Despite being one of the oldest forms of digital marketing methods, email, even today, delivers the best return on investment. According to Forbes, email marketing is among the most cost-effective. However, to get lucrative returns, marketers need to ensure they send emails to highly-targeted audiences containing content of high interest, presented compellingly. Some of the biggest challenges include making emails stand out in the clutter of a typical overcrowded Inbox, ensuring the emails don’t end up in the spam folder, and recipients opening the email but not clicking through. Check some of the handy tips for email marketers to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns. Here are some tasks to perform while developing a startup marketing plan:
Avoid Buying Email Addresses
Acquiring email addresses to feed your marketing campaign can be a challenge in the early days of your business because not too many people have subscribed to your newsletter. It can be hard to resist the temptation of buying email addresses in bulk to try to get your marketing campaign off the ground quickly. However, such exercises represent a waste of time, effort, and money because these email addresses usually do not fit your target profile, and you do not know their interest levels because they did not subscribe to you. Most likely, the recipients will ignore the emails, and importantly, you will violate General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that protects people from unsolicited emails.
Have a GDPR-Compliant Opt-In Process
If your email marketing campaign targets people in Europe, you must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) formulated to protect the personal data of internet users. You cannot have the opt-in checkbox pre-checked if you encourage users to visit your website page that solicits personal information to enable them to receive updates and special offers. Instead, users should have the opportunity to opt to receive the email newsletter if they wish. While this rule can make subscriber acquisition difficult, it can improve your open and click through rates because you will send your email newsletter only to the people who have expressed interest in receiving communication from you.
Respond Promptly to Prospect Emails
When an email recipient sends you, an email expressing interest in your products or seeking clarification, you can improve your chances of converting them by responding promptly, preferably the same day or at least within 24 hours. You will get better results because of better top-of-the-mind recall, and customers will appreciate your promptness. A quick reply also allows you to boost brand awareness and set customer expectations. You must make it easy for recipients to reply to your emails. You must remember to keep your Inbox clean since too many emails in it can force you to repair outlook periodically.
Make the Email Sender a Real Person, Not a Faceless Company
Many marketers make the mistake of using the company name as the email sender. However, they will invariably get better results if they use a name of a person along with the name of the company. For example, if the email sender is “Rebecca Brown@ ABC Corporation”, you will get a better open and click through rate than if you had used only “ABC Corporation” as the sender name. According to studies, most people trust personalized senders more than generic ones. They assume emails from a person are better than those from a faceless organization.
Configure the Preview Text
Some of the most popular email clients like Outlook, Gmail, and the iPhone Mail app display the first few lines of your email along with the subject line. The number of words displayed depends on both the user setting and the email client. The email client will pull the text automatically from the email body if you do not configure the preview text. Apart from looking messy, it also represents a wasted opportunity of engaging your target audience. Ideally, you should restrict the preview to 50 characters and provide a crisp synopsis of your communication.
Craft Compelling Subject Lines
It is only by making the subject lines compelling you can ensure they catch the attention of recipients. Some of the most effective ways of ensuring recipients notice and click on your emails are to make the subject line clear, and comprehensible, restrict the length to less than 50 characters to prevent truncating, and use language intended to create excitement among the recipients. Further, you should try to create a sense of urgency and include an exclusive offer like a discount or a freebie. It is a good policy to avoid spam triggers like ‘Save”, “Quote”, “Cash”, etc. Personalizing the subject line with the name of the recipient can help to boost open rates, however, you should do it sparingly to avoid being intrusive or repetitive.
Make Your Emails Crisp and Concise
With hundreds of emails lying unopened in a user’s Inbox, you will not want to trouble users fighting a shortage of time with long-winded emails. Users in a hurry, often accessing their emails using smartphones on the go can be notoriously impatient and will abandon an email if it is not short and comes to the point immediately. Moreover, long emails can trigger spam filters. It is best to compose the email as if you were having a conversation with the reader. If you must include a lot of details, you should try to break up the content into multiple paragraphs, each with a heading to make it easier to skim and read.
Ensure You Include a Powerful CTA
Getting recipients to notice your email is an achievement but getting them to act on it is another thing altogether. You can increase your conversion rate by including a powerful call-to-action button. Without a compelling CTA, even the best emails may remain unproductive. The trick to boosting your response rate is placing the CTA button in a place that readers cannot miss. You also need to pay attention to the design of the CTA button and the landing page the user will visit after clicking on it.
Conclusion
Even though email marketing is relatively easy and inexpensive, you must keep monitoring the performance of your email campaigns, especially the open, click through, and conversion rates, to make your campaigns succeed.
