“Should I open this email or ignore it?” The answer to this question is the basis of this article on email marketing tips. We all ask ourselves this question every time we visit our inbox and see the new emails lined up one after the other. We don’t usually open emails if they look like spam. Yes, we don’t even need to make sure of it!
Imagine your recipients feeling that way about your emails. That one affects your income directly, doesn’t it? I am not mentioning the fact that it will damage your brand’s reputation at the same time.
Let’s review some of the most important things you need to know about email marketing here. I mean, email marketing is still powerful for lead generation and customer retention, whether it’s a cold email or a hot one.
Let’s get started with our latest email marketing tips. 🏁
1. Get to Know Your Recipients 👥
Imagine that you are the marketer of an agricultural machines company. Does sending promotional emails to doctors get you to your goal?
Well, of course no! When running email campaigns, you should consider your ideal customer persona.
One of the most important principles of email marketing is addressing gender, age, preferences, and, in general, the recipients’ persona.
Not paying attention to this will greatly increase your email bounce rate. People are much more inclined to open an email that is relevant to them and targeted to their interests. For example, a doctor is more interested in reading an email about the latest discoveries in IBS than the mechanism of a tractor!
2. Subject Line Personalization 🎯
The first thing the recipient sees from your email is the subject line you have chosen. This makes it one of the most important parts of your email marketing.
Most inboxes are filled with different emails every day. Now, your subject line should shine brightly in this crowded inbox. It can have a huge impact on your email open rate.
So, write the subject line simple, short, attractive, and tempting.
Use powerful words. Those words that aim at the recipients’ emotions and attract attention. Be exact. If people know exactly what they’re learning and how you’re making them happier, more capable, informed, and ultimately better at something, they’ll be more likely to open and read your email. Stimulate recipients’ curiosity. Feel free to use weird words from time to time.
Try to compose your titles to provide slight information. This way, you can get your reader’s curiosity to click so that they can discover the full story. It creates an effective hook but maintains the readers wanting more.
Emails must capture their audience in the subject lines, as 35% of users will ignore an email that needs a better subject line.
Learn from the masters. Subscribe to the famous email newsletters and check their titles. There is always something to learn there.
For example, you can use subject lines like:
- 10 ideas for SEO optimization
- Dear Mike, are you thinking of a better investment?
- A new way to increase your website traffic.
- Get Leads That Are Ready to Say YES!
3. Show Your Value 💎
What is the purpose of email marketing? Undoubtedly, the first is stable interaction with the customer and increased sales. But your audience receives dozens of other promotional emails from different companies daily.
To be different from other businesses, you need to create value for them. This means that not all emails should be sales-related. You should also send interactive messages so the customer understands your value.
When they sign up on your website, a short welcome email without being pushy can greatly impact future conversations and actions.
4. Send a Thank You Email After Purchase 🙏
If a customer buys something from you, remember to send an email thanking them for their choice along with the transaction emails that inform them of their purchase, order number, shipping time, etc.
People love to be appreciated. Just a simple phrase like “Thank you for trusting us” or “Thank you for your purchase. This is our 30% discount code for your next order” can do wonders in getting these people to come back and repeat their purchase and turn them into regular customers of the website.
After the thank you email, they will no longer see your emails as spam!
5. Attractive Visual Design 🎨
A suitable design can greatly affect the opening rate, click-through rate and overall conversion of your email campaigns. According to Embryo, a good design can make reading and understanding content much easier.
This website claims that placing only one appropriate call to action and using visual features can increase the open rate by 42%. If you want to write better emails and have better sales, read our articles about email templates.
6. Appropriate Timing For Sending Emails ⏱
Like content marketing, one key to successful email marketing is correct timing. You should never waste your audience’s time. Nobody has enough time to read your long and unscheduled emails these days.
Send emails to subscribers only when you have valuable information to share. Choose the timing carefully to ensure maximum engagement and communicate thoughtfully and well-planned. This way, they know when to expect your emails. It is better to focus on precise timing to build trust, avoid bombarding them, and ensure that they will not forget you.
Lead generation experts believe that the highest rate of email marketing interaction is between 9 AM and 12 PM and 12 PM and 3 PM on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
Email marketing costs much less than other marketing methods, but it is only effective if you choose the right time to send emails to customers. For example, if your customers are abroad, consider the time difference between the two countries when running the campaigns.
7. Focus On Customer Needs ➶
Contrary to what many brands think, recipients are not interested in learning about you and your issues. They prefer to know what you can do to meet their needs. So, use the information you have gathered about them, guess their needs, and offer them a solution for any problems they may have. Don’t stray off course.
8. Providing Value and Rewards 🎁
The art of email marketing is informing your audience about your business. This method will help you stick in the audience’s minds. This information can be in the form of educational content, operational messages, or product sales. It must be worth reading, or it will be deleted!
Reward people for reading your email. Make sure they get something out of reading it. But what?
Give them a helpful tip, an inspirational quote, a discount code, a tempting offer, etc. It can be very effective in email marketing conversion rates.
Show readers what they might be missing. Most people are afraid of risks. They want to avoid difficulty, error, and complexity. Present the benefits of your offer in a different tone, such as a problem you’re helping readers avoid.
9. Stay Away From the Spam Folder 🚫
If your emails are spammed, they are no longer useful for your business. You must not violate laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act to ensure your emails are seen and read. Avoid writing in capital letters, consecutive exclamation points, and very prominent phrases. Every spam filter works differently. An email may pass through one filter and not pass through another.
When you send emails from a real person, open rates increase—it’s as simple as that. Email recipients trust a person’s name and email more than a company name. People get so much spam these days that they often hesitate to open emails from unfamiliar senders.
Avoid words like “cash, price estimate, and savings,” as these will send your email to the spam folder!
10. Writing Concise and Useful Email Text 📜
A study by HubSpot shows that emails with texts between 50 and 125 words have a 50% reply rate. Well, logically, these days no one has the time to read your long texts, and even if they have, they cannot concentrate that long!
Psychologists have been studying attention spans for about 20 years. They claim that over this period, the average time a person can focus on one thing has dropped from around 2½ minutes to around 45 seconds.
11. Use a Strong Call to Action Button 👇
Never abandon recipients halfway. Have a clear call to action. Tell your readers exactly what you expect them to do next, and remind them why it’s in their best interest to buy from you. You need to give your customers a road map to keep them going in the funnel.
People won’t look for the next step that is not indicated!
12. Brand Compatible Design 🎭
That means designing your email to reflect your brand in terms of appearance. This can help your audience identify your brand with every email they receive. For example, one way to create this feeling is to use your brand’s main colors and fonts in the email design.
We also suggest you use visual elements, especially the logo, in different email sections, such as the header and the subject line, so the recipient knows your brand. Also, use images that reflect your brand’s overall style. Another way to achieve consistency is to ensure that the tone of your written content is consistent with that of other brand content.
If your brand has a formal and professional tone, use it in the emails, and if it has a friendly and informal tone, write in the same style.
13. Survey Email After Purchase 📝
One email marketing tip that many companies may not use or don’t even know is important is email surveys, which ask about customer satisfaction with the purchased product or service.
Any brand of any size and in any industry needs customer feedback to improve its performance. But this is not the whole story. Sending such emails gives customers a sense of value and is an amazing technique for increasing engagement rates.
Please include the product name, delivery date, or order number in your email so the customer knows exactly which purchase you request feedback on.
14. Offer for Next Purchase 💲
Introducing items that suit customer needs and previous purchases helps build long-term relationships and increase customer satisfaction. This technique usually offers items related to the customer’s original purchase. In this email, you must convince the customer to buy the products they might like based on the original purchase.
You can include an offer for future purchases in the shipping confirmation email (indicating that the customer’s order has been completed). For instance, most clothing companies use this approach, which recommends other clothes and accessories to the customer along with the previous purchase. Another way is to introduce the products that most customers have bought.
15. Sending Emails to Keep the Customer 📧
Customers always visit your website, but some may leave without making a purchase. To avoid this issue, look at other customers who often buy from you. What products do they buy? Send them a list of their favorite items based on the products they browsed.
If many people have purchased a product, it is a good idea to suggest it to other customers in your post-purchase emails.
Also, email other customers who last bought from you a long time ago and suggest frequent and best-selling products. It can help in customer retention. Don’t let people forget about you.
16. Special Offers and Surprises 🎁
You may have some active customers who have bought from you multiple times. You can surprise them and give them attractive offers and gifts. There are different ways to do this, including sending them a personalized note thanking them for their purchase. Then, reward them for getting the highest score (buy more) or offer them a good discount code in your thank you or post-purchase email.
You have no idea how this little thing can affect customer loyalty.
17. Test, Test, and Test! 📈
Only send an email after making sure it works properly. Imagine you want to send emails to employee accounts, So check them twice. View them on Outlook.com, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and various mobile, tablet, and desktop devices, and finalize your drafts.
Litmus also displays your email in dozens of different email tools. Make sure that all the links and email personalization are working and suitable.
Sending thousands of uncontrolled emails is like choosing an outfit for a job interview in a dark room. Get it wrong, and you’ll look unprofessional.
18. Enriching Your Email List 🚀
It’s tempting to keep every subscriber you’ve ever acquired on your email list until they unsubscribe. However, even though they have yet to unsubscribe from your email newsletter, they still need to be interested in your business. Inactive subscribers can drastically reduce your email open and click rates.
To ensure you’re only sending emails to interested people, modify your email list to remove recipients who may not be that interested any more. This way, you can ensure that your email open and click rates are only for interested readers, and you can get more accurate data about what works and doesn’t work in your emails.
Using a good email cleaning program like CUFinder, validating the deletion of invalid emails from your entire email list to reduce the bounce rate as much as possible can be a perfect idea.
It’s natural to want to grow your list, but you can’t grow it at any cost.
Sending emails to valid and active addresses lets you connect with people who care about your brand.
19. Checking the Performance of Each Email ✔️
What’s effective in your email campaign this month may not be effective next month, so you should check your email open and click rates and take every opportunity to improve it. Of course, you need an email analysis tool for this, too.
For example, if you notice ten messages generate twice as many interactions after a month of sending emails as other messages, analyze them. What did you do differently in them? Did these emails have a special photo? Did they have a special title?
Your audience may be divided into several segments, and one of these segments may be interested in something other than the current content of your emails.
Email marketing can be difficult sometimes, but by sending compelling offers to the right target segments and paying attention to important details in your emails, you can increase open and click-through rates and lead generation.
20. Overdoing the Personalization ✖️
We always emphasize that personalization is the most important part of marketing and sales in any field. However, overdoing it can backfire!
For example, constantly using the recipient’s name in the email gives the impression that you want to sell something to them in any way possible. Remember, thanks to the promotional nature of the emails you are sending; people already have their guard up against you; there is no need to make them close it even more.
The Ultimate Reality
Our inboxes are always full of emails from different people, companies, and organizations. Neither of us likes to receive more emails, especially if it’s an advertising type. So, customers who subscribe to your newsletters or your website have done you a favor.
Each subscription means that someone has trusted you, and I admit that gaining and maintaining this trust is very difficult. So be careful; their interest may only last for a while.
Every time you send an email, you must prove your value to your newsletter subscribers and customers. You should know them so well that you can communicate with them and make their lives easier.
Remember: Write as if you were emailing a good friend. Only then will people remember you, like you, and trust you. And when you have these three, you can safely send your emails and wait for the sales figures to rise.
These are some valuable email marketing tips I have used over the years as a marketer. Do you know of another tip or trick? Do you have a question about email marketing? Please share it with us in the comments section. 👇
FAQs
1. How to succeed in email marketing?
The key starting point toward successful e-mail marketing will revolve around understanding your audience, content personalization, and adding value continuously. Segmentation of lists and optimization of subject lines are all important to campaigns’ success and perfection.
2. What is the best email strategy?
The most effective email strategy finds a perfect balance between personalization and relevance. Segmenting your audience, creating striking subject lines, and implementing timing and frequency accordingly can make your message more appealing to the recipients, increasing conversion chances.
3. How many marketing emails can I send per day?
There is no universally specified limit, but a general best practice is to only send up to one to three marketing emails per day per contact. Monitoring your engagement and unsubscribe rates closely ensures the recipients are calm.