to make them work. Keep your subject lines simple and straight to the point. This is not the time for lengthy words. Subject lines have a character limit so you may want to keep that in mind. The limits differ based on the email service provider you use but a sweet spot is between 80 and 100 characters.
Personalizing your subject lines is also another way to grab your reader’s attention. Call them out by their first name to create a sense of familiarity. Avoid words that trigger spam filters as these may get your emails marked as spam. If you don’t know them, download a list of over 200 spam words from this article. One other thing you want to do is to make sure you have a sender identity in place. Sender identities tell your recipient the origin of the email. Use the name of an actual person like “[email protected]”. Names of departments also work well when the email is not coming from an individual. Support sender identities are a great example. Most of them look like “[email protected]”.
6. Optimize for mobile
Some 88% of smartphone owners check their emails on their mobile devices regularly. Yet nearly 1 in 5 emails are not optimized for mobile devices. Let me just say it: you don’t want to be that one. There are more mobile devices than there are humans on earth. You cannot afford to overlook mobile devices in you email strategy. Optimizing for mobile devices mean that your email is designed in a way to appear on mobile screens without distortion. You don’t want the emails you have invested time and effort into to show up great on a desktop and out of place on mobile. A few tips to help you design for mobile are to use bigger fonts that are readable and a call to action button that is big enough for users to tap on. You should also design the emails to in one column and have smaller images that are properly aligned.
7. Keep building and maintaining your email list
Building your email list is a continuous process that doesn’t end. Once you have built a good enough list, you need to audit and maintain it from time to time. List scrubbing as it is often called keeps your list healthy and weeds out the bad emails. The truth is, not everyone will read your emails. In fact, a huge number may miss them. There are some email addresses on your list that may bounce or never even open anything you send. Maintaining your list will subsequently reduce your list size by 20% to 30% every year. That is because you will have to remove emails that no longer are beneficial to your list.
For instance, there are those that have unsubscribed – they need to go. Those who have never opened or responded to your emails are prime candidates for removal as well. However, before you weed them out, you can send one last series of campaigns. Ask them what content would be more relevant to them. Are they even still interested in being your subscriber? If they are not, allow them to opt out. It may sound disheartening but it will be doing your email marketing a world of good. If after all of these, they still fail to respond, then you can take them off your active lists of subscribers. You will appreciate a healthier and engaging list especially if you are paying for every email that goes out. Take a look at this example from Readymag.
8. Find The Best Time To Send Emails
The timing of your emails are as important as the quality of the emails themselves. You can put much effort into the design of your emails and still not get the most engagement simply because of the time it was sent.
You may have to do some testing on your own to understand the best times to push out your emails. Try a combination of different time and days over a period to see which times give the most engagement. Mind you, this may take a while as you will need to repeat this a couple of times to get enough data to work with. Once you have marked down the best times, you can design and schedule your campaigns. The scheduled campaigns will be sent out at your specified time. This helps a lot especially when your audience are in different timezones.
9. Pleasantly surprise your subscribers
Giveaways are an age-old marketing technique that is still relevant today. Giving out something people really want is a simple yet effective way to gather emails for your email marketing. Your website and social media channels can be used as the entry points for your giveaways. Visitors will be required to enter their name and email address in exchange for what you are offering. From time to time, you can use emails as a medium for your giveaways to encourage engagement and product purchases.
Ensure that whatever it is you are giving away is related to your brand. The tendency for users to stay within your funnel is higher if the gift is related to your products or services. When it is not related, you stand the risk of attracting people who are not particularly targets of your brand. They might only want to win the gift and never interact with your brand. An example is, if you are a cooking brand, giving out recipe books makes much more sense than giving out a pair of headphones. They might not exactly attract your target audience. Another thing to look out for is to validate customer emails. It is a good idea to send the gift or its details to the email the customer provided. This way, they will not be encouraged to use bogus email addresses that do not exist.
10. Combine Your Email Marketing With Social Media
Social media combined with email marketing give you multiple touchpoints to interact with your customers. Both can be used interchangeably for customer acquisition and retention. You can acquire customers via social media and nurture the relationship through emails. The other way round works as well. Use your social media posts to generate awareness for your products or services. If your budget allows you, boost the posts with ads to reach a wider audience. Through the posts, you can acquire a good number of leads to nurture via email. On the other hand, when sending out emails, ask your email audience to follow you on your social media channels. In tinyEmail, almost all our templates come with predesigned social media icons. All you need to do is insert your social media links and you are good to go.
Concluding part one
Email marketing will remain crucial to marketers for a long time to come. It is the only proper marketing real estate you have complete control of. You own your list and can decide the approach to use. These 10 email marketing strategies will help you find the best way to communicate with your customers. Subscribe below to get the next 11 strategies right in your inbox along with future marketing guides and tips.
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