Before you read any further, here are three things you need to know.
- Email Marketing isn’t dead yet.
- It is more complicated than it looks.
- It works only when done right.
Dissect all successful email marketing campaigns and you’d always find a few commons that go into their making. In this article, we’ll discuss those very commons that help businesses upsell without turning off people.
Send Time Optimization
Time is an illusion, timing is an art. Your email marketing campaign could go south if the send time is wrong. How do you fix the perfect date and hour? Intuition? – No. Planning? – Yes! Below are some tips to send your emails.
- Best Days in a Month: The first two weeks in a month are great for higher open and click rates. The best days include 5th, 7th and 12th in that order. A possible reason could be paydays. The beginning of the month is when people are more likely to have money and spend it, too.
- Best Days in a Week: Mondays are worst and weekends are no better. Possible reasons include weekend hangovers and Monday morning blues. As such, mid-weeks seem like a safe bet. Schedule your emails on Thursdays or Tuesday or Wednesday for maximum impact.
- Daytime vs. Nighttime: Always schedule emails during the daytime. This is the time when your target audience is awake and available to read your message. After-hour emails, on the other hand, are perceived as overzealous marketing attempts and ignored.
- Best Time of the Day: Early mornings and work breaks are the best time slot during the day. 8 am mails contribute to high open rates, 5 pm to high click rates and 4 pm to high order rates. This apart, 10 am and 1 pm mails also perform well.
“Mid-Month, Mid-Week, Mid-Day – The Rule Is Pretty Simple!”
Target Audience Analysis
Email marketing campaigns often fail because the messages can’t reach the right people. It’s important to use an email verifier to maintain a strong email list and send your messages to the right email leads.. To that end, it is important that businesses understand their target audience like the back of their hand. In fact, this is where the entire process should begin.
“Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue.”
Source
Collecting an email list via a newsletter form or by safely scraping dynamic websites is half of a deal. It would be a mistake to send the same message to all without knowing unique individual preferences. For instance, if a person is a drone enthusiast and you send him newsletters featuring autonomous cars, he would pass without second thoughts. This is why it is important to study audience demographics, geographic locations, and customer metrics before you jump into creating that perfect cold email. Then, once you’ve created the cold email, you can use cold email software to send it. Amid the cutthroat competition, you cannot afford to have your email ignored, can you?
Identifying your target audience took a lot of work. It’s finally time to sell your products after investing your time and efforts in creating them and crafting the proper copy. Although it’s not quite that easy, the potential is there. Now that you’ve completed the simple steps; move on to the most challenging phase of your journey: how to sell them. Before we move on to the next section, you can take a look at some of the best tips to help you sell digital products online.”
Personalized Experiences
While interacting with brands, people prefer one-on-one interactions to single, broad experiences thrown in their general direction. This is why, to encourage customer engagement, you’d need to customize your emails.
Emails That Are Personalized Can Deliver 6X Higher Transaction Rates.”
Source
Start with a personalized subject line that addresses your customers by name. Make sure to use the same email address every time to send your message across. Researching on behavioral data also helps in creating emails that convert.
learning what is DMARC and activating the email security protocols will also help to increase the email’s credibility.
Remember, your aim is to reach people, not just inboxes. Emails with a personal touch have a better chance of being opened and read. This is how trust is built.
Strive to Use User-Generated Content
User-generated content puts your emailers in a different shade of light for your target customers. One such full proof way is to make effective use of data that you already have. Rely on your products and services; the ones that are selling off the racks like hotcakes, the most shared, the most clicked, the most in trend.
When you showcase such user-generated content that shows what other customers love, to another set of audiences, it usually draws in favor of you.
Increase Email Marketing Engagements and Conversions with User-Generated Content
Responsive Design
Keep your email short and sweet. You don’t want to sound salesy and boisterous. You don’t want to create something gaudy that causes the recipient to delete it straight away. Your layout needs to be simple and clean – one that looks professional and easy to scan.
“60% Consumers Prefer Checking Emails On Their Mobile Device.” –Fluent, Inc.
In this era of the screens, an overloaded email copy won’t cut it. Thus, along with ensuring the economy of language, it is also important to keep the layout appealing and mobile optimized.
Proper use of negative space is crucial for readers to distinguish the elements, whether text or images. Likewise, single-column layouts are better than multiple column layouts to adapt to the limited viewing on mobile devices. Also, use readable fonts and restrict the subject lines to a maximum of 70 characters.
Call to Action
An email without a call to action is a marketing endeavor without a purpose. It will never drive consumers to action and lead to conversions. If there is nothing that can prompt customers to look beyond the presented text, graphics, and colors, what is the point of sending the email?
“Conversions Increase By 28% When a Call to Action Button Is Included Instead Of a Text Link”– Campaign Monitor
By using a call to action button in an email, businesses can ask the recipient to visit a certain webpage, connect on social media, fill out a survey, make a purchase or avail perks. The best ones are short and include action-compelling text. The button is placed either above the fold or toward the end of the message.
Retargeting Emails
A retargeting email is a marketing tool to capture those customers who have left their shopping journey on your website midway and abandoned the shopping cart. Email retargeting or remarketing is a sure shot way to boost your on-site conversions and grow your email list. Retargeting allows you to do more with your potential customers and finally make them purchase thereby enhancing your conversion rates.
“Compared with a normal eCommerce conversion rate between 2% to 4%, the rate of email retargeting conversions can be as high as 41%.”
– Moz
The best part about email retargeting is that it deals with customers who have already shown interest in your products and services, hence the potential benefits are incredible. Personalization is the crucial key to success in email remarketing. Hence, displaying customer images using the same products as in the abandoned shopping cart is a great way to induce the lost trust in your products and drive the customers towards making the purchase.
Wrap-Up
Businesses that do not believe in the power of email marketing are the ones that tried and failed. They are the ones that strategized campaigns based on intuition instead of a proper plan of action. In an urge to achieve smashing success, they focused more on the larger picture than the pixels.
Those who are willing to experiment should know the goal of such activities is to bring business to the table. To that end, email marketing is a lot about the little things. Yes, the devil lies in the detail.
The size of the text and indent, the appeal of the colors and graphics, type of the font and readability, the relevance of the message, personalization, and targeted delivery, and most importantly, a strong statement to encourage immediate response – everything is conducive to an impactful campaign.
Are you doing it right?
