The Top 8 Email Marketing Tips To Boost Your Business
Email marketing can be an incredibly powerful way to promote your business and get new customers, but only if you know what you’re doing. Otherwise, all you’ll do is annoy people who won’t buy from you and send yourself into the dreaded junk mail folder in their inboxes. Every platform also has its own best practices, so if you are starting out on Shopify, for example, be sure to check out the best email marketing for Shopify. Nonetheless, the following eight email marketing tips will help you avoid most common problems across platforms and engage with customers in a meaningful way that helps them remember your company name and encourages them to buy from you again in the future.
8 Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Business
1) Keep Your Content Concise
A short but sweet email is far more likely to be read than one that runs on and on. Shoot for a 200-word or less length, and you should be fine. However, brevity doesn’t mean you have to write a terse email; with most people spending somewhere between four and eight hours each day reading emails, it’s fine if your email takes up a little bit of space in someone’s inbox. Just ensure there are clear call-to-actions throughout your message, including at least one prominently placed link where people can learn more about what you have to offer.
2) Focus on Getting Clicks, Not Opens
Once you have an email list of potential buyers, there’s no point in spending a lot of time focusing on getting people to open your emails. Instead, look at creating content that encourages people to click through. Even if only 1% of your list clicks through, it can lead to many new sales opportunities. And with autoresponders, you can send another message specifically crafted for your customers once they do click through and buy something from you. The key is relevance—you want customers who are likely to be interested in buying something from you when they see your sales email pop up in their inboxes or read their social media feeds. At the same time, emphasize how your customers can benefit from your product or service by highlighting the value that they’ll receive. It’s not always about selling—it’s about appealing to a person’s desire for something better, bigger, and different. Rather than focusing on what you want them to do (buy), emphasize what they get when they do it (the benefits).
3) Optimise for Mobile Devices
Recent surveys prove that most of all emails are opened on a mobile device. Smartphone ownership is expected to rise rapidly in 2014 and beyond. If you haven’t optimized your emails for viewing on mobile devices, your response rates could drop. So it’s critical that you check how your email appears on smartphones, including tablet devices such as iPads, before sending any mass email marketing campaigns. Some free tools include Mail Chimp’s responsive template or Apple Mail’s preview pane.
4) Include Images in Your Emails
Visuals in email are 27x more likely to be seen than in text-only emails, so don’t forget those pictures and graphics. With most email clients now supporting images, there is no reason not to include them. But if your readers are using a text-only email client, or aren’t able to see your images for any other reason, you should also include some short text that describes what you want readers to focus on. This could be as simple as an alt tag on your image with a line like “learn more about our new product.”
5) Follow Up with Customers Who Don’t Open Your Emails
The challenge with email marketing is that it’s hard to know why your emails aren’t working for you. The reality is, that you could be making plenty of mistakes without realizing it. To help you figure out what needs improvement, send a follow-up email to those who didn’t open your message and ask them why they haven’t opened your messages. For example, Hi [Name], We noticed you didn’t open our last email, so we wanted to check in and see if there was anything we can do differently? An email like this will also show your key clients that you value their feedback.
6) Send Emails at The Right Time
Many email marketing best practices focus on writing and delivering great content, which is important—but it’s not all there is to it. Timing is another crucial aspect of successful email marketing. Sending your emails at an off-hour, such as late in the evening or early in the morning, could mean you’re out of touch with your audience when they are most engaged. On the other hand, if you send them too close together they may not get read or looked at because recipients have grown tired of seeing your emails in their inboxes. Measure your open rates and see what time frame generates higher engagement for you and base future campaigns around that information.
7) Ask for Permission
If you’re using email marketing in an attempt to rekindle an old relationship, don’t try and force a connection. Send an email asking your subscriber what he or she would like from you. Not only will that be a more effective way of getting someone’s attention, but it will also help you develop content and information based on their needs rather than your own. Think about how often people receive newsletters they never asked for and are instantly turned off by it—don’t let that happen to you. If readers have requested emails from you, give them what they want.
8) Get Personal
People aren’t likely to click on your email if they don’t think you know them personally, so start by making a list of your contacts and categorizing them into groups. Are there people who fall into several categories? In that case, choose a few important characteristics as your main ways of sorting them (e.g., geography or relationship). The more personal you can make an email feel, while still keeping it businesslike, the more effective it will be at encouraging people to open and read your messages. People are more likely to respond positively when they have reason to believe you know something about them—so go ahead and use those clues.
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.
