As the year ends, many businesses scramble to re-invent their email marketing strategies and refresh their campaigns. It’s a challenging task and one that demands a lot of thought and preparation.
Whether you’re an independent brand or a part of a large business, you’ll want to optimize your email marketing efforts to give you the best chance of success.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of the most effective tips and tricks for emailing your customers to increase engagement and convert more leads into paying customers. So, read on to learn more.
1. Personalize Everything
You’ve been sending regular mailers for years, so it’s about time you started using your big, fancy email to promote your business. You’ve got a unique opportunity to make an impression on your subscribers and turn them into fans. And what’s the best way to keep people interested? By personalizing your messages.
Personalized messages make the recipient feel like they’re receiving a special message just for them. So if you’re wondering why subject lines in email marketing seem to be going out of style, it’s probably because they work. Your emails are more likely to be opened and read if the subject line is personalized.
You can easily use tools like HubSpot Email to create personalized campaign subject lines. Just think about all the personalization you would do for a letter or package — it’s the same basic principle but applied to emails. And don’t worry. You don’t need to run out and buy a new shirt to make your emails more personalized. You can use tools like TinyLetter to make it super simple to add a personalized greeting to your emails. They even have a free version that allows you to customize the greeting, which is more than enough for most businesses.
2. Optimize For Mobile
This point may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many companies still don’t bother with mobile responsiveness when creating emails. You’ll want to ensure that your emails look good on all devices, and if you use a tool like Litmus to check for mobile email readability, you can easily see what aspects of your design might need work. For example, if the font size is too small, your message won’t be easily read on a mobile device. If your budget allows, you can always hire a web design firm to tackle this task.
However, if you want to improve your design skills, you can use a tool like MailChimp to help you achieve the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality.
3. Be Genuine
People are more likely to trust strangers than they are friends or acquaintances, which means that your email list probably consists of a mix of both. This is why you need always to be genuine when contacting your subscribers. They won’t necessarily want to hear from a stranger, but they might be inspired by your offer and feel that you’re the kind of person they can trust.
Even if you’ve never met the subscriber, you’ve got a relationship because you’ve been in contact. So, you need to make sure you act in a way that is consistent with your brand. When you’re being genuine, you’ll probably seem like a bigger threat to the competition, and that’s not a bad thing. After all, you’re competing for the same audience, so you must ensure you’re delivering on the promises you make in your email marketing.
4. Always Be Proactive
You’ve got a list of subscribers who are interested in what you have to offer. Now, you need to make sure you stay in front of them. People hate being bored, and you don’t want to lose a single subscriber, so you must ensure you keep up with the excitement. What does this mean? It means you need to be proactive. You need to communicate with your subscribers regularly and let them know you’re still interested in their company even though they haven’t heard from you in a while.
You should do this through email marketing. If you use marketing automation or a drip campaign, you’ll be able to follow up with new content and offers tailored to each subscriber’s interests. You can implement this strategy without spending a huge amount of money, giving you the best chance of keeping your audience engaged.
If you’ve been putting off sending a letter or package to your customers because you don’t have the time, you can use this opportunity to engage with them. You can use a tool like Hello Bar to build a mini-website to enhance their experience on your behalf. If you run a hotel or restaurant, you can use Fiverr to find a virtual assistant to help you manage your social media accounts, design websites, or create graphical materials to promote your business.
5. Use Multi-channel Marketing
You may believe that your customers just see your website and make a purchase from there. But, if you use a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll see that people often discover your product or service through other methods. These could include social media or email marketing.
You can use online marketing to spread the word about your business, and that’s what it’s all about. You may not always have the best website, but that’s no reason not to use the internet to your advantage. If you want to be successful in the future, you need to find a way to communicate with your audience wherever they are.
For example, if someone visits your blog and ultimately decides to purchase your product or service, you’ve got an opportunity to follow up with them via email to ensure they make a purchase. You can also use email to send news and updates to your customers, so they don’t forget about you. This way, you’re not limited to one channel.
6. Measure The Results Of Your Email Marketing Efforts
You’ve got a new product or service and want to promote it. Or, you’ve just finished a new email campaign and want to see how effectively it got the word out. Whatever the case, you need to measure the results of your marketing efforts.
You can use tools like Google Analytics or Hootsuite to track the performance of your different campaigns, social media accounts, and websites. With this information, you’ll be able to determine which approach worked best and which methods you can use to re-engage with your audience.
If you want to be successful in the future, you need to figure out a way to measure the results of your email marketing efforts to determine how much impact you’ve had on your industry.
7. Re-engage With Your Audience
Now, you’ve got a healthy number of subscribers who liked what you said and are interested in what you offer. You can use this opportunity to re-engage with your audience and see what they’re up to. You can send them a weekly email with content that’s relevant to what they’re looking for, or you can develop a longer-term plan to have live chat sessions, webinars, or virtual assistant phone calls to further engage with your audience.
You can also take this opportunity to grow your audience by inviting people to join your email list. You’ll have better luck getting people to subscribe if you’ve already connected with them. So, if you’ve been putting off sending a letter or package, this is the perfect opportunity to do so.
8. Automate Certain Tasks
You’ve a business to run and a lot on your plate, so why should you manually check and double-check your emails before sending off a campaign? You can use tools like HubSpot to automate certain tasks so you can focus on growing your business. If you use HubSpot, you can set up email templates that can be saved and used repeatedly. This makes creating new emails quick and simple. Plus, you can track all the open, hit, and unsubscribe rates for every email you send to ensure you keep your customers informed and engaged.
You may also want to use MailChimp to create and send emails on your behalf. With MailChimp, you can create an email group you can contribute, send regular emails about relevant topics, and track the performance of every campaign you run. With the help of tools like this, you don’t need to be technical and can easily keep up with the ever-changing world of email marketing.
9. Make It Easy For Your Readers To Find Useful Information
If you want your readers to stay engaged and interested in your content, you must ensure they can easily find the information they’re looking for. You do this by creating easy-to-follow, user-friendly pages packed with useful information. Designing these pages requires a bit of skill but can be a lot of fun. When designing a new page, you want to keep the reader in mind and create something they’ll value and appreciate.
10. Avoid Giving Too Much Away For Free
While it’s great to provide value to your readers and offer them something worth what they paid for, you don’t want to give away the whole game for free. Remember, your product is worth what they paid for it. This means you should avoid giving your content away for free unless it’s worth something. However, you can provide limited access to certain pages or content for free. For example, you can provide a limited-time coupon for a specific product that’ll only work for a limited time. Another option is to provide a free trial or unlock the content for a limited time, after which the reader will be asked to pay.
Update Your Email Marketing Skills
Thanks to social media, email marketing has become more relevant than ever before. With platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can gain an understanding of what your customers want and need, as well as keep in touch with previous clients and potential new partners. Furthermore, thanks to the power of social media, your marketing strategy can adjust and change as needed, adapting to new methods and techniques as they emerge. However, at this point in history, the basics of effective email marketing remain the same. By following the tips above, you’ll be able to set up a system that’ll be quite useful for your endeavors.
