Email marketing is a necessary aspect of your marketing strategy, but how do you make sure to use it effectively? With billions of emails being sent every day, it can be incredibly difficult to cut through the noise and make your newsletters stand out in your subscribers’ inbox. Even after you have put together an extensive subscribers list, so many users may not even open your emails, let alone click on any of the content, which can become quite frustrating. Here are some of our top email marketing tips and tricks or do’s and don’ts that will help you get the engagement you’re looking for and steer you away from common pitfalls!
Do…
Personalise your emails
Personalisation is always more likely to increase your open and click rate, making your newsletters stand out from the faceless, generic emails most of us receive every day! This is one of the best email marketing tips for small businesses in particular, as it will be much easier for you to create that personal relationship with your subscribers. Firstly, think about the contact name your emails are coming from. Instead of using info@businessname.co.uk, try to use a person’s name who is behind the message to make it more approachable and friendly. Personalising your offering to your customers is another great way to ensure they engage with your emails. One of the approaches is to split them into segments based on their purchasing habits and demographic. This way, you can slightly alter your newsletters to suit each customer group, which means they are more likely to find what they are looking for in your emails.
Use testimonials
84% of consumers trust reviews as much as they would trust a personal recommendation, therefore, testimonials are a powerful marketing tool that shouldn’t be overlooked. You can include customer reviews and feedback in your newsletters to make your products and services look more credible to people who haven’t tried them yet. You should also use your email marketing to collect testimonials from your customers. You can set these to go out a week after a purchase or after a certain subscription period, for example. Encouraging your customers to leave a review shows that you care about their opinion and experience, and it also gives you a chance to resolve any issues they may not have mentioned otherwise.
Keep it concise
Think about the amount of emails your audience receives every day – they are unlikely to read a long-winded email and would rather skim it to see if it’s relevant to them. So how can you get to the point as quickly as possible, provide them with the product or service they might be looking for, or offer interesting or useful information they can easily access in a matter of minutes, even seconds? This should be your main focus when planning your next newsletter. If you feel you can’t condense your content any further, add paragraph breaks, insert photos and videos and make your email more interactive than a big block of text, as this will help keep your audience’s attention until the end. Try to include a clear call to action in every email to let your audience know what you’d like them to do, whether it’s to check out your website, buy a product, leave a review etc.
Think about design
This might seem like an obvious one, but it’s still important to reiterate that your emails are a chance for you to reinforce and further your branding, while creating a pleasant user experience. Don’t just focus on emails that look nice, think about maintaining all the elements of your brand from colours to fonts and logo, so people can instantly recognise your newsletters. Make sure it’s easy for your audience to access the information, products and services they need and design your emails to easily direct them to where you want them to click.
Optimise your emails
Just like your website, your emails should be optimised for mobile, too. Make sure that the images and text look great in mobile format and that your newsletter remains streamlined and easy to read and access, without having to zoom in and out. Another important consideration is to make sure your content isn’t too large and loads quickly enough on mobile as well as a computer screen. A relatively recent technology that could affect the way you approach your marketing strategy is voice search. It’s changing the input in search engines, so if you have altered your blogs and landing pages to match it, try to use similar language in your email newsletters.
Monitor performance
The best way to learn what works and what doesn’t work for your audience is to monitor your email performance. Which links, subject lines, designs perform the best? For which demographic? Which email triggered the most amount of people to unsubscribe? Which one converted clicks into sales? Keep an eye on common trends and implement what you’ve learned for future newsletters.
You can also send two different versions of the same email to a small number of your subscribers, splitting them into groups A and B, and monitor the initial response before rolling out the more successful version to the rest of your audience. Whichever way you choose to do it, analysing your audience’s response will help you improve your email performance in the future.
Don’t…
Buy email lists
Among our top email marketing tips and tricks is avoid buying subscriber lists! It might be tempting to do this initially, especially when your audience is small, but there are much more fruitful ways to spend your money than buying a database. This is because the people behind these email addresses didn’t opt-in to receive your content and it is unlikely that they’ll be engaging with your emails. Instead, it’s better to focus on a smaller list of engaged audience and see how you can cater to their needs.
If you do want to increase your subscriber list, try adding an incentive such as a promo code or exclusive, free content when they sign up. That way, you can ensure the people who subscribe to you at least have an initial interest in your brand and are likely to engage more. Whether you choose to go with a special offer or not, it’s generally good practice to send an email within 24 hours of a new subscription as a way to welcome a new audience member and give them a taste of what they can expect from your newsletters.
Remember, if you find that a lot of your subscribers haven’t engaged with any your newsletters, there is no issue with removing them too, because, ideally you want the people on your list of subscribers to be genuinely interested in your content.
Make it difficult to unsubscribe
It could seem tempting to make the ‘unsubscribe’ option less obvious in your emails, especially, as you are in the early stages of growing your subscriber database, however, it’s likely to create a negative relationship with your audience instead of a positive one. Be sure to have an option to easily unsubscribe or amend subscription in every single one of your newsletters.
Use too many spam triggers
You may have heard that one of the email marketing tips and tricks is to use enticing subject lines that create a sense of urgency, prompting people to open the email. An over-use of trigger words, such as ‘save’, ‘act now’ etc can become quite tiresome, however, so be mindful and use them sparingly. Think whether these clickbait subject lines are necessary for your email and if you do use them, keep an eye on how your audience responds. Similarly, using their first name in every subject line can become too intrusive, so switch it up a little and avoid using pushy marketing techniques in every single newsletter.
Did you find our email marketing tips and tricks useful? We have plenty more to offer! As a full-service marketing agency, we can take a look at your current marketing strategy and offer tailored, expert advice for all areas to help achieve your business goals. Contact us today on hello@macmartin.co.uk or 01283 703626.
