As part of your business’s wider marketing plan, email marketing continues to be a highly effective and cost-efficient channel for businesses to connect with their audiences. As part of an inbound marketing strategy, email marketing will help your business nurture its leads and drive conversion. But it’s important to maximise the impact of your email campaigns. It’s essential to implement best practices to grab attention, engage your readers, and deliver a strong return on investment. In this blog, we’ll explore some key email marketing best practices that will help you improve engagement and achieve impressive results. And if you don’t think you are up to the job yourself, hear about how we can help!
Build and maintain a responsive and targeted email list
The first step to any email marketing campaign begins with your distribution list. Start by building a high-quality email list made up of individuals who have willingly opted in to receive your messages. This can be through high-quality social media campaigns, the ability to sign up on your company website, as well as all current and past customers, prospects and suppliers. Think of offering compelling incentives to sign up or subscribe, for example, exclusive content or discounts.
To create more tailored and specific messaging you should consider segmenting your list based on criteria that are relevant to your business. This could be things like demographics, locations, previous buying behaviour, or the method they used to subscribe. This will allow you to send personalised and targeted emails that will resonate more strongly with your subscriber’s specific interests and needs.
Craft compelling subject lines
We’re all used to receiving hundreds of emails a week, so making sure that your email stands out in everyone’s busy inbox is really important. The subject line plays a critical role in determining whether your recipient will even open your email. Firstly, keep them concise, engaging and relevant to the content of the marketing email. It’s estimated that around 1.8 billion people use their phones to read their emails, double the number of desktop users estimated at around 0.9 billion. So, it’s important to create a subject line that will read well on a mobile device. It should also make the reader want to open it rather than swipe it into the deleted folder. You can experiment with things like personalisation, urgency, or curiosity to encourage them to open the email. But make sure your subject line accurately reflects the content to avoid misleading your audience.
Focus on engaging and valuable content
There should always be a purpose to your email. For example, the email could be around educating your audience, announcing an exciting company update, providing entertaining insights, or addressing your customer’s pain points. A good email should be concise and scannable, with a balance of eye-catching visuals, clear headings, and short well-structured paragraphs. It’s important to balance the email with information, entertaining content, and promotional messages. You don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers with constant sales pitches as this is likely to just encourage them to hit the unsubscribe button.
Personalise your marketing emails
Personalisation is a powerful technique to build rapport with your audience and make them feel included. Even the most basic email packages allow dynamic tags to be inserted in most parts of your email. From the most basic which would be to address your subscribers by their preferred name. To more sophisticated segmentation and tagging, to deliver targeted content, based on the segments you created in your email list. You could also consider using dynamic content blocks to showcase different sections of an email to specific segments. Again, improving relevancy to your audience will improve your email’s engagement.
Automation
Automation is a game-changer when it comes to email marketing efficiency and scalability. A good email marketing system will allow you to implement advanced email marketing using it’s automation tools. These will streamline your email campaigns and standard customer journeys and save you time. Set up personalised workflows, automated follow-ups, and triggered emails based on specific customer actions. These will ensure that your messages are timely, relevant, and personalised.
Optimise email marketing for mobile devices
With more than 2/3 of all emails being opened on mobile devices not only is it crucial that your subject line is mobile friendly, but that your content within the email is also mobile optimised. The use of responsive design tools will ensure that your email adapts its layout to various screen sizes once it’s opened. Keep the email layout simple, using your brand’s colours and fonts, so that your audience will immediately recognise your business. Include clear, tested, and trackable calls-to-action (CTAs). They should always be prominent and easy to see and should be easy to tap on, on a smaller screen like a mobile device.
Monitor, analyse and optimise
Don’t just keep banging out emails without tracking how they perform. Track and analyse key metrics. To fully understand the effectiveness of your campaign you should track open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and the number of unsubscribes. Your chosen email marketing system (we love Mailchimp!) will have its own analytics tools. Use these to gain insights into your subscribers’ behaviours and preferences. Then use these insights to refine your email strategy, test new approaches, and continually optimise your campaigns for better results.
A/B Test your email marketing campaigns
A good email marketing system will allow you to send two similar versions of the same email to 50% of your audience. This is known as A/B testing and is a great way to find out what works best with your audience. You could experiment with different subject lines, different email layouts, or different CTAs. It’s important to only test one element in each round of A/B testing. Then use the results of these tests to make further data-driven decisions to improve your engagement and email conversion rates.
Why is Email Marketing important?
Implementing great email marketing practices is crucial for engagement and maximising your return on investment. By building a segmented email list, crafting personalised and compelling content, that is mobile-optimised, you can create impactful email campaigns. Analysing your campaign’s performance and running A/B tests will allow you to track that your emails resonate with your audience and achieve your desired outcomes. Embracing these best practices will take your email marketing efforts to new heights. And if you don’t have the skills or expertise within your business we can help.
How we can help
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, but it requires expertise, strategy, and ongoing optimisation. At Mirage and Mole, we believe that a well-thought-out strategy is the foundation of any successful email marketing campaign. Our team of marketing experts will work closely with you to understand your business objectives, target audience, and unique value proposition. Based on these insights, we’ll develop a comprehensive email marketing strategy that aligns with your goals and maximises results. Whether you want to nurture leads, promote new products or services, or re-engage existing customers, we’ll create tailored campaigns to meet your specific needs.
Our talented team of copywriters and content creators will work with you to develop engaging and personalised email content that resonates with your audience. From attention-grabbing subject lines to persuasive calls-to-action, we’ll ensure that every element of your email content is optimised for maximum impact. We will help you implement effective list-building strategies to grow your subscriber base organically. We’ll also use our expertise in audience segmentation to ensure that your email campaigns are targeted and personalised.
We will provide you with in-depth analytics and reporting, giving you valuable insights into email campaign performance. Based on these metrics, we’ll optimise your campaigns, test different elements, and make data-driven adjustments to improve results. With Mirage and Mole as your outsourced marketing partner, you can unlock the full potential of email marketing to drive growth, engage your audience, and achieve your business objectives. Contact us today and let us help you harness the power of email marketing for your business’s success.
