On average, email drives a return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel. Email marketing proves to be a pivotal tool to include in your marketing efforts. Whether you want to increase your brand awareness or build customer relationships, these tips will help you make the perfect delivery.
1. Creating a Buyer Persona
It’s critical to understand your audience before starting to develop email campaigns. It’s not helpful for your brand to build email campaigns just for the sake of pushing content. Creating a buyer persona allows you to understand who your perfect customer is. This is a person who engages with your content and completes a purchase with no frustrations or hesitation. Through this process, you can understand where this perfect person most likely lives, what they do for a living and how much money they make. You can then figure out their specific interests and what they might have in common with other potential customers.
For example, if you sell surfing gear, your ideal customer most likely lives near the ocean, is interested in fitness and is passionate about keeping plastic out of the sea. You can then use this persona to segment your audiences into closely related categories like those who live near coasts or travel a lot, those who like working out or trying new sports, and those who are into sustainability efforts or volunteering.
If you don’t have any information about your audience, it doesn’t hurt to ask! Sending a survey to an email list is a common practice and provides valuable information so you can send the right content to the right people. Many people appreciate this effort because no one wants to waste time reading an email they have no interest in.
Quick Tip: Survey your internal employees, especially the sales team, about their interactions with customers. You might be surprised to find something in common among customers or an untapped market.
2. Experimenting with Subject Lines
The first thing people will use to judge whether or not to even open the email is the subject line. You can use a few different tones for subject lines to capture attention. You can make it mysterious and suspenseful, like “You Have Two Choices.” Asking a question will also intrigue or excite someone, such as “Are you Ready for Summer?” This example is a great way to offer anything related to traveling, shopping, or even fixing an A/C. FOMO or “fear of missing out” can tell people that a sale is ending soon or a limited edition product is almost gone! It can be as simple as “Last Call” or “Don’t Miss Out!” If you’re launching an exciting new product or service, make that the subject line to alert potential customers immediately. Whichever approach you choose, don’t reuse the same subject line over and over again.
If you’d like to mix things up a bit, emojis are great for conveying emotion. Remember that different people interpret emojis differently, so it can be tricky to convey the same message. Plus, the emojis can appear as blank boxes if they have an outdated phone. It’s best to keep it to one or two emojis here and there.
Quick Tip: Subject lines with 50 characters or less result in 12% higher open rates and 75% higher click-through rates than emails with longer subject lines.
3. Taking Advantage of Keywords and Trends
Exploring Google Trends helps you ride the wave of what’s capturing people’s attention. You can gauge which keywords or trends are more likely to resonate with your audience than others. It can be as small as “sustainability” versus “eco-friendly” or deciding if it’s too early to push content about Halloween.
Another way to find out what keywords you might be missing is by questioning what customers ask about your brand or how they would describe your services. It’s obvious to you what they should be looking for or how to describe your company’s services, but put yourself in their shoes. Imagine opening a search engine and thinking about what to type to find your product or service.
4. Trying Out Testing and Resending
If you’ve already heard of A/B testing before, let us reiterate how important it is to test out different things. Many email marketers feel discouraged when they spend so much time on their email campaigns and the response is underwhelming. A/B testing allows you to experiment with small details until you find the best formula. You should test different subject lines, content, design elements, calls-to-action (CTAs) and even the delivery timing. It’s important to only test one thing at a time and in small batches to contacts you know will most likely engage.
It might be worth resending if you have an important email campaign and the open rates aren’t quite hitting the mark. Before resending, adjust the subject line and resend it on the fourth day. However, do not rely on this method for all of your email campaigns and don’t resend to unengaged contacts, or it could damage your email reputation.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Tell Your Story
It might not work for everyone, but a text-heavy email can be a great way to establish a relationship with your audience. Every brand has a story, but it’s been expected that emails should push out short content centered around your product or services. Nowadays, customers want to know more about the people and story behind the brand. They want to know who they’re supporting and why they should support you. Emails are the perfect medium to tell an engaging story without many other distractions.
The key to a successful text-heavy email is having a good hook to capture attention, using anchor texts to highlight specific points and including hyperlinks to break up the story. Don’t forget to include a CTA at the end so your reader has some direction after investing in your story.
Email marketing continues to evolve, and staying on top of best practices is essential to ensure you’re reaching customers and maintaining a strong sender reputation. If you need help launching email marketing, contact us to get started! You can also sign up for The UPSIDE monthly newsletter for more tips and industry news.