1. Think of email marketing as a two-way conversation
Do you enjoy chatting with people at mixers who just go on and on about how great their business is going without asking anything about you? Or would you prefer hanging with people who ask about you and share valuable and interesting information based on your responses?
Email marketing follows the same principle. It’s not a place to brag about your business; instead, it’s an opportunity to provide useful, compelling content to your prospects and clients based on their interests. Think of it as a value exchange: you give readers important and interesting tips, stories and special offers in exchange for their time.
It’s also a place to show your personality. Be conversational with your reader instead of speaking in “marketing-ese” or in a dry “press release” tone. Send new opt-ins a welcome email that asks them to whitelist your email address, thanks them for subscribing and explains what they can expect to get from you in the future. Your emails should be written with openness and a friendly tone while remaining professional and aligned with your brand voice.
When you send engagingly written, valuable emails, your subscribers will be more likely to open and read them, which boosts your deliverability for the future.
2. Use authentic and transparent subject lines
Respect your readers’ intelligence; don’t try to trick them with deceptive subject lines. Click-baited opens will make your readers lose faith in you and will eventually lead them to stop opening your emails altogether, making your messages more likely to end up in the spam folder.
This doesn’t mean you should be boring. Tantalize the reader — but do it with clever copy.
Influencer Marketing Hub has 19 Tips for subject lines. Here are a few highlights:
- Keep it short. Keep your subject lines between 6-10 words for easiest readability.
- Make it personal. Swap generic greetings for personalized ones to better catch your readers’ attention.
- Offer a solution. An email subject line that offers tips or solutions to solve your audience’s problems will draw attention and be more appreciated.
- Build curiosity. Open-ended questions and clever subject lines open up a conversation and get you noticed by scanning readers.
More tips for Earning Opens:
- Use numbers (i.e., 5 tips to fill your seminar).
- Encourage action with a clear CTA (RSVP now for the seminar!).
- Include the occasional emoji.
Avoid using these spam content filter triggers:
- Sale
- Free
- Advertisement
- $$$$$
- ALL CAPS
- Excessive punctuation
- Too many emojis
3. Test, test, test
There’s always room to improve your email campaigns, and one of the best ways to do that is through continuous split testing — pitting two or more versions of your email message against each other to see which performs better.
This gives you valuable insight into the email campaign’s performance while allowing you to increase engagement, opt-ins, and conversions by improving the quality of your final product. It all comes down to learning what your market wants to see in their inbox and adapting.
Split test everything: send dates and times, subject lines and preheaders, email templates, design and body copy. Learn more about split testing in this article.
4. Segment emails based on client data
Your list is one of your most valuable assets, as it contains everything your contacts have told you about themselves since day one. Between behavioral and demographic information gained in your CRM, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of each contact’s engagement with your business. Use the data to segment your list and send tailored content to each group.
By separating your list into groups based on their interests, you open up the opportunity to personalize your email marketing and, in turn, significantly improve your email marketing results. In fact, Influencer Marketing Hub says, “74% of marketers attribute targeted personalization as the reason for increased customer engagement.”
Here are a few types of segmented emails you might send to your list:
- Send an email about a sale at your brick-and-mortar store to locals only.
- Send your top customers VIP sale offers and customer appreciation messages.
- Send cart abandoners and other hot leads special incentives to start shopping with you.
5. Optimize your thank you page
Take advantage of every opportunity to set the stage for future engagement with new email subscribers. Here are some ways to optimize your thank you page and increase the value of your opt-in process:
- Use a merge field to personalize your thank you message.
- Tell them how excited you are that they’ve joined your list and that you’re grateful they took the time to sign up.
- Give them a preview of the awesome content they’ll be receiving from you and the frequency with which they’ll receive it.
- Include social sharing buttons.
- Ask them to whitelist your sender address.
Utilizing these tips will help cultivate a more personal relationship between you and your customers, grabbing their attention without being invasive. It will also help build trust, assuring that your customers stick around and look forward to the emails they receive from you.
Have any more tips on how to improve email marketing results? Share them with us in the comments below.
