Believe it or not, emails are still one of the best ways of reaching out to people. If reports and surveys are to be relied upon, marketing products and services via emails enhances the sales figures by a whopping 138 percent. This figure is actually substantial as compared to marketing campaigns initiated via other avenues. Therefore, it is imperative for every business to indulge into email marketing while keeping up with the newly devised concepts.
Why Email Marketing?
There is a definite reason why you should value email marketing. Your subscribers are hungry for newsletters, insights and specific hacks which are best released in the form of emails. While the metamorphic dotted line has finally been drawn, most of the subscribers are already primed to purchase your products and services. Individuals keep on checking their inbox and almost everybody trusts you and your vision.
The idea here is to keep up with this trust while making some serious profits. This is where email marketing comes right into the picture.
While there are many conjectures focused around this form of marketing, here are six of the most effective ideas for amplifying the results. These tips delve into the basics of email marketing while unearthing the hidden treasures for the marketers.
So let’s get started
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Focus on an Impactful Subject Line
Every marketing strategy or rather campaign emphasizes on an impactful initiation. When it comes to email marketing, this cardinal rule becomes all the more important. While creating an email, you must clearly focus on the heading or the subject line to be precise. Unless you opt for a strong subject, the email ends up in Spam or Trash as subscribers hardly have the time to read out the entire matter.
In this section, I will be summarizing a few ideas to optimize the subject lines— in order to resonate perfectly with the concerned individuals.
- Aim for Shorter Lines– When it comes to creating the perfect subject line, you shouldn’t invest in more than 6-10 words. Rambling isn’t the way to go as emails with shorter subject lines have the best open rates.
- Be Wise with the Words– Refrain from sales rhetoric and opt for something classier.
- Personalize– Bulk emails will never get you the desired profits and this is where a personalized approach can be of great help. If a subject line is carefully drafted for a company or a subscriber, the email is more likely to be opened. A survey suggests that personalized mails are opened 41.8 percent more than the general ones.
- Being Benefit Oriented– This is where efficient copywriters pitch in by creating subject lines with defined prospects. Do summarize the mail-opening benefits, associated perks and the gains while being original and definitely within the desired word limit.
- SHOUTING isn’t the Way– Typing everything in Caps is a strict no-no unless it is done occasionally. Typing words in caps feels more like shouting to the subscribers and this approach shouldn’t be used while drafting the subject line.
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Work on Call-to-Actions
From a marketing perspective, an email without a CTA is only an attractive showcase of your vocabulary. You must let your prospects or subscribers know what action you need them to take. CTAs are more like the subject lines— they should be short, clear, concise and still pretty descriptive.
The CTA must resonate and actually convince the readers— compelling them to click-through. Once you have distilled the CTA to its core benefits— you must curb the verbosity and look to added punchiness to the same. Apart from a typical written approach, you can also opt for time-sensitive offers— encouraging people to pitch in. FOMO is something which is still perfect for pulling in a sizeable audience.
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Leverage Emails (Mostly Transactional)
Here is a trick that most marketers are missing out on. Transactional mails are like receipts with definite offers and other form of CTAs. They help with cross-sell and upsell. Moreover, they have at least 4 times higher open rates as compared to other emails.
Many firms which are already leveraging these kind of mails are actually reverting back to the user with a definite call to action— dipped into a sumptuous sauce of time-specific offers. Transactional emails confirm a registration and even enlist the points which made the user register, in the first place. Once the recapitulation is initiated, these mails leverage the emotional quotient and reveal the offer— which can then be availed by clicking through or subscribing.
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Large Scale Personalization is Imperative
While personalizing the subject line comes in as an optional resort, the body needs to be customized— every single time. The best part is that personalized emails have higher open rates and even better click-throughs associated with them.
However, before we start discussing them, it is important to understand what personalized emails actually mean. These are user-specific mails which are customized according to the preferences, purchase history, location and even specific interests of the subscriber base.
Unlike the years gone by, email marketing strategy has evolved and the concept of personalization has also changed. Even though the emails are drafted according the specific interest levels, there are software in the market which can automate the mail sending process and sometimes even the entire campaign.
The only thing you need to do as a marketer is to gather information and specific data sets— corresponding to the subscriber. This info can then be fed into the servers and used for personalizing the emails.
To be clear, transactional mails work on the same principle of personalization. The response mail from the company is triggered by a specific action of the subscriber. This approach needs to be extrapolated in order to covert customers and appeal to them on a larger scale.
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Go Mobile
Here is a vital piece of information which suggests that almost 70 percent of daily emails are read over a mobile interface. Marketers should therefore target the smartphone audience or rather the millennials, often via a dedicated approach. Firstly, the concerned emails need to be responsive i.e. they should look good even on mobiles.
Next, you should look to reduce the length of the emails as a reader logging in via the smartphone won’t be willing to read a lot of text. The next step for marketers should be to root their smartphones for unlocking the true potential of the device. This allows them to install specific applications which can then help with the email marketing campaign.
As a marketer, you need to be on the move and willing to work at all times. A rooted handset can therefore be a great resource to have. Apart from this technological input, marketers must look to invest in the sentiments associated with a marketing strategy. While the iOS and android root guide helps with the technical aspects, here are some of the important tips for revamping the email marketing strategy, targeting a typical smartphone:
- Trim the Text
- Always Include a CTA
- Fit in Images
There are many email marketing platforms which offer a sneak peek of the way a specific mail looks on the mobile interface.
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Opt for a Split Test
While each one of these tips can be useful towards catering to a specific audience base, it all pans down to split testing for refining the marketing campaign. The idea here is to segregate the entire audience base into smaller pockets and bombarding them with specific campaigns. Depending upon the reception of each campaign, you can opt for the most popular strategy.
The idea here is to change one variable at any given time as experimenting way too much can negatively impact the performances. You can either change the subject line, corresponding CTA, headlines, images and even the layout— targeting large-scale split testing.
Bottom Line
Email marketing is resourceful but needs to be pushed out of the oblivion in order to make a difference. These six strategies can be extremely useful for those marketers who are willing to delve into the world of emails while reaching out to their respective subscriber base.