Every digital marketer agrees to the fact that email marketing is the most effective marketing technique. However, email marketing is also infamous of spamming. But, if it is done carefully it is best and more rewarding than any other marketing technique. And the best way is to stick to the email marketing best practices to create relevant and meaningful experiences for your customers.
It is a great way of marketing for both small and large companies. If done carefully and thoughtfully it gives even better results than SEO, Pay-Per-Click, and affiliate marketing.
It’s very easy to use and highly cost-effective. But a lot of marketers fail to tap the full potential of email marketing.
Many forget or ignore this method to include in their overall marketing plan. But, those who ignore or don’t use this method of marketing lose a good number of customers and an effective way to build a relationship with their customers.
Why Email Marketing?
Below we would discuss more in detail why email marketing is a powerful marketing tool and what are the email marketing best practices. Let’s first see which factors make the email marketing a powerful marketing tool.
Email Marketing is Cost-Effective
Compared to other digital marketing methods like Pay-per-click, native advertising, etc., email marketing is very cost-effective if it’s done in the right way.
Many email service providers offer free email credits every month which is good for small businesses having fewer customers.
Or if you have little more customers you can buy a credit of thousands of emails for as less than $10 a month. MailChimp, Sendgrid, and SendinBlue all of these email providers offer thousands of free emails every month.
Also, they offer inbuilt templates, and very user-friendly drag and drop elements to quickly design your emails.
Email Marketing is Easy to Do
Email marketing is easy to start and keep continue because it doesn’t require too much technical and coding skills. Its technical components can be usually managed.
Email Marketing Doesn’t Require Too Much Time
Time is precious and you don’t want to waste it on writing and sending one by one email. Email marketing can be performed periodically and when you want with very little time invested in it.
You can remain connected with your customers with a weekly or monthly newsletter. Also, you can inform them if you have any offers or events happening.
Six Main Components of Email Marketing
Email marketing has basically six main components which are as follows:
- Capturing email addresses
- Managing subscribers and users lists and campaigns
- Designing email campaigns
- Delivering emails to recipients mailboxes
- Collecting analytical data of the email campaigns like the Open Rate, Bounce Rate, and Click Rate, etc.
- Automation
Capturing Email Addresses
Collecting and managing email addresses of the subscribers, customers, leads, prospects etc., in one place is one of the most difficult tasks.
But, most of the email service providers have this feature built-in into the application. With MailChimp, you can directly capture your subscribers and customer email addresses into the list.
Managing Subscribers, Users Lists and Campaigns
You can define the sources and accordingly email service providers capture the email addresses into those lists which is easy to manage and you can easily identify which list you want to use to send which of your email campaigns.
For instance, if you want to send an introductory offer of getting 20% off on the first purchase.
Then you surely wouldn’t want to send that email to your existing customers, but only to the new leads and prospects which now you want to convert as your customer.
These separate lists of emails into the system would make your job easier.
Otherwise, you would waste a lot of your time to figure out on which email addresses you want to send which of your email campaigns.
Designing Email Campaigns
Design of the emails is one of the most important factors, so this shouldn’t be ignored or undermined.
These days most users access their emails on their mobile devices, so they need to be responsive and designed in a way to inspire a response.
Email service providers like MailChimp make the design process easy by providing in-built templates and design tools for creating beautiful emails your customers can’t resist scrolling all the way through the end.
Delivering Emails to Recipient’s Mailboxes
You can send thousands of emails to your target audiences with just a click of a button.
Email service providers make this process super easy and fast by offering the tools to do it without any hassle.
Checking Response of the Email Campaigns
Now when you have sent your email to your target audience you may want to see the response.
So, you can do that as well.
You can go to the reports dashboard and quickly see how many emails have been opened, which devices they have been opened on.
How many clicks you got from those emails, and much more data to further refine your emails.
Email Automation
Even you can automate your emails. For instance, you want to send a welcome email to your new customer or subscriber as soon as they register.
You can do that with a pre-set template into your emailing system.
What are Email Marketing Best Practices?
Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach your customers organically and without investing too much money.
If your emails have poor open rate, high bounce rate, poor click-through then it’s likely that you’re doing something wrong.
You need to re-think your strategy and avoid mistakes which are causing poor response on your email campaigns.
One common reason for the low response rate is poor content. In that case, you might want to avoid flat, impersonal content?
Below are some of the email marketing best practices which would help you design your email campaigns for more clicks and responses.
Relevance
Relevant Customer Experience is the key to marketing success. And email marketing is a function of marketing so it should be relevant to the audience.
For instance, if you sell kid’s garments and sending emails to college-going student’s it might not be relevant for them.
But, if you send that email to the young parents it would be relevant to them and they would respond to your emails if they want to buy from your store.
Personalization
Creating personalized content makes email marketing very effective.
People love to have things that resonate with them. For instance, you always read your emails which are sent to you with your name in it by someone you know.
So, try to create personalized content for your audience. It doesn’t take too much time and effort.
Here is how you can personalize your emails and email campaigns which your customers would love.
Include From (Sender’s) Name
People usually don’t ignore emails from someone they know. Make sure to include your brand name or company’s name in the email sender’s name, so that your audience could easily know that you have sent them that email and it’s not a spam email.
As per a study 68% of people decide to open or ignore emails based on “From Names.”
Names can even be personalized to show account managers and their profile pictures in from the field of the email.
Individual Names in the Subject Lines
Researches show that including the individual names in subject lines increases open rates of the emails by 26%.
Email service providers make this task easy by storing names and corresponding emails so you don’t have to manually type recipients’ names into every subject line.
You can send your campaign as usual and the emailing system would add names of your customers in the subject lines itself.
Individual’s Name in the Email Body Copy
To make your emails even more personalized you can add the names of the recipients in the body content.
Adding the name of the recipient into the first line of your message is common, but yet many marketers ignore it and send mass emails without personalization.
Other information like birthdays, anniversaries, physical addresses, etc., can also be stored in the system and used for more personalization.
The data stored in emailing systems and campaign builders, allow for easy access when compiling them into messages.
Images
A similar strategy could be applied by adding images that are more personalized for the target audience.
For instance, if you are organizing an event in your city, then adding pictures of famous buildings in the city would be more effective than using any random pictures.
Dynamic Content
Many of the email service providers also offer to send dynamic content to users based on gender, demography, geography, language, etc. You can send emails with dynamic content to your target audience in different subgroups or cities.
Re-engagement
Email marketing is the best way to bring your customer back to your website or store and re-engage with them.
Most of the eCommerce companies keep sending emails every day to their customers with different offers, new arrivals, even recommended items based on their interests, buying behaviors and purchase history.
Reward & Loyalty
Emails are the best way to offer loyalty points, discounts, reward points, etc., to your most loyal customers.
These emails offer promotional discounts or never-seen-before products to customers who’ve proven their loyalty. Based on the spending threshold, patronage, buying behavior, and user engagement, you can create relevant campaigns specific to the individual’s shopping and spending habits.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
You can send automated emails to the customers who didn’t complete their purchase on your website.
Systems pick up the products those customers have added to their shopping carts and send them in an email a couple of days later to make them quickly buy them.
Strategies like these keep your customers coming back to you over and over again.
Option to Unsubscribe
Where email is a great tool for marketing and direct in approach, but it has its own limitations. For instance, sometimes some of your subscribers or users might no longer want to see your email.
Hence, they unsubscribe from your email list. That’s completely normal, and a natural part of the email marketing lifecycle.
The great way is to give your users an easy option to unsubscribe and re-subscribe to your email list.
Like every other thing and effort, you made to provide relevant and meaningful experiences to your users, make the unsubscription simple and not snarky.
Conclusion
Email marketing helps a lot if it is done carefully keeping in mind the email marketing best practices and industry standards.
Email marketing is becoming more effective due to advancements in email marketing systems and developments in data analytics.
Start perfecting your email marketing strategies today and stay ahead of the game.
