So, it’s pretty obvious that email marketing is an irreplaceable component of a brand’s digital marketing efforts in these times. However, it isn’t something that you can master without proper guidance. Success in email marketing requires you to follow a few useful tips, which are as follows:
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Segment your audience
One of the most crucial email marketing success mantra lies in knowing and understanding your target audience in and out. It’s only when you have your fingers on the pulse of your customers that you can provide them something of value to them. It’s all about sending the right message to the right group of people. That cannot be achieved without understanding who your customers are and what they desire.
Hence, first and foremost, you need to segment your audience. The ideal way is to think about your audience segments as various subsets of your target market. After you have identified your segments, you can create multiple lists of email subscribers on the basis of their interests. You can use a form that your website visitors can fill. You can also be proactive in your segmentation by tracking the pages they have visited. This way, you can save time and energy on having to ask people about their interests.
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Pay attention to your email subject line
While crafting an email marketing campaign, many marketers tend to underestimate the importance of having a catchy subject line. Believe it or not, 47 percent of recipients of an email click on it after seeing its subject line alone. It should be intriguing, compelling, and should have a cliffhanger—something that instantly generates interest in your audience.
Here are a few best practices to follow while crafting email subject lines:
- Your subject line should be relevant to your email marketing purpose and should connect with the interests of your audience directly.
- Use merge tags in your email subject line in order to enhance its clickability and performance.
- Your subject line should be short. Having long subject lines not only will cut off in the inbox of your recipients but also deviate from the main meaning of your message.
- Consider using emojis in your subject line because they seem really fun. There’s no harm in testing them out and seeing how your audience responds.
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Refine your call to action (CTA)
Call to action (CTA) is yet another element that email marketers tend to ignore while running email campaigns. This is what drives your audience to take a particular action, which could be to make a purchase, visit your website for more information, or make contact with your company. It is the touchpoint that email recipients see before going to a landing page, a blog post, or any other destination you wish to lead them to.
As such, you need to pay special attention to your CTA. Try to make it as contextual as possible. Instead of using the generic (and boring ones) like “buy now” or “shop now,” you can create something that hooks your audience. Your email CTA should be descriptive, hard to miss, and easy to act on. That’s when you can boost your email’s click-through rate.
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Personalize your emails
This is the era of personalization— something that audiences desire in order to develop a meaningful association with a brand. You can ace at email marketing in the present times only when you are able to create a memorable and unique experience for your audience. Personalization will help you make your audience feel special. Whether it’s the subject line or the body copy, it should heartily speak to your audience, and that also in their voice.
If you know the first name of your recipient, it makes complete sense to use it in the subject line and the body copy of the email. Consider asking your audience relevant and easy-to-answer questions to make the whole communication more personal. You can even add your own details to your emails, such as your first name and your photograph. As a brand owner, you should know the significance of lending a personal feel to your email marketing because it has a direct impact on your campaign’s conversion rate.
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Measure your performance
Last but certainly not least, you need to find numbers that speak about your campaign’s performance. This is the age of data, and you need to leverage it. It’s only when you have a proper analytics and performance measurement system in place that you can know where you stand.
Here are a few metrics you should keep an eye on:
- Click-through rate: It represents how many people have clicked on your email. It is inherently dependent on the content of your email and the offer it provides.
- Open rate: This represents the catchiness of your email’s subject line and the weight your brand name bears.
- Bounce rate: The bounce rate of your email campaign indicates the health of your subscriber list. A high bounce rate is a clear indication that your imported list is incorrect or too old.
- Conversion rate: Although not a part of your email campaign, the conversion rate shows how many people visited your desired page and converted it into actual customers or subscribers.
Out of the above four metrics, the first two are the most crucial to your email marketing campaign. Make sure you don’t ignore them.
The above five tips are just a few guidelines that can help you get the best out of your email marketing campaigns. It’s an important branding exercise, and you should avoid mistakes at all costs.
