According to Forbes.com, email marketing is still the best way to generate leads. You can maximize your email marketing with these pivotal email marketing best practices for higher engagement and growth.
1. Strategic Planning
In order to be effective, you must come up with a strategy. Your strategy must be an informed one.
You will not need to look any further than your existing list to get the information you need to improve your strategy. Use the people on your list to find out more about what worked in your email marketing campaigns. Create a survey and offer them something valuable in return for their thoughts.
Think about why a particular strategy didn’t work and make note of your thoughts. Look at what worked and also make note of that as well.
2. List Quality Over Quantity
One of the best things you can do is scrub your list. It is time to carefully assess your list and remove all those contacts who are disengaged.
You need a list that performs. Removing those people who simply have not responded to your outreach in a very long time is the best way to ensure that your emails remain targeted. Remember, quality is more important than quantity.
Perhaps you could create a special group for those people who have not actively engaged with you for a while. You may have to test different strategies to see if you can re-engage them, but by all means, remove them from your main outreach.
3. Personalization Matters
While you may have been making use of personalization before, it’s time to look at your list with a critical eye. Try to group those you email by looking at who responded to different messages and who converted. This helps you to better target your message to different cross-sections of your list.
Make use of people’s names more when you target them. Don’t just use their name once in your message but try using their name in the second and third paragraph of your email as well. You can even include information that is unique to their buying and conversion personality.
The bottom line is that you need to analyze your list and be even more strategic about your email marketing. People are bombarded by emails every day. When you create highly personalized emails, they are more likely to respond to you.
3. Artificial Intelligence
The use of artificial intelligence is on the rise in email marketing. Imagine being able to get a machine to analyze the performance of your list.
Artificial intelligence can even personalize your emails based on data and help you to increase your open rates and click-through rates. From crafting attention-getting email subject lines to using the right images, artificial intelligence has taken email marketing by storm.
Artificial intelligence can even predict how a lead will interact with your email. This saves you a lot of time and energy.
Artificial intelligence allows you to focus on the more important things, such as growing your business.
4. Nurture More, Sell Less
Do you use most of your emails to do hard sells?
If your answer is yes, you may have had success with this tactic. However, you probably would have done a whole lot better if you had given away free and valuable information before attempting to sell a product.
The giving approach before selling is well utilized in social media, but it is often overlooked in email marketing. Your social media marketing campaign and email marketing campaigns should mimic each other in terms of the value you give. Give, give, and then give some more before offering a product.
Give quality useful information to your subscribers that will help to solve the problems they may be having. Give them one solution after another and then finally, offer them a solution in the form of a product.
They are likely to respond in a positive manner. One additional way to gain a lot of support for your product using email campaigns is to give as little as 1% of your sales to a worthy cause.
This way your product will solve a problem for your subscribers while helping them to feel good about themselves by helping others. All of this makes it even more likely that they will respond in a positive way to any future products you may offer them.
5. Mobile-Friendly Is a Must
These days, it is safe to say that a lot of emails are first opened on a mobile device. Optimize your email so that when it is opened on a mobile device, it reads well.
Otherwise, you may miss an opportunity. Often, once someone opens an email on mobile and does not read it because it is not mobile-friendly, they will not read it again on a computer.
This is definitely a case where first impressions last, so make it count.
Final Thoughts on Email Marketing Best Practices
The strategies discussed are the most important email marketing best practices you need to know. Once you are able to master these best practices, you should be well on your way to profitable email campaigns.
It is often said that “the money is in the list.” This is only true when you know how to make the most of any list you have. Take the time to look at what interests the people on your list.
Make use of technology when possible to make your emails better and, most of all, master the art of patience so you don’t bombard your subscribers with offers.