Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to promote your business. By the end of 2019, the number of email users is projected to grow to 2.9 billion people.
To help you make the most of this digital marketing tactic, we’ve put together three simply but effective ways to improve your results:
1. Know your audience
Know exactly who your audience is and ensure that you send messages relevant to them. One of the worst mistakes you can make with your email marketing campaigns is to send the same message to every subscriber on your list. When someone realises that email wasn’t “for them”, they lose trust in your emails and unsubscribe or simply ignore all future emails.
So make sure you segment and personalise your emails to the preferences of individual subscribers. Every marketer knows how to personalise emails by inserting the first name tag. However, if you want your emails to sand out in the inbox you will need to bit more than that. Email segmentation is one of the best tactics to send personalised emails to your subscribers. Try segmenting by:
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- Classifying every contact into distinct groups such as buyer personas
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- User demographics such as age or location
- Onsite behaviour such as open and click activity
Then tailor your content so it’s relevant to each segment you have created. Using segmentation effectively means you can send targeted emails addressing a groups common interests.
2. Keep it short
In reality, people just don’t have the time to read pages and pages of content from a marketing email. People want to read one, short, effective and friendly email. Keep your emails simple by writing messages that are concise and clear. If someone likes what you are writing, they will head over to your website to read more, which is the main objective of any email marketing campaign.
Keeping it short doesn’t mean monolithic blocks of text though. Remember to
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- Visually break up the text into short paragraphs of just two or three sentences
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- Use bullets or numbers where appropriate
- Make sure your content is either helpful, valuable or informative. If it’s not don’t hit send.
3. Be mobile-friendly
Over 51% of email is opened on mobile devices, and this number will only surge as more and more people use mobile devices. This makes it imperative that your emails are mobile-friendly. Before you schedule your emails, ensure your design looks as good on mobile as it does on a desktop.
This can easily be achieved via test emails. If your emails look strange on mobile devices, then customers aren’t going to save them to read on a desktop. Instead, they will just ignore or delete them. Ensure your emails look professional by:
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- Incorporating plenty of white space so you don’t overwhelm the reader
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- Make sure the text is large enough to read on a small screen (at least 16px)
- Using a CTA button instead of a text link for your main call-to-action
Once you have got these basics working you can really start growing your list. Offer easy email sign up opportunities at every customer touch point and only ask for the information you plan to use straight away. The fewer fields you ask for initially the better. Remember to keep your emails fresh by linking out to different types of content including blog posts, landing pages and videos to keep down those dreaded unsubscribes.
GDPR is coming
Finally, you can’t talk about email marketing this month without talking about the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The GDPR is coming on 25 May and represents the most substantial change in data protection regulation in the past 20 years. The thing to keep in mind is that GDPR is your opportunity to send better emails and get better results from your email marketing campaigns. Make sure you have updated the privacy policy on your website and have an opt-in from every contact in your database by 25 May 2018.
If you need help with GDPR or you’re interested in boosting your marketing, then why not get in touch with us today to see how we can help?
