10 Tips To Improve Your E-mail Marketing in 2020

E-mail marketing is one of the most effective weapons in each digital business’ marketing arsenal. It converts leads, brings more revenue from existing customers, recovers abandoned carts, and upsells products. It provides you with loads of useful data that can be used to analyze performance and instantly improve your campaigns and see great results. Here are our ten tips to be successful in your e-mail marketing in 2020.  

 

So, how to take full advantage of the great potential that e-mail marketing has to offer? 

Have a Good, Healthy Mailing List

Do not buy e-mail addresses or just spam cold mails. If your business is new and you don’t already have a good solid list of subscribers there are many ways to populate it. Few ideas on how to do it: 

1. Run lead generation campaigns to subscribe qualified prospects to your list
2. Give something free (e-book, file, recipe, sample, advice, useful insights, etc)
3. Organize events (collect business cards, or have games requiring emails)
4. Post valuable content and have a subscription form on your blog
5. Add CTAs on more strategic places on your website, blog, LP
6. Encourage subscribers to share/forward your content
7. Create ‘Bonus’ Content (ask them for their contact details for the “bonus” info)
8. Organize a contest with a prize to win and email to apply
9. Host an online webinar

Having qualified and interested subscribers, gathered via a compliant opt-in process is the most important foundation of your e-mail marketing.

Write Clear, Attention-Grabbing Subject Lines

Your e-mails will end up in the mailboxes of your subscribers along with hundreds of other emails. The subject is the first thing each person sees – it even pops out on the notification tab of their mobile phones. If you manage to intrigue someone enough to get your e-mail opened you have won the first battle of the war! To do so:

1. Use emojis in your subject line
2. Implement urgency (for example – 24 hours left to act)
3. Use personalization – personal subject lines have higher open rates
4. Use numbers – subject lines that contain numbers have been proven to generate higher open rates than those that do not
5. Avoid spam trigger words – 69% of emails that are flagged as spam are flagged as such because of the email subject line
6. Don’t over-promise or mislead in your subject line and then under-deliver and disappoint in the email copy
7. A/B test subject lines – testing is the best way to know how your audience responds to different subject lines

Build Good Flows

Trying to convert someone right off the bat is never a good idea! From our experience email flows, consisting of 3 to 6 e-mails in a logical chain is the best way to present your products or services to your subscribers. Include valuable information in your emails, introduce everything in a gradual way, and don’t use hard CTA’s in your first couple of emails. Create separate flows for different segments and present personalized content for each. 

Use Segmentation

In order to send relevant and high-converting messages, you should segment your lists. There are many different ways to do so and it is very niche dependant on what type of segmentation you would need. For example, some of your users may only be interested in specific products or services that you offer, so you can segment them based on specific products they visited or bought  and then run personalized campaigns to them with custom messages, offers or promotions for them. Different ways to get the information you need for the segmentation:

1. Have users select their preferences in their user profile
2. Send reminder emails to your existing subscribers to complete their profile or ask about their preferences in an email campaign
3. Integrate your website and email client to track behavioral actions users do on your site and use it to send them personalized messages

You should segment your remarketing campaigns as well, and this is really powerful, as these campaigns will bring you the most revenue.

 

 

Find Your Optimal Send Times

Most email marketing platforms offer a dynamic send-time option based on the user time zone. While this is a must-use, you should experiment and find the best send times for your email campaigns. Analyze in which hours your users are most active on your website, check for the time when your previous campaigns had the best open rates, and based on that adapt and send your emails at the appropriate time for maximum engagement.

Have Clear Call-To-Actions

In order to achieve maximum results, you need to have clearly defined call-to-action on each email. This is done in the planning phase of your email campaigns – you should know exactly where you want to send your subscribers with each of your emails – to your blog, to a specific product page, to a promotions page, etc. An email should continue a conversation or interaction between a brand and a consumer, so think of the CTAs as the next step in your conversation and lead them onto the next step from the journey.

Be Very Careful With How Frequently You’re Sending Mails

No one likes to be bothered or spammed. Many people will unsubscribe from your list if they get too many emails too frequently. Your email client will have the “smart sending” option and you should configure it to the appropriate settings – for example, no subscriber that has received an email from you in the past 12 hours will get another one. Or if you want to send an announcement campaign to all subscribers you might want to remove that option to make sure everyone is notified regardless of other marketing emails they received recently.

Be Mindful Of Your E-Mail Design 

Design is a very important part of every step of the customer journey. It can attract your customers or repulse them. Try to keep everything consistent with your brand’s design guidelines so that people can always recognize your brand identity and style. 

Keeping your emails clean and being consistent with your design will make them stand out, however, some factors should be kept in mind. For example, a big challenge when designing emails will be Dark Mode. This setting will display content in high contrast using dark background colors. More and more users are starting to use dark mode on one or more of their devices. This could potentially mess up your designs, so always send a test email and open it from different devices and browsers to see how it looks. Some email platforms provide this info, but it is always best to check it yourself.

Use Cross-Integrations To Leverage Tools & Results

Email marketing, as it is a powerful tool, can be complemented by using additional methods to boost conversions and revenue. Integrating your email platform with your CRM can help your business to scale successfully. Sending SMS messages along with your emails can also increase user engagement and lead to more sales. 

For most of these functionalities, you won’t need a developer, as there are tools that handle integrations in a very friendly way. Such a tool is Zapier https://zapier.com/, where you can find tons of pre-made integrations, ready to use.

SMS marketing is something that deserves it’s own separate course, as it is a very powerful tool in e-commerce right now and it will only get better. Some of the leading email marketing platforms are already integrating SMS services, so this will remove the need for any cross-integrations and will keep all the data in one place!

Create Automated Remarketing and Re-engagement Campaigns

One of the secrets of email marketing is that a big part of it runs on autopilot, once you set things up correctly. Here is a list of the most commonly used email automations that you should definitely implement if you want to succeed in your email marketing efforts!

1. Welcome Series E-Mail Flows – here you can explain your business, products, mission, vision, and values, get to know your subscribers and let them get to know your brand
2. Customer Winback Flows – these are automated flows that will re-engage your old customers who were inactive for a given time period.
3. Post-Purchase Flows – You can use a customer thank-you message to upsell, gather reviews, or just engage your recent customers. People who recently made a purchase are more likely to interact with your brand!
4. Abandoned Cart Flows – This automation is a must for every e-commerce business! Most businesses only send one email and it usually comes from the website. Creating a specific flow with 2-3 emails in a sequence can increase your conversion rate x2 or more.