How To Get Better At Email Marketing?

Best Email Marketing Practices

If it isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing, but it can be improved upon. Here are some ways to make your email marketing even more effective.

• Be More Interactive

When you make your emails interactive, you can engage with your customers better. Customers like being given options and choosing their own journey. Businesses can take advantage of this and tailor the choices to fit customer preferences more closely. The customised journey will lead to more conversions as well. 

There is no need to make interactive elements complicated. They can be clear, clickable call-to-action buttons, surveys and polls, carousels and quick quizzes to display services or products. The usual transaction and welcome emails don’t have to be boring and robotic.

• Consider Incorporating Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new to the realm of digital marketing. Implementing AI in email strategy can help analyse customer behaviour and streamline email marketing efforts. 

If customers have opened an email, the content needs to be worth their time. If it isn’t, they will simply delete the email, not open the next one and may even unsubscribe. Knowing what customers need becomes important here, so you know exactly what or when to send them an email. You can even use a CRM system to make this process easier. 

For instance, when you analyse customer purchase interests and habits, tools such as Ongage can optimise the times you can send an email, identify the best angle for subject lines and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

• Keep It Simple and Contextual

People receive more than 120 emails every day on average. With every email vying for the customer’s attention, it is difficult to stand out from the crowd. The only way to do so is by keeping it contextual—making it more relevant to your users, urging them to open them. For example, if someone buys dog food from a pet store, they are more likely to respond to an email about dog care than fish or cat care.

To make contextualisation work, user segmentation is required. Here is where you can use AI applications like MoEngage that will segment and categorise your users into groups based on their actions and behaviours such as ‘Needs Attention’ or ‘Price Sensitive’.

• Be Privacy-friendly

Customers today are more aware of their privacy and how their personal information is being used. Therefore, every business needs to focus on data privacy. 

A business is responsible in more ways than one. You should constantly review legislation concerning data privacy and make sure your email marketing campaigns are adhering to it. You are furthermore responsible to inform your customers about any changes in data privacy and let them know how you are going to protect their data. Not just accountability, doing so will also increase your customer’s trust in your business.

Things to Avoid in Your Email Marketing Campaigns

You know what to do but what should you avoid? Here are some email marketing mistakes you don’t want to make.

• Don’t Send Too Many Emails

This is a huge pet peeve for many customers when it comes to email marketing and you need to avoid this the most. More the merrier isn’t ideal for emails. A YouGov study found that 75% of customers say they resent brands that send too many emails. Resentment does not increase sales. You don’t want people to be annoyed with your brand. Spare them this feeling by strategically sending your promotions, for example, once a week.

• Don’t Go Overboard with CTAs

An inbox inundated with promotions is frustrating and so is stacking too many CTAs in one email.

Once a subscriber opens an email, you have 3 seconds to convince them to act. If you give them too many CTAs, you are going to confuse the customer or worse, annoy them. Flooding the subscriber is not the goal. To improve conversion rates, you have to make sure the emails have a simpler way of getting the subscribers to act. You also need to give every email its own purpose.

• Don’t Forget to Optimise for Mobile

More than half of all searches today happen on mobile phones. People use their mobile phones for everything. So, if you aren’t modifying your email marketing for mobile, you can lose subscribers. Test, review and test again to make sure your email campaign is optimised for mobile phones.

• Don’t Forget to Proofread

If there’s one thing people don’t like to see, it’s a sloppy copy. Therefore, make sure there is more than one person working on the brand’s email newsletter. Multiple people should read it before it’s sent out and it should be checked thoroughly for spelling, tone, professionalism and ease of understanding. 

Email marketing after the pandemic doesn’t have to be challenging if you can leverage the work you already put into it over the past year. Keep these tips in mind when you plan your next email campaign.