Email Marketing Strategies: 12 Proven Tactics in 2023
Email is a goldmine for you. It does a lot of good to you, right from connecting with your audience, promoting yourself or your products (brand promotion) to earning revenue by selling your products.
It helps you form a personal connection with your audience by sharing consistent useful information, news, or telling them a story that adds value.
It is one of the most powerful channels of marketing as it’s the return on investment (ROI) is very huge. It converts a large proportion of customers when compared to social media platforms.
Having a bunch of great email content pieces and the mailing list ready with you is not enough. This will not give you the full benefit of email marketing.
To benefit the most out of your email marketing campaigns, you have to follow some smart email marketing strategies. In this post, I am going to clearly explain these very email marketing strategies which will help you grow very fast. So let’s get started.
Start with finding out what you want to accomplish:
To plan or develop your email marketing strategies, you should know what your objectives are. For example, your objectives could be to nurture your leads or to increase conversions or to keep your audience engaged, etc.
So, to identify your exact objectives, ask yourself the following questions, and write down the answers on a piece of paper.
- How would you describe your email receivers? Who are they?
- Why do you want to send them emails?
- What will be the content of your emails? What type of information you are planning to send?
- How the outline of your emails look like? Draw a rough outline.
- What will be your schedule for sending emails? How many emails weekly or monthly?
Now, you will have sufficient information that will work as a backbone for the further development of your email marketing plans.
After this, you are set to plan your email marketing strategies. Follow the steps explained below.
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Personalization:
One-size-fits-all campaigns will never help you if you aim to improve customer retention. Work on developing personalized emails because most of the email revenue is generated from them. This is one of the best qualities of successful email marketing strategies.
Benefits of personalized campaigns:
It improves customer retention. In fact, it is a must for this.
It nurtures your target audience. Nurturing is important because acquiring a new customer is always hard work. It requires time, effort, and money. You can’t afford to lose your existing customer. So, you better nurture them than lose them.
It helps to keep your customer engaged and interested. If you fulfill their needs, they will always stay interested.
What can you do to personalize your campaigns?
First and foremost, make sure your emails don’t look like automated ones. Give it a human touch. Don’t forget that you want a human to read your mail. So be mindful of that.
Study and analyze the data that you have of your customers. Now use this information while writing your email content. If through your customers’ data you can identify possible challenges that might be faced by them, then figure out how you can solve the problem and how you can include your solution in the email copy that you are writing.
It’s a good way of keeping your customers interested.
Figure out if you could provide location-specific offers or information to your customers. This will make your emails give a sense of high relevance to the customers.
You now might be thinking that it’s really a complicated task. In fact, it is. And guess what, you can use different campaign monitoring tools to do this task. They make everything easy for you.
A few examples are Email Marketing Scorecard, Email Template Builder, Headline Analyzer, Kickbox, Hello Bar, and many more.
Use these tools and make your email copy dynamic.
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Make killer subject lines:
While creating the subject lines always keep in mind that you are focusing on conversions. The subject line is the first thing that your customers will see. If it doesn’t interest your customers, they probably won’t open the mail. So, the subject line determines the success of your email campaigns.
Your subject line should be personalized too. Make sure you write your customer’s name in the subject line. An email with the subject line mentioning the receiver’s name has higher open rates.
Keep it short and simple. Only use around 3-5 words to ensure that your subject line is completely visible on mobile phones as most of the emails (about 50%) are read on mobile phones.
The ultimate goal of the subject lines is to compel the customers to click through it and read your mail. So write something to catch your customer’s curiosity. Stay away from click baits.
Click baits might make your customers open the mail but when they find irrelevant content, your clickbait will become a major turn-off for them and they won’t trust you anymore. There won’t be any conversions and probably you will lose your customers.
Take benefit from segments and behavior data:
Know your customers well for successful email marketing strategies. You should gather the data related to the interests and behavior of your customers. Identify where they are in their buyer’s journey. Now categorize your customers based on the gathered data.
Now you can use triggered automated emails relying on this data. This includes emails like post-purchase email, birthdays email, etc.
Promotion:
Use social media platforms to build your mailing list for perfect email marketing strategies. You can post something with a sign-up form included. Otherwise, use your subscribers to increase your following on social media platforms. Emails come with icons for social platforms that enable your subscribers to visit your social pages.
The promotion will give you exposure and improve your customers’ engagement.
Grow your mailing list using lead magnets:
Lead magnets- It’s a kind of option bribe that you give your customers in exchange for their email addresses. These can be a free pdf file, videos, or other digital material that costs you nothing. You can make it for free.
Example of lead magnets:
E-books, Workbooks, Cheat-sheets, Case studies, White papers, Free digital courses, Webinars, Quizzes, Coupons, Free consultations, Free trails, Free samples, Giveaways, Free resources, etc.
Characteristics of a good lead magnet:
- It should be short, simple, sweet, easy to read and understand. It should not be too overwhelming that your readers don’t even finish reading it. Don’t put books with a large number of pages as a lead magnet. Such leads don’t attract customers.
- It should provide an immediate benefit to your customers. They should be able to see a noticeable change or improvement in their problems or challenges. This will make them come to you again and again.
- Give them something to take immediate action. Like a diet plan or any other useful actionable resources.
- Make sure it is relevant to your customers’ needs. Don’t give them what you want to give, but give them what they want to take.
- Keep it easy to access. Keep the file in a small size and make it easy to download. Don’t force your customers to give a hell of a lot of information like name, address, phone number, and gender, and bla bla bla. For you, their email addresses are enough.
Use analytical tools to track your customers’ behavior:
Use robust analytic tools like Google Analytics to track user’s behavior whenever they visit your website. The user’s behavior data will help you personalize your email campaigns.
Analytical tools also help you get data like open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, location, age group, gender, etc of your customers.
This data will help you convert visitors to buyers. All you need to do is to connect the dots using this data and help your customers by solving their problems. Provide the best solution in terms of quality and cost. Figure out how your solution can stand out in the crowd.
Run referral programs:
Referrals act like word of mouth to promote your brand. This will help you build your mailing list. People usually refer products to their close relatives and friends. This increases the trust factor. You can start by taking surveys from your current customers.
Gather the data on how many customers are satisfied with your product. You can ask these satisfied customers to refer your product to their close friends and relatives and give them some incentives in return.
Do A/B testing:
A/B testing helps you find out what email marketing strategies work best for you. For example, if you have two subject line ideas and you want to know which one is better, perform A/B testing. Send one subject line to a few customers and another subject line to the other few customers.
See which one has a higher open rate and use that subject line for running your email campaign for all your customers. The higher the open rates, the higher will be the conversions. Similarly, you can do A/B testing with your email content also. Whenever you are stuck between two ideas, simply perform A/B testing and take your final decision.
Timing and frequency of sending emails:
The timing of your emails can hugely affect your revenues. Therefore it is the most important element of your email marketing strategies. Your target customer may be located in a different time zone than yours. This creates a chance of you sending emails to your customers in a time slot where they probably won’t even see your emails, like midnight, busy work hours, etc.
This will eventually reduce your click-through rates and hence reduced conversions and revenue. So, you should categorize your customers into different segments based on their time zones and send emails accordingly. The best time to send emails is 10 am to 11 am and the best day to send emails is Thursday.
These time periods have a proven record of high click-through rates. But, you can apply the one-size-fits-all concept here. You should decide what time is better for your customers based on the data you have. The thing is, you have to be mindful of the timings when sending emails to your customers.
The frequency of your emails can affect how your emails would be treated. More frequent emails annoy people and give them email fatigue. They won’t even bother opening your emails. They may even unsubscribe. So, prefer sending very few emails like 2 per week or even 2 per month for certain businesses.
Be consistent:
Although it is important to ensure that you don’t annoy your customers too much with your frequent emails, it is also important to consider that you don’t send emails so less frequently that they end up forgetting you. Be consistent in writing emails. Plan your emailing schedule and stick to it. Consistency helps in growth.
You can also try asking your customers how often would they like to hear from you. This will help you make your emailing schedule.
Create visually appealing emails:
Don’t fill your email content just with plain text. Use visuals. Images convey a lot of information. Users don’t have much time to read. So, your emails should convey your message as easily and as fast as possible.
Most of the readers just skim through your emails and pay attention if something interests them. If you want your customers to read a big piece of content, then keep a link to that content or make it available in downloadable files and ensure that you don’t present that big piece of information in your mail itself.
If customers really want, they will click on that link to read your content. Such links are your call to action (CTA). Every email you send should have a certain CTA. For example, making your customer read an article on your website, making them purchase your product, etc.
Since a CTA are you asking something from your customer, your emails should be highly appealing. So a successful CTA depends upon your email contents. Also, make sure your CTA is standing out in your email content so that it gets easy for your customer to find it and click on it.
Do not make the mistake of hiding your CTA somewhere between your content paragraphs. For inserting images use tools to optimize images. This will ensure that your image loads efficiently and your customers don’t wait very long just to view the image. Longer waiting times will make them skip your emails or delete them.
Optimization:
Your users access their emails not just through desktops, but also through various other devices like tablets, smartphones, etc. Due to this variability, you have to make sure that your emails are accessible and responsive to various types of devices.
This is known as the optimization of email. Optimized email designs allow your customers to have a user-friendly experience and accessibility on nearly every type of device.
There are several tools available online that can help you easily optimize your emails as per the needs of your customers. Most of the email marketing tools help you create highly optimized emails without much effort.
You can use different email marketing tools like HubSpot Email Marketing, Sender, Sendinblue, Omnisend, SendPulse, Benchmark Email, Mailchimp, MailerLite, etc.
Another good tool to check how your email would perform on different devices is ‘Litmus’. Check your email performance before sending any emails to your customers.
Write kickass emails:
Your writing should be up to the mark but you don’t have to become Shakespeare. While writing your emails, always focus on how you can make your content look much engaging and try to incorporate a call to action within your email. Write something valuable and creative which is share-worthy.
Don’t waste your readers’ time with any BS. Write professionally and add your tone/personality to your writing pieces. Write as if you are having a conversation with your readers. Make it interesting. You can try beginning with a short story (not fake), but a real-life example of yours which relates to your email concept.
Try to draw attention with your subject line and your email introduction should retain the attention and compel your readers to finish reading your email. Finally, prompt them to take some action.
The magic in your writing can be brought by only you. No other software or tools can compare to human creativity. Write to make your readers always look forward to your emails.
Finally,
Good quality emails with smart email marketing strategies will gain you huge profits. Never underestimate their power. Keep all the points explained above in mind whenever you launch a new email marketing campaign. You will get a lot from it.
Take advantage of the data you have about your customers and use them to develop your strategies. Out of all your digital marketing channels, email marketing is the most profitable if done correctly.
Be consistent and work by following a schedule. Be organized and don’t keep a messy routine.
Use various email marketing tools available online to take your email marketing strategies to the next level.
Be a kickass writer and be creative.
Hope this article will help you successfully create your email marketing strategies and make huge revenue.
Get started now!