Email is one of the few communication and marketing channels whose significance remained intact despite the fast development of social networks.
In contrast, the amount of sent and received emails keeps rising every year, hitting a 281 billion mark in 2018. That number is expected to reach approximately 350 billion by 2023.
Reasons to contain email marketing in your digital marketing services are many. 58% of people claim that the first thing they do in the morning is check their email. Most significantly, the return on investment (ROI) that you get with email campaigns is enormous compared to any other digital channel, as it stands at about $44 per $1 invested.
Furthermore, the order value on an average of emails is as a minimum 3X higher than the order values created by social media campaigns using business development technology as a tool for boosting revenue.
Now, this data makes one thing thoroughly clear – that email marketing stands way above most other digital marketing channels while it comes to generating revenue, and so it remains in a league of its own.
However, this ROI cannot be achieved without a cautious and knowledgeable approach to your campaigns. Here are a few tricks you could employ to leverage the full power of this channel, plus maximize your income.
Grow an engaged and healthy list.
Growing a healthy list of engaged subscribers takes effort, however, it also pays long-standing dividends for your brand. This is since subscribers who are more engaged are more likely to purchase from you.
Here is how you construct an engaged email list.
- Make signing up suitable – If you want to inspire people to sign up, make the procedure easy for them. You also have to offer them an abundance of opportunities to do so. Create simple signup forms plus strategically place them all through your website in important pages – for example your blog page, homepage, and contact us page.
- Data is everything – Collecting the correct data is vital to driving email marketing profits. Add fields to your signup forms to ask for info outside of a person’s name and email address. However, avoid adding too many fields, as this can reduce your signups.
- Permission is vital – Always use the double-opt-in technique of confirmation. Email people and ask them to verify their subscription. This keeps your list healthy plus prevents invalid contacts from being added to your list.
- Track engagement – Keep an eye on your open rates, exchange rates, and click-to-open rates. With this method, you can instantly determine when one region of engagement requires some work.
- Clean your list – Check your list on a regular basis and delete any invalid emails. If you have a noteworthy number of inactive subscribers, send them a re-engagement email.
The importance of personalization
Email is a good tool to nurture prospective buyers in a more personal way to avoid sending an impersonal and bland message. Most people don’t like to read a long and stiff email that is filled with corporate information.
An email that sounds like it comes directly from an actual person in the company and does not look like a brochure would help to lift conversion rates.
Try to encourage replies and start a discussion via email with your clientele, making it as personal as possible. Brand personalization is a method to psychologically connect with your potential clientele, make them feel special, and show to the recipients that you are not somebody far beyond reach. Uniqueness triggers people’s attention and this is why personalization is very effective in your email campaigns.
Speaking of relevance, you could also personalize your emails to make them more appropriate to individual subscribers.
You could start with something as simple as adding recipients’ first names in your email greeting in place of a generic “Hey there!”
Just be certain to test your emails to avoid addressing subscribers with the wrong name.
You could set up automated behavioral trigger emails If you want to take your personalization game to the next level. For example, if somebody purchases on your site, you could send a follow-up email with associated items that complement their buy.
Personalization increases email click-through rates by an average of 14% – plus conversions by 10%. So if you want to increase the ROI of your emails, personalization is a great choice!
Segment Your Subscribers
Segmenting your email lists speaks more straight and wisely to your users. It provides them with the right info at the correct moment.
If you do it accurately, the results will be better. In their study about the power of segmentation for the marketing campaign, Optimove found out that target groups by up to 150 clientele had at least $1.90 uplift per client. The groups of 1,500+ had a boost of $0.90 at the most. This shows that the lesser the group the campaign targeted, the bigger the range of potential campaign outcomes.
Businesses that use email segmentation experienced 24% higher sales according to Lyris’s yearly Email Optimizer Report. Subscribers want to receive pertinent content to their likes and dislikes – as it creates a seamless client experience. Taking this into consideration, it is vital to correctly segment your lists to maximize your engagement.
Some quick and easy segmentation strategy to help you in the procedure:
- Segmentation on demographic data – One of the vital ways you can segment your list is to do it through demographic data (gender, income level, age, location, company position, etc.). If you are a clothing seller, knowing the gender of your clientele will be a piece of vital information. On the other hand, if you are a B2B software developer, demographics – for example company position – would be of great value.
- Segmentation on email engagement – This might sound basic, but it truthfully has a huge impact on the general results. The main metrics here are the open rate plus the click-through rate. Using this kind of segmentation, you can select active vs. inactive users (ex. someone that has not opened your email in 90 days). After creating this segment, you could target your inactive users by crafting a particular re-engaging campaign.
- Segmentation on precedent purchase – This is another simple yet effective way to optimize your email targeting. You can start by sending recommendations for similar purchases these users have made. Let us say somebody has bought a hair product from your site. You can send them an email about their product adding urgency by saying it may run out.
- Segmentation on the location in the sales funnel – A precious way to customize your messaging is to segment your users through where they are in the sales funnel. The point is, you cannot target those users at the bottom of the funnel through the same messaging as those who are at the top. If they are at the bottom – a group of brand-new subscribers – you must send more generalized messages presenting a range of products or features. Though, if they’ve already signed up and have already interacted with your content you could use that information, determine what they are interested in – plus target them more particularly.
Smart Copywriting and Engaging Subject Lines
The enormous amount of emails sent and received every day means that our inboxes are buried with messages we will never even notice.
Thus, it is vital to grab people’s attention in the very first moment. The finest way to do this is by coming up with an attractive subject line that will stand out among all the others, as 35% of recipients select which emails to open based on this issue alone.
This can’t be done without appropriate segmentation being carried out before. Subject lines should be modified according to the recipients’ demographics, activities and interests. The same goes for the content of the email, which must be short, on point, and using the pitch and language that will intrigue and engage the specific reader you are addressing.
Going a step further and personalizing the subject and content of the emails is a great idea. For example, Including the person’s first name in the subject is a good start. Remember that personalized emails drive 6 times more communications than non-personalized ones.
Once you get the recipient to open the email, you want them to focus on the content and message inside. Depending on the kind of campaign you’re deploying, some emails will have more text than others.
In text-heavy emails, it is important to focus on the language of the message. Readability is a vast factor affecting client engagement. When recipients have a hard time reading your message, they are less likely to click through to your offer or otherwise open another email from you in the future.
Try to use more conversational language in your emails to keep the reader occupied by pushing the narrative along.
While a brand uses more formal language, it could make the message feel strained and sometimes give the brand a robotic voice. Customers want to interact with humans, thus make sure you are talking to them in such a manner. Marketing messaging within emails must always focus on creating an engaging and unforgettable experience for recipients.
A/B tests your emails.
A/B testing could improve your conversion rates by 25%. This makes A/B testing a vital component of your email policy if your objective is to amplify your email marketing ROI.
Consider implementing these A/B tests for your next campaign.
- Subject line
○ Length -Test short subject lines plus lengthy subject lines. Use whichever gets the best response.
○ Offer – Test two offers and see which one generates more opens. You could try testing an offer for a discounted item and an offer for free item aimed at increasing the open rate.
- Content
○ Length – Do your subscribers choose long-form text-based content or do they like short content that is broken up through high-quality images? Test both and see which one gets superior engagement.
○ Content kind – Send newsletter-type content to one subset of subscribers plus send promotional content to another. You can moreover include video in your email marketing policy.
- Call to action (CTA)
○ Copy – Test using the general language for example “Download Here” against incentivizing language for example “Get This Helpful Ebook Now”.
○ Button vs Link – See which one gets more clicks: a button that stands out or a standard hypertext link.
- Cadence
○ Time – Test sending emails in the morning, afternoon, or at night to figure out what time your subscribers frequently open your email. Sending a message at just the righttime raises the probability of subscribers seeing your email as well as engaging with it.
○ Day – Send emails on the weekdays and the weekend to decide what exact day your subscribers are more likely to engage with your brand.
Conclusion
The most powerful way to find out what works best for your business is to constantly test your email campaigns. This would save you typos, bounces, errors, and other kinds of trouble that might have been prevented should you send out test emails prior to the official one going out.
Also, it’s significant to note that testing is not something you must do occasionally, rather you should test constantly on-the-go. Testing diverse variations of the same email campaign would give you plenty of info about how your subscribers reply. You will know what works well and what requires improvement in your next campaigns.
Having so much potential to contribute to development and achievement is what makes email marketing both a challenging as well as exciting procedure.
It is a great base for creating a well-planned strategy that will lead to creating higher sales – if performed the right way.
Putting a considerable amount of effort into communicating with your subscribers on their way to becoming trustworthy customers is what is going to put you in front of your competition.
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