Each year the amount of email users is progressing at an extraordinary rate. Analysts expect that by the end of 2022 there will be over 4.2 billion users. What these numbers reveal, besides that email continues to be one of the best ways for business communication, is that email marketing strategies are still an effective way of reaching out to potential customers and getting the best out of your overall marketing strategy.
Because over 293 billion emails are sent every day, it’s necessary to ask the question. In an ocean of emails, how can you make your business differentiate from the competition and experience increased sales through higher open and click-through rates?
Let’s have a look at the most effective email marketing strategies that will help you to reach out to more clients and generate more sales.
1. Get Personal – But Have Your Boundaries
There’s no question that email customization is a great marketing strategy proven to have remarkable gains in your mail campaigns. Studies show that, compared to standard, customized promotional mailings, they produce 29% higher unique open rates and 41% higher unique click rates.
While it’s excellent to set a familiar tone to the relationship you have with your customers, you have to be mindful not to cross the line. Overusing first names will only make you look weird from your customer’s point of view and damage your reputation.
However, remember that personalization is more than just mentioning each customer’s name in the email. There are several other ways to do so and it’s at your discretion to test and examine which alternative works best for your email list.
2. Keep Your Subject Lines Short
There are a few statistics that show that subject lines are extremely important for your email marketing campaign’s success. Based just on the subject line, 47% of email recipients open the mail, and those that are personalized are 22% more likely to be opened. Nevertheless, stats confirm that it’s not just the content you need to be concerned about, but its dimension as well. Email subject lines with 6-10 words are some with the highest open rate. Another study suggests that those subject lines with a sense of urgency or exclusivity experience 22% higher open rates.
What appears to be an easy one-liner, can be a time-consuming task to create the right one. Subject lines can either make or break your email marketing strategy results. So, the next time you find yourself designing one, keep in mind that more is less and, thus, the better chances for a successful email marketing campaign.
3. Pick the Right Time for Email Sending
Timing is everything when it comes to generating sales through email campaigns. When aiming for improved open and click-through rates you must choose the time wisely. Another reason is that loyal users want to engage with your content or share it with friends or on social media. Considering all these, you need to use all the available tools to discover the best timing for them.
On average, more than half of the companies are currently utilizing email automation, as many marketing automation tools can help you perform advanced multivariate testing to find the perfect timing for messaging your recipients. In exchange, this will save your business a great deal of time and resources and will allow you to focus on the essential aspects of your email marketing strategy.
With the guidance of tools like these, you can include AI delivery, which means that the automation software itself determines what resonates best with your audience by tracking their activities. It takes a certain period, from the moment users enter your email list, to effectively decide when customers engage most with your app based on previous behavior. Accordingly, users will receive your emails at the ideal moment. This type of email optimization can save you from spending time and resources on the wrong email marketing strategies.
4. Segment Your Subscribers
Segmenting your email lists helps you speak more directly and effectively to your users. It gives them accurate information at the precise moment. When done right, the results will be positive.
Here are some swift and straightforward segmentation strategies to help you in the process:
Segmentation on demographic data
Say you are a clothing retailer, knowing the gender of your buyers will be a piece of vital information. On the other hand, if you are a B2B software developer, demographics such as company position can be of great value.
Segmentation on email engagement
Applying this type of segmentation, you can indicate active vs. inactive users. After creating this segment, you can target your inactive customers by building a specialized re-engaging campaign.
Segmentation on past purchase
This is another simple but effective way to optimize your targeting. You can start by sending recommendations for similar purchases these users have made. You can make an educated guess about when this product might run out and send an email to the very same user suggesting reorder ahead of time.
Segmentation on the position in the sales funnels
A helpful way to customize your messaging is to segment your users by their position in the sales funnel. Thing is, you can’t target the users at the bottom of the funnel with the same message as those who are at the top. When they are at the bottom such as a group of brand-new subscribers, you should send a broad message providing a wide range of products or features. Nevertheless, if they’ve already signed up and have already engaged with your content you can use that information, discover what they’re interested in and target them more specifically.
5. Re-engage with Inactive Customers
You will approximately lose a quarter of your subscribers per year if you don’t strive to send engaging and relevant information. Email list decline is inevitable, but you can limit it to a certain degree. So, how do you keep your subscribers active, or how do you make inactive subscribers become active again?
Take into consideration all of the actions that your subscribers perform to fit your inactive criteria. Most companies try to engage with their subscribers as much as possible. This endeavor comes to the point where they send out too many emails, and the subscribers don’t find them relevant anymore. Furthermore, never underestimate the power of great email design. If your email campaigns aren’t user-friendly and mobile-optimized, then you risk your email to be marked as spam, deleted, or not even opened.
When it comes to the right email marketing strategies, you need to solve all of the mentioned issues. Then you can focus on building the re-engagement campaign. There are many productive ways of executing win-back. Some businesses choose the “we-miss-you” type of campaigns, as well as discounts, and promo codes, or a combination of these.
However, the win-back campaigns are often not an easy process. But remember that companies that spend on re-engaging campaigns in their email marketing notice a $28.50 return on each $1 spent. This suggests that recovering inactive subscribers is more cost-effective than reaching new ones.
Whatever your email strategy is, you might carry a certain number of emails and your subscribers still don’t come back. In this case, the best approach is to ask them about their email preferences. Let them choose whether they still want to receive your emails. A curated email list is better for any email marketing strategy than spending resources on subscribers that won’t return no matter your strategy.
Bottom Line
The most effective way to find out what email marketing strategy works best for your company is to test your email campaigns. This will prevent you from having typos, errors, bounces, and other kinds of troubles that could have been avoided by sending out test emails before the official one.
Having so many alternatives that generate more sales and growth is what makes email marketing both a challenging and interesting process. Effective email marketing strategies will lead to boosted sales – if executed in the right way. Investing time, effort, and resources into engaging with your subscribers on their way to becoming loyal customers will put you ahead of your competition.
Do you want to grow your business and generate more sales? Contact us and we can do it together, by giving you some direction regarding the best email marketing strategies for your business.
