4 Overlooked Email Secrets
I can’t emphasize enough how crucial a good email marketing strategy is for the success of a business. Email marketing yields an average of 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States.
A good strategy addresses the smallest details to the biggest features, but we often overlook some of them and here are a few such best practices:
Including a message preheader
Preheader is content that follows the subject line of the email and it should ideally capture the essence of the email. It is not more than 100 characters, usually.
In the preheader, you get an opportunity to tell the readers what’s in it for them, if they open the email. Here are some ways in which preheaders can tempt your readers to take action:
- Highlight a question the email is trying to answer.
- Expand on the subject line and reinforce it.
- Mention offers such as coupons or free shipping deals.
- Use the beginning of the email as a preheader, but ensure that it makes them want to read further. For example, Josh, my business partner, came to me with a hilarious proposal…
If you cannot tempt your audience to click using the subject line, preheader will act as a reinforcement to ensure that the readers are hooked.
Make sure you end up in the primary tab instead of the promotions tab
When composing your email newsletter for the marketing campaign taking a few steps can prevent you from landing in the much less visited promotions tab or even worse, the spam folder.
Here are some tips to avoid this:
- Don’t use keywords such as bonus, free, promo etc; they trigger the spam filters.
- Always keep the number of images in check, too many images cause the mail to land in promotions tab.
- Don’t make the email too bulky.
- In the welcome mails, ask your users to add your contact in their contact list.
Also, don’t resort to tricks such as adding ‘Re:’ or ‘Fwd:’ to the subject lines in order to get into the primary tab. This might annoy your readers.
Keeping the email relevant to everyone – personalized content
According to previous studies, when users segmented email lists based on parameters such as location and age group, open rates increased by almost 19%, and click-through rates by almost 22% compared to non-segmented ones.
Segmentation is one of the most effective strategies for conversions, but is not emphasized enough.
The aim is to give personal attention to your customers, making them feel exclusive. Here are a couple of tips:
- Select a few parameters such as gender, demography etc and tag all your contacts with these parameters.
- Go 1-to-1 by finding information about things that will make your customers happy – tag customers with notes. For example, pick all dog lovers and send them doggy memes.
Sendlane™ can help you segment lists by qualifiers as: sign up date, previous opens, previous clicks.
If you want to know more about segmentation, here you go.
Don’t push your emails on the customers – let them opt-in
Purchased email lists may work on a few rare occasions, but in general, they are not effective and it will damage your reputation given that they go against the CAN SPAM regulations.
Most people on purchased email lists are not even aware that their contacts are being shared with someone else and this can increase the risk of spam and it’s not a clean business if you get their email address against their will.
According to a study done by ExactTarget, 77% of consumers would prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email.
Also, if the spam filters notice that your mails are getting consistently low clicks and high bounce rates and complaints, your mails will start to end up in the spam box.
The most strategic and effective approach to email marketing is to build a list of opt-in email contacts list. This allows you to do a very targeted marketing. When people opt-in for your newsletters themselves, you are gaining an audience that is already interested in your product/service and hence, there is a much smaller risk of spams and the open rates will be higher.
I remember clearly that when we first implemented the opt-in strategy at my startup Hiver, the email open rates soared to 3X of what had earlier seen from a purchased list.
Final thoughts
Even with the increasing influence of the social media marketing, email marketing still remains effective and sometimes, more powerful than any other type of content marketing.
It is a given that email marketing will become a common practice for all businesses. How do you distinguish yourself in this area? Spend time on areas that most of them usually overlook.
Get started today with a free trial of Sendlane™ to begin implementing these tips.
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