Email marketing techniques is an important part of any PR strategy. Email marketing techniques are the most cost-effective way to promote your products, communicate with your customers and reach your business goals.
Email marketing techniques continues to be an essential part of daily business and consumer communication. Email is also integral to the overall Internet experience as an email account (i.e. email address) is required to sign up to any form of online activity, including social networking sites, instant messaging and any other kind of account or presence on the Internet.
The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 293 billion in 2019, and is forecast to grow to over 347 billion by year-end 2023.
Email marketing techniques best practices; by Nabitali Victoria Bbosa
1. Optimize Email Messages for Mobile
More and more people are accessing their email through their mobile devices. Since the mobile revolution is in full swing, it’s important to formulate the best email marketing techniques for your business that lets you tap into mobile.
Optimizing your emails only for the desktop users may not be the best email marketing techniques. It means, you may never have your emails read.
If your business is not adopting the “mobile-first” mentality, you are not only losing the opportunity to build a relationship with your subscribers, but also the opportunity to increase your conversions and sales.
Keep in mind that a large percentage of your email subscribers will see your emails on their mobile device. So the effort you put into optimizing your emails will help you run the best email marketing techniques that get results. For example, Optimize your ‘From’ name by matching it with the expectations of your email subscribers.
2. Personalization
People love to feel special, and one of the best email marketing techniques to make them feel so is personalization. If your emails are generic and impersonal, you may be losing customers as effective personalization helps you improve your open rates and click-through rates. In short, creating the right kind of personalized emails can prove to be a game changer for your business.
A common way to personalize emails is to use the customer’s first name in the subject line and email copy. However, today you have the opportunity to access much more data that can help you improve your personalization tactics and go beyond the ‘first name’. Which can improve your chances of making your email campaign profitable.
If you want to create the best email marketing campaigns that help you get a return on your investment, you need to segment your email subscribers according to various data points.
For example, if you are running a local business and want to send out a special offer to your local customers, you may want to segregate them from the rest of the list. The more segmentation areas you focus on, the better it is.
3. Exclusive Email Content
Every successful brand knows the power of making customers feel exclusive. They do it in different ways, but it works all the time. By sending out exclusive, subscribers only content, your subscribers feel special.
Because they know anybody and everybody doesn’t have access to it. It makes them feel privileged. This can lead to more sales and growth in revenue. Also, this exclusivity can help you create a stronger relationship with your subscribers.
Just the way it is important to get people on your email list, it’s also important to make them stay there. If your subscribers don’t feel special enough or if they feel like they are not getting real value by being on your list, it won’t take them long to hit the unsubscribe button.
Sending exclusive content to your list doesn’t mean you have to spend hours or days creating unique content.
The content can be something as simple as a 3 page research report, but it gives your subscribers something they can learn from, they’ll be happy. So it’s more quality than quantity.
If you use an auto-responder to send out emails, then you can create a series of exclusive content and add it to your email sequence.
If you aren’t already leveraging this tactic, we have email marketing automation services that will help you do so. Remember, keeping your list from going cold is all about consistently delivering value. And you can count this technique as one of the best email marketing techniques to keep your subscribers loyal to you.
4. Subject Line Length
Your email subject line is like the heading of a newspaper article. If people don’t get enticed by it, they will not open and read your emails. While a lot of has been written about creating effective subject lines, you can always start with the basics, such as avoiding the “dead zone” when it comes to your subject line length. That is; subject lines that fall in the 60 to 70 characters bracket.
Research shows that subject lines that were longer than 70 characters lead to more clicks and subject lines that had 49 characters or less fetched a higher open rate, subject lines with ten characters or less have a close to 60% open rate.
So how long your subject line should be depends on what you want to gain from your campaign. If you want more of your subscribers to respond to your emails in terms of taking action, then go for a longer subject line as it helps get more clicks.
And if you want more people to simply open and read your email messages, then practice brevity and keep it short. The idea is to focus your subject line on your email marketing goals and try to stay out of the dead zone.
5. Give Away Something Valuable
Keeping your email audience engaged and connected gets easy when you give away something for free that is relevant to the interests of your subscribers, it is a great way to improve your overall relationship and get them to take action on future emails.
One of the best techniques to get more quality emails leads and at the same time improve your open rate is to leverage contests. Choose a giveaway that is appropriate and in demand in your niche so that your email subscribers find it appealing.
Give people a reason to share the details of your contest so that they are motivated to spread the word. For example, you could give your subscribers higher number of entries into the contest based on how much they shared info about it. Follow up with subscribers who have participated and encourage them to get more people to join the contest.
Initially, you may not see huge results from your contest, especially if your list is small. However, if you keep running relevant contests from time and time, you should be able to tap into the real power of giving away free stuff.
6. Address Inactive Subscribers
Your inactive subscribers are costing you, in terms of money you’re paying to your email service provider and also your profits. Studies show that on an average 63% subscribers on an email list are not active.
In order to wake them up and re-engage with them, you need to take the necessary steps. Leveraging your existing subscribers to increase sales has to be the best email marketing technique that doesn’t cost you extra money.
Once you have a list of inactive email subscribers, it’s time to segment them based on the data you have on file. You want to see if a certain group of subscribers are inactive or a percentage of them share commonalities.
For example, let’s say you find that subscribers who got on your list by downloading your free eBook are no longer opening your emails. This could be because you are not sending them relevant emails or they were expecting more.