Does creating email marketing campaigns that keep subscribers engaged seem like an impossible task?
You're not alone. It takes a lot of work to win users' attention through emails — crafting great subject lines, finding the best time to send them, keeping up with bounce backs... But you can't afford to ignore email marketing. Email marketing is among the most effective digital marketing approaches, with the average return being $36 for every $1 spent. Email is big business.
Email marketing doesn't have to be a thorn in your side, either. A smart strategy can go a long way toward helping you capture the hearts and attention of your email subscribers. Here are 8 tips to keep in mind.
1. Understand Your Audience
The first step towards boosting email engagement is understanding your audience. Dig deep to find what frustrates them, what they desire, and how your business is perfectly positioned to address their needs. With such an understanding, you can craft highly relevant emails that are hard to resist.
Tools like website analytics, email analytics, and customer relationship management systems can help you gather the correct information about what your customers care about most. Track customers' patterns, topics they're interested in, and emails they engage with most. Once you have the data, strategically customize your emails to appeal to your audience.
Since 83% of customers prefer hyper-personalized marketing emails, use the collected data to segment your list according to customer journey stage, behavior, demography, and engagement levels.
2. Personalization
Over 70% of customers will only engage with your business's messaging if it's customized for them. As such, your digital marketing strategy should prioritize personalization using the data you have about the customer. For instance, you can:
- Address your customers by name
- Personalize subject lines
- Align emails with a buyer's journey
- Segment your email list according to different needs
- Send special offers or greetings on birthdays or anniversary dates
- Send automated emails based on user actions, such as abandoned cart reminders
Email marketing software like HubSpot and ActiveCampaign can get you the necessary data for personalization.
3. Compelling Subject Lines
HubSpot reports that 65% of email marketers say subject lines have the greatest impact on open rates. That's because subject lines determine whether a reader opens your email, ignores it, or sends it to the trash.
A compelling subject line grabs attention, triggers recipients to open the email, sets expectations for the email content, and avoids the spam filter.
Here are some examples of compelling subject lines:
- The Timer's Going Off on Your Cart: Induces the fear of missing out
- A Sneak Peek for VIPs Only: Promises exclusive offer for loyal customers
- Take $20 Off Your Order of $25 or More: Informs subscribers of existing discounts to boost sales
4. Quality Content
Once you have a compelling subject line, create relevant and valuable content to hold your subscribers' attention and encourage interaction. Establish your email relevancy right away in the first sentence.
Avoid selling too hard before your prospects are ready. Instead, warm them up with content like educational emails, newsletters, and promotions.
You should also establish the ideal content frequency. If you email your audience too often, you risk getting ignored, overwhelming your subscribers till they hit the "unsubscribe" button, increasing spam complaints, and eventually damaging your brand reputation. Send too few emails, and your subscribers will quickly forget about you and your business.
The best approach is to analyze your audience's data or conduct a survey to find an email frequency that works best for your audience.
5. Interactive Elements
Interactive elements include quizzes, clickable buttons, surveys, games, videos, or any design feature that encourages customer engagement in email campaigns. The main role of these elements is to boost engagement and encourage recipients to take action.
However, interactive elements can also:
- Increase conversions
- Improve user experience
- Enhance brand awareness
- Help you collect valuable data
To use interactive elements in an email campaign, determine what you want to achieve and the action you want your recipients to take. Then, design a simple element, monitor whether it furthers the goals of your campaign, and adjust accordingly.
6. Mobile Optimization
Forty-two percent of emails are opened on mobile devices. If you haven't optimized your emails for mobile devices, many users might find your emails challenging to read and navigate. This can lead to a poor customer experience and low opens, conversions, and click-through rates.
You can optimize your emails for mobile devices using a responsive email template that scales to different screen sizes. That way, your email will look good on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
Avoid long, dense texts in the email body. While they might read well on desktops, huge text blocks are hard to read on mobile devices - plus, you risk boring your audience. Instead, use short paragraphs, bullet points, and headings to break up text blocks and improve mobile readability.
7. A/B Testing
Email marketing A/B testing involves sending one variation of your campaign to one segment of your audience and another to a separate subset to establish which campaign produces the best results.
In the test, you can experiment with different subject lines, content layouts, calls-to-action (CTAs), visuals, tone, personalization, and more to improve email results.
Let's walk through a step-by-step guide to run an A/B test:
- Establish what you want to achieve with the A/B test. Example goals could be increasing open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, or engagement.
- Choose the variable to test, such as subject line, email content, CTA, layout, or send time or day.
- Create two email versions, changing your selected variables.
- Split your audience into equal groups and send the emails.
- Monitor performance and implement the winning variations.
8. Analytics and Metrics
Monitoring your campaign allows you to assess how effective your email marketing is. Some metrics to measure include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Overall ROI
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rate
- List growth rate
- Email forwarding/sharing rate
Most email marketing tools, such as HubSpot and ActiveCampaign, track all of the above metrics, helping you gain insights into how users interact with your email campaigns and make data-driven decisions about optimizing your email strategy.
Email Marketing Strategies To Get People To Open Your Emails and Make a Purchase
Email marketing is all about sending the right message to the right people at the right time. It's also about continuously improving and adapting your strategy to your subscribers' needs so you get the most out of your campaigns.
At Pyromaniac Digital, we can help you transform your email marketing strategy into a powerful, persuasive messaging approach that boosts open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Schedule a call today to learn how we can help you with your email marketing strategy.
