As previously covered in our blog on email marketing’s vitality, email marketing isn’t going anywhere, and in fact, it can contribute to some serious ROI. However, in order to tap into email’s true potential, several best practices must be followed. This week’s blog will serve as a stepping stone to launching targeted, valuable content to your current subscribers.

1. List Segmentation

While seemingly simple, list segmentation is one of the most critical steps to creating an effective marketing email. Segmentation is what helps focus your email content as well as ensure that the right information is going to the correct audience. To define your lists, start with the objective of your email. Are you creating a cross-selling campaign? Offering a promotion to some of your newest customers? Creating a loyalty program for your customers who have been with you since day one? No matter what the goal of your campaign is, segmenting your current contact database will help you determine how many email sets you will need and help tailor the content accordingly. Defining your audience into smaller subsets helps personalize your emails and provide more value to your customer, thus increasing the chances of your message being received and acted upon.

1. Personalization

Personalized emails can go a long way. Especially when considering the average email user will send and receive over 121 business emails a day (Campaign Monitor). Using personalization tokens in your email helps your message stand out to your audience by inserting information specific to each user in the content of your email. In fact, emails with personalized subject lines have a 26% higher open rate as well as deliver 6X higher transactional rates (LiveClicker). 

It is important to remember that personalization tokens are more than just first name and last name. Get creative with the information you have in your database. For example, if you were trying a cross-sell campaign, including the previous services/products purchased by your customer can help provide context to your email and correlate their previous experiences and your current offerings.

1. Timing

As any marketer can tell you, timing is a cornerstone of quality marketing messages. Determining when your customers are most active and likely to engage with your content is vital to the success of your campaign and messaging. Timing is not always straightforward either, it greatly varies depending on your medium and message. Additionally, timing cannot always be generalized and can change drastically according to your industry and audience’s behaviors. If you aren’t quite sure what timing best suits your audience, you can start by testing your email campaigns based on the time of day and the day of the week. By gathering this information over time, you will be able to carve out several prime times in which your marketing messages are best received. Remember, this can change over time, so it is essential to continually monitor your email analytics closely!

1. Mobile Friendliness

You will be hearing the words “mobile-friendliness” over and over and over again for the foreseeable future. That is due to rapid advancements in technology that have made our society more mobile than ever before. According to Buffer, 47% of emails are opened on a mobile device. This means antiquated desktop-oriented content will become stretched or squeezed on the mobile platform and can even break certain content features such as calls to action (CTA’s). Therefore it is crucial to ensure your content is digestible and functional on mobile devices and desktops. Gone are the days of checking your email every morning on your desktop or laptop; with hybrid workers commuting back and forth, a large portion of your audience may only be able to catch up on their inbox on the go. 

1. Customer-Centric Content

While this may seem like a no-brainer, there is alot more to creating customer-centric content than you may think. 

• Keep it Super Simple: Do not overwhelm your customer with overcomplicated content. Remember, you are competing against 151 other emails filtering in and out of your customer’s inbox. Keep your messaging simple and to the point, without any distractionary language. A general rule of thumb is to keep your content to a 5th-grade reading level. The easier information is to digest, the easier it is to act upon.
• Utilize Compelling Messaging: While it is important to keep things short, it is also important to make sure they are sweet. Avoid generic messaging; instead, deliver relevant messaging as quickly as possible. Give your customer an engaging message that will compel them to continue reading or click through to an offer within thirty seconds of opening an email. Establish value early on, and your future message will carry even more weight.
• Specific and Relevant CTA’s: Your CTA or call to action is essentially the objective of your messaging. It is the action you want your customer to take, whether it be a product trial, a limited-time sale, or a free “insert your industry’s verb here” you want to be clear with your CTA and provide instant value to your customer. Again avoid generic language and use the verbiage on your CTA to compel your customer to take action.
• Informative and Compelling Landing Pages: In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or similar places on the web (Unbounce). In other words, it is the next destination your customer will visit after acting upon the content in your email. Much like your email’s messaging, it is essential to keep your landing page targeted and relevant to your customers’ needs. With that being said, if your customer is visiting a landing page, they have a basic level of vested interest; therefore, you can use your landing page to expand upon the messaging in your email. Do not be afraid to dive deeper into your product/service, as you will provide information important to your customer’s decision-making process.
• Follow Up and Analysis: It is vitally important that you follow up with your customers. One-time emails can provide valuable information for limited-time sales or announcements of new products; however, Copper Chronicles states that follow-up emails can triple your reply rate. Continuing to build upon your previous marketing messages makes it substantially easier to build trust with your audience and will serve to further bolster the success of your future emails. Additionally, closely tracking your emails analytics (open rates, click-through rates, HTML click maps, top clicked links, top engaged contacts, deliverability results, time spent reading emails, etc.) will help you improve upon your marketing messages and help you better define a process to send highly effective emails to your specific customer base. It is essential to continuously analyze your results and use them to your advantage, using your customers’ feedback to tailor your content further to create the most engaging and relevant content for your audience.

Creating an engaging email campaign is no easy feat and requires alot of trial and error and A/B testing to truly determine what is best for your specific set of customers and prospects. However, it isn’t impossible to do, and by following these best practices, you will find that you can refine your previous messaging to suit your audiences’ needs better. Are you having trouble just getting started? Or just want to take stock of your current tactics? Contact Art’s Cube today and book your free 15-minute consultation, and get started on your journey to creating effective email campaigns in 2022.