Contrary to what you might have heard, or perhaps wished, email’s not dead. There’s even a website to prove it!
We check our devices an average of 46 times a day, and nearly 34% of us check our email around the clock. Despite the rise of social media, and messaging apps like Slack, email appears to be here to stay.
Which means email marketing is too.
With that in mind, let’s review five practical tips to help you conjure up some email marketing magic, muscle, and/or mojo.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Make It Personal
Dear valued reader,
I hope you are enjoying this blog post.
Sincerely, <auto-reply, do not respond>.
Generally speaking, people like to be treated as individual, dignified human beings with a name. Calling someone Friend, Valued Customer, Current Resident — or heaven forbid Robbie with an ‘IE’ at the end — is not a good start toward making a sale.
As much as you’re able, personalize your emails, and make sure they’re coming from a fellow human being. This isn’t just a matter of getting a good greeting in place. One study found that personalized emails delivered six times higher transaction rates.
Of course addressing someone by name will only accomplish so much. Part and parcel of personalization is delivering relevant content.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Make It Segmented
The best way to boost your open and click rates is to segment your list. Sure, it’s a time-consuming, painstaking process, but the positive effects of segmentation are profound. Mail Chimp found that segmented email campaigns garnered nearly 59% higher click rates across the board.
People prefer emails featuring relevant information that applies to them — go figure!
It’s well worth the effort to send different emails to different people based on what they’d be likeliest to respond to. Whether you decide to divvy up your list based on preferences, previous interactions, geography, purchase behavior, demographics, or any other number of criteria is up to you. The important thing is to not just settle for the same one-size-fits-all blast to everybody.
That’s a recipe for SPAM, and a depressing onslaught of unsubscribes. Segment and curate your lists to avoid the deletion, general soul depletion blues.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Make it Simple, and Interesting!
Emails should be punchy, light reading. And interesting for crying out loud!
Cut out needless words. Delete superfluous graphics. Remove anything in your email that might prevent the recipient from doing the main thing you want them to do.
Speaking of which, every email should have a clear call to action. Why are you sending the email? What do you want the recipients to do?
Make your call to action the focal point of the email, and make it seamless for your audience to click through.
Click here and here if you need some inbox inspiration.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Make the Subject Sizzle
If you want your email to get opened, your subject line should sizzle. Make it scintillating!
But be judicious with the punctuation, as special characters have been known to trigger spam alerts. Writing zesty subject lines is tricky, and can be a moving target, so be sure to bone up on best practices if you’re rusty. Or in a subject writing rut.
Be sure to have other eyeballs review your subject line before hitting send. Ideally, you should send a handful of potential subject lines to a group of folks in your office, and see which garners the most votes.
Subject lines have a tendency to fly below the radar of the proofing process and get inserted at the last second. That’s asking for trouble.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Make It Into a Newsletter
Newsletters are hot right now. Real hot.
Ride the wave!
People enjoy consuming news in the form of a curated, tidy e-newsletter with links to the juiciest content you have to offer. We’ve seen this shift firsthand in our own brands, pretty much across the board.
In a single year, we saw a jump from 31% to 38% of Commercial Carrier Journal readers selecting ‘emailed daily news’ as their primary news source. We’ve noticed a similar trend in our other publications like Equipment World and Overdrive.
Newsletters can be a great way to build your email list. Then you can embark upon the fun task of figuring just how much those subscribers are worth.
[hr style=”3″ margin=”40px 0px 40px 0px”]
Vive Le Email
People keep trying to kill email. Many have tried, all, so far, have failed. Why? A huge number of us are simply unabashed, can’t stop/won’t stop email junkies. When it comes to Gmail, Outlook — and I suppose to a slightly lesser extent Yahoo and AOL — we keep saying in so many words: “I can’t quit you.”
Until this changes, email marketing will continue to be an indispensable tool in every marketer’s belt.
[acf field=”cta_10″ post_id=”option”]