Email marketing is a major component of any brand’s marketing plan. Take a quick look at your inbox and you’ll have tons of emails from nearly every retailer you’ve recently bought from and a ton of you haven’t. Brands wouldn’t spend so much effort creating such a multitude of emails if email marketing was a major driver of ROI.
Email is such a great tool for a number of reasons, it’s a way to deliver customized content of nearly any message directly to your previous customers or potential leads. It lets you stay engaged with consumers and show off new deals and sales specials. Constant contact with consumers and prior customers is one of the most effective ways to keep customers shopping with you over competitors.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important email marketing tips of 2021!
Deliverability is key!
Your emails are being wasted if your audience isn’t getting them. Email providers have become pickier over time as to what emails they flag as spam, and the last thing you need is for your domain to get flagged. Typically you should be working with an email system like Mailchimp and watch the number of emails you send when starting a campaign. Certain subject line words can also trigger email filters to send them to the spam folder.
Subject lines are critical
Subject lines should be the top priority when you start planning an email campaign. Your audience will respond quite a bit to different subject lines, and it’s important you run a selection of A/B tests to see what is most effective. Try to stay away from anything that sounds spammy, uses spam keywords, or is too long. You want to generate personalized interest and drive the action of them opening the email.
If you are running a major sale, often listing a loss leader price or percent off in the subject generates strong results.
Think through your formatting
The visual feel of your email is really important, it’s very easy to get a spammy vibe from an email, no doubt if you go to your inbox right now, you’ll see a big difference between name-brand retailers’ sales emails and some that are truly spam and junk.
There are tons of examples, and brands are always A/B testing their formats, but spending the time necessary to design a proper email template is going to pay dividends in the long run as viewers will be less likely to mark it as spam and it will generate more ROI due to higher CTR rates.
Audience Segmentation
Not all your audience will respond the same to your emails and not all your audience are in the same place on customer lifecycle, not even want to buy the same type of products as others. Segmenting your audience will mean that you deliver more accurate information that will be relevant to the different audience groups you have. Every large brand has significant segmentation in place, but it’s become easy for smaller firms to do it as well.
The first step will be to decide what the core segments are of your audience. For customers that haven’t bought yet, that’s certainly a different list, than repeat customers. If you sell both B2B and B2C, that’s another form of segmentation.
Often as you create special promotions, the promotions will be targeted to different audiences.
Email marketing segmentation is a key way to increase CTR and decrease spam flagging, as segmentation lets you put relevant content and messaging in front of your audience.
Longer isn’t Better
Most consumers simply don’t have the attention span to read a long email. Shorter is nearly always better, as it’s quick, doesn’t waste time, and gets to the point immediately. When A/B testing between longer and shorter emails, you will nearly always see a higher CTR rate on the shorter emails.
Writing a short, concise, and effective copy text can be challenging, which is why so many brands have internal marketing teams or hire copywriters to help.
Our recommendation is to get to the point as quickly as possible in an email marketing campaign of any kind.
Personalization is a Must
Adding in the first name of your recipient and heavily segmenting your audience is now standard practice for many brands. A personal touch makes the email feel less spammy. Personalization in the subject line is also a common way to increase open rates. Just adding first names into the first line of the email has shown through various data studies to generate a 15-25% increase in open rates which is significant.
Video Content
Just like with SEO, and webpage statistics, including rich media in email marketing, will set your email campaigns apart from competitors and generate more interest and better ROI than other firms. As many studies have shown, video is so much more engaging compared with static photos and text, which is why so many brands are increasing their reliance on video content in a variety of channels including PPC ads and social media.
If you already have video or are planning to create more video content in the coming months, think through how you can use that content in your email marketing. Don’t just fire and forget, but A/B tests similar email marketing campaigns with video and without, nearly every time, the emails that use video will generate much better performance.
Volan Media is a top video content producer for a wide range of marketing channels, we can work with you to plan out video content needed for email marketing that can also be effectively used in other channels as well.
Email Software and Data
We mention A/B testing quite a bit above, in order to manage email campaigns effectively and properly A/B test, you need to be using some kind of email marketing software to coordinate your campaigns. While it might seem daunting at first to set up your email campaigns, it’s really very easy to start, and several email marketing software providers offer free tiers for smaller businesses to start.
You won’t go wrong using services from firms like Hubspot, Mailchimp, Salesforce or Zoho. Try a demo of some of the most popular CRM and email automation tools to get a feel for what each offer!
Don’t Forget mobile devices
More than 40% of emails are opened on mobile devices and this will likely only grow, so just like your website, you need to be sure that your emails look and are functional on mobile devices. If you are trying to drive your audience to a landing page or include video content, make sure that both look and function correctly on mobile! The last thing you want to do is lose 40% of your audience due to issues on mobile devices with your campaign.
Make Sure not to spam!
It should be obvious, but don’t mass spam cold emails. It won’t take long for your domain to be flagged and your email deliverability to drop significantly. Sending thousands of emails to random addresses could get your email domain banned which would be a major problem going forward.
By sending messages for legitimate sales offers or new product launches etc then following the A/B testing, personalization and content tips from above, you’ll avoid spam issues!
When in doubt, work with an email marketing specialist to help you set up your campaign and software for the first time. Getting started on the right track is a must to avoid issues and maximize ROI. Once your system is set up, you’ll quickly get a feel for what works and what doesn’t through data analytics. Then it becomes a matter of content quality, consistent campaign refinement, and testing new ideas.
About Volan Media
We’ve worked with dozens of businesses across many different industries and sizes to plan content marketing plans. Volan Media is a top Knoxville, Tennessee based content marketing agency and video production company, we not only work with clients in the Knoxville, Maryville, Chattanooga, and Nashville area but also work with clients around the country!
Give us a shout if you want to refine your email marketing campaign or add video content your marketing plan.
