Email marketing is the best way to build a relationship with the prospects. Despite being a 40-year-old method, it is still one the most affordable, as well as, efficient ways to reach the target audience. You can send personalized communication to thousands of subscribers with just a few clicks.
However, like other marketing technologies, email has also seen a drastic change in the past few years. You need to adopt the new features and adapt your campaign to shifting consumer preferences to generate better results.
Here are 6 Tweaks that can Dramatically Improve the Performance of your Email Marketing Platform.
#1. Switch to Text Emails
For a long time we have been told by marketers and various email marketing vendors to use simple drag and drop editors to send attractive emails. A majority of email campaigns use not only stock images but also use different colors and styles to enhance the look and feel of the campaign. As an organization, you might feel proud of the beautiful emails that you send to your subscribers. However, for the subscribers, it is just another generic email with promotional offers. If you think like a consumer, you will realize that we all like simple emails that have useful information.
Do an experiment by switching to text-only emails. With this, the entire focus shifts to the content. Thus, write a compelling text-only message which is beneficial for your target audience. Compare its performance with the previous campaigns, and you will notice a positive difference.
Moreover, the probability of landing into users’ Inbox or Update tabs will be higher for emails with no images or HTML codes. The HTML-emails usually go into Promotion tab of Gmail or even in the Spam folder.
#2. Integrate Remarketing
Remarketing is a powerful tool to engage with a targeted audience based on their online behavior. When combined with the email, remarketing deliver excellent returns. Through email remarketing, you can send a personalized communication to a set of users who visit a particular web page or a blog post on your website. It enables you to send a relevant message to the users when they need it the most. It has the potential to increase open as well as conversion rate significantly. You can find some startling facts about email remarketing here.
#3. Optimize Timings
Timing is critical in marketing, especially in email marketing. Sending an email when the users are busy will result in low open and click rate. It is also important to segregate the email list based on your customers’ time zone and send emails based on your clients’ time zones. Fortunately, we have many email marketing platforms like SendPulse, Elastic Email or SendGrid that have a timing optimization tool that let you send an email to users when they have a higher probability of opening the email.
The tools which come at no extra cost automatically tracks users email behavior and send the emails at an optimum time. Optimizing timing will help you in generating more businesses without making extra efforts.
#4. Abandon Cart Email
Setting up your e-commerce checkout in such a way that an email is automatically sent to users who leave the shopping cart without completing the sales is by far one of the best uses of email marketing. However, it is still not being used extensively, especially by small businesses. Abandon cart emails are intended to help users accomplish a goal on the website.
Many successful marketers have also used promotional offer in the emails to lure customers back. This is an extension of email remarketing when email is triggered based on certain events or activities by the users on the website. A study from Baymard reveals that around 69% of the customers abandon the shopping cart after following through a sales process. This is a huge blow to marketers who make a lot of efforts in generating traffic and attracting customers.
Since the customers leave carts due to various reasons, you can’t bring all of them back by using email. However, if you can bring even 10-15% of the customers back through abandoned cart emails, your sales will improve by 7-10%. For instance, Redley London generated 8% of sales, whereas Boot Barn recovered around 12% in lost sales by sending emails to cart abandoners. Many case studies show that abandoned cart emails are a massive success.
Integrate an abandoned cart email along with your checkout process to ensure a better follow-up and more conversions.
#5. Segment Your Email List
Audience segmentation is an old concept in marketing. However, very few email marketers segment their email list based on identifiable parameters. A study by Marketing Sherpa reveals that sending emails to segmented lists can lead to 208% higher conversion rate. In your case, the benefits of segmentation could be different.
However, even a 10% increase in conversion will be a big boost as segmentations efforts are just a matter of implementation and don’t require many efforts. You can use various parameters to segment your emails. Some of them could be the age group, gender, interest, purchase behavior, industry, etc. You can also consider using an additional field in subscription form that makes it easy to segment the list. If you intend to do this, then ensure that the subscribing to the newsletter doesn’t become hard, else it may prove to be counter-productive.
#6. Take Full Advantage of Email Automation
Email marketing technology has evolved significantly over the years. You can automate a lot of activities such as follow-ups, time optimization, A/B testing, behavioral targeting, event-based triggers, etc. The automation brings efficiency, saves a lot of time and produces amazing results. Many email marketing platforms have also introduced artificial intelligence and machine-based learnings which will further boost the campaign performance.
Integrate your email marketing platform with social media accounts, CRM, and website and automate as many tasks as possible. Don’t be wary of trying new feature in your email marketing platform.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one the most underutilized marketing technique. A majority of businesses still use its most basic features such as subscription forms, auto responders, newsletter blast, etc. to reach their target audience. If you want to generate tangible results from your email marketing efforts, then use the tips mentioned above. Also, experiment with newly introduced features in your email marketing platform to improve the effectiveness of the campaign. The campaign of tomorrow must be better than the campaign of today.
