On a daily basis, consumers find themselves receiving automated emails from companies trying to promote their products and services to increase their sales. With so many emails going through, it’s important to have an email marketing strategy that makes the customers want to open the email and ultimately click through to the website.
Seven professionals have supplied their top tips on how to create a successful and effective email marketing campaign.
1. Personalisation is king
Gone are the days where you blast out the same email to thousands of email addresses and hope it’s opened. Nowadays, subscribers want a personalised experience. According to reports, emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to get opened. It’s not just subject lines, personal shout outs in the main copy can also work well and are simple to do.
Once you’re a bit more au fait with the basics, you could even start to think about personalising the offer, imagery and call to action based on the customer data you hold.
For example, if you’re talking to a young mother with a daughter, why not personalise the image to reflect that or utilise previous sales data to offer related products.
You could also segment your list into smaller audience lists and tweak your emails for each audience segment. Email marketing software allows you to upload multiple contact lists (as excel files) so you can send separate emails to each list. This will also help you to identify which segment of your audience is more responsive/engaged.
- Lynn Morrison, Marketing Director, Opus Energy
2. Show Your Loyal Subscribers Some Love
It’s been somewhat of a tough time for a number of brands over the last 12 months, with many seeing a drop in their subscriber numbers post-GDPR. Remember: your most loyal subscribers are the ones who have stuck by you, continued to engage with your emails and have purchased - so why not show them some love?
Let your most loyal subscribers know that their repeat custom has not gone unnoticed and that you appreciate them! You could celebrate their loyalty, by offering them an extra incentive to allow them to treat either themselves or buy something for others.
- Lindsey Roberts, Head of Email Marketing at Visualsoft
3. Getting Your Email in the Inbox
Both IP warming and domain warming should start early.
As send volume increases in frequency and volume, sudden spikes can cause email providers (like Gmail or Yahoo) to throttle the delivery of email to the inboxes of your subscribers.
Clean your lists. If you plan to start emailing inactive subscribers – contacts, you haven’t communicated with for 9-13 months – consider investing in a list cleansing service. Alternatively, consider a win-back or reactivation series for this segment. Include a specific call to action, creative, and an offer.
- Elliott Jacobs, Commerce Consulting Director at LiveArea
4. Front of mind, tip of the tongue
Always have the customer at the front of mind, strive to deliver the best experience for them with your choice of content. Use a test and learn approach and set clear KPIs and work to those goals. Lastly, make sure you respect your customer data, be clear with the consumer how you will market to them and don’t deliberately make it difficult to unsubscribe. If your content is relevant they will be happy to receive your emails.
- Steven Lunniss, Wowcher’s Head of CRM.
5. Measurable objectives
Do you know why you are sending the email and what you are trying to achieve?
Ensure you understand this objective and how it will move both your business needs and the customer’s goals forward once activated. Not only this but ensure your objectives can be easily measured against a success metric.
- Rob Pellow, Digital Experience Director for award-winning CRM agency, Armadillo
6. Ensure its mobile friendly
Lastly, and especially if you're targeting Millennials or Gen Z -who are mobile only- your emails need to be mobile friendly. Most email marketing platforms have now integrated with tools like Litmus which offers email previews across all popular email clients, apps, and devices. This allows you to ensure your HTML emails look good in any format or on any device.”
- Fabio Torlini, EMEA Managing Director at WP Engine, the digital experience platform for WordPress.
7. The importance of the subject line
Despite the subject line being a small part of your e-mail, it’s one of the very first impressions that customers will have of your brand. Therefore, it’s imperative to draft a compelling enough subject line to get people to click through. For instance, creating a sense of urgency and scarcity in an email subject line can really entice people to act, particularly when an offer or sale is about to end. Personalisation is also a great method of getting your audience to open your e-mail. You can really pique the interest of the customer simply by including their name or their favourite products in the subject line. Audiences want to feel unique and special and tailoring your subject line can help with that.
- Jason Lark, Managing Director, Celerity
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