Effective Email Marketing Tips To Increase Sales In 2021
- Updated on: 2021-07-11
- Read original article here
Is email marketing still used?
Why use email marketing when we have asocial media marketing strategy?
We are sure you must have heard some crazy comments about email marketing from so-called marketers. Let us tell you what you have to do, do not pay any heed to such statements. Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel to target your prospects, connect with your existing customers, and build a long-term relationship with your audience.
Please read the following stats and figures that accentuate why email marketing should be deployed by businesses to increase their sales and promote their brands.
Do you need more reasons to get started with this fantastic marketing strategy?
Email marketing is a highly targeted form of marketing. The marketer can categorize its existing and potential customers into different segments and curate targeted messages for each group to reap the desired results.
For instance, an eCommerce store that sells clothes for females aged between 16 and 60 can divide its customer base according to age groups such as teenagers, middle-aged, and senior citizens. It can then target each segment by designing messages to entice them to visit the store and shop their favorite articles. This benefit is not available to businesses in any other form of marketing, especially social media marketing.
The posts designed and uploaded on social networking profiles are viewed by all the followers. A marketer cannot target a particular segment of its audience on social networking sites. Thus, if you want to implement a different marketing strategy on each category of your buyers, email marketing is there to help you.
Email marketing is pretty easy to get started with. A business doesn’t need a graphic designer nor a huge investment to launch its email marketing campaign. All that it needs to pull off this marketing channel is the email addresses of its customers, email marketing service provider, and a good internet connection. That’s it! You are all ready to go and embrace the opportunity of connecting with your subscribers and enticing them to visit your store.
So, all geared up for launching an email marketing campaign for your business? If yes, then we have the perfect email marketing tips that’ll help you to pull off the campaign like a pro and realize your marketing goals.
The first effective email marketing tip is to determine your marketing goal. Sure, every marketing campaign aims to attract more customers and maximize profit. Still, you have to be more specific about your goals when integrating email marketing into your digital marketing campaign.
Ask yourself why you want to send emails to your customers and potential audience? Is it because you want to increase brand awareness, boost traffic at your website, or increase conversions.
Be specific about your email marketing goal. It will allow you to plan a robust strategy to execute your marketing campaign successfully. In the absence of proper goals, you will have a hard time steering your marketing actions towards the direction of your goals. Thus, before building your subscriber list, work on determining your goal.
Segmentation of the audience is perhaps the biggest reason why email marketing is still alive and thriving in the era of social media.
Encourage your website visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Offer them a small gift, free printable resources, discount code, etc., to make them share their email addresses with you. Once you have collected the email addresses of your potential and existing customers, divide them into different categories and sub-categories.
You can divide your subscribers based on their gender, age group, interests, previous purchases, location, etc. Separating your subscribers will enable you to curate effective messages for each segment to make them take the desired action.
For example, suppose you have a broad customer base from different areas of the world. In that case, you can categorize your subscribers according to their countries of domicile and send that category offers and promotions for products that are well-suited to their needs, such as sending discount offers on coats and mufflers to customers who reside in cold countries.
Segmentation can give your business a competitive edge. You can promote the goods to the group who is genuinely interested in it.
You can target your subscriber via email only if they open their emails. If they do not open their email and read its content, or worse, delete it right after receiving it, your email marketing campaign will be rendered useless.
Thus, to ensure that your subscriber opens the email and skims its content, use a killer subject line. Make the subject line attention-grabbing that persuades the customer that reading the email is for his benefit.
Which of the following subject lines is likely to make the customer open his email?
The customer will open the second email as it talks about his benefit. Hence, make sure to come up with unique and catchy subject lines for your email marketing campaigns. A business can enter 60 characters for the subject line. Ensure that you use these characters wisely to make your customer open the email.
Are you customers not opening your emails even after drafting killer subject lines?
Don’t worry; if your customers don’t open the email for the first time, send them emails again.
A zealous marketer never gives up. He chases potential customers and tempts them to visit the store, purchase the product, or even read the email. Hence, deploy the ‘Double Open Strategy’ and send the emails to those subscribers who didn’t open your first email.
There can be many reasons why a customer didn’t open your email. He might be busy, his phone was silent and didn’t get the notification for email, he was sleeping, his internet connection was troubling him, etc.
Thus, send the emails again with the following changes:
Apart from a catchy subject line, you need a persuasive pre-header or a preview text to make the customer open his email. Preview text informs the customer what the content of the email is, and if the preview text is convincing, the probability of the email getting opened increases by manifolds.
Preview text refers to a short description placed right under the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. The majority of the email service providers allow 40 to 130 characters to be displayed to the email recipient. Use these characters wisely to draft a convincing description that makes the subscriber instantly open the email.
For example, if your subject line is: Are you ready to unveil the secret of weight loss?
You can keep the preview text as ‘Lose up to 8 Kgs with simple lifestyle changes.’
While investing all your efforts and energy into writing a creative subject line, preview text, and email copy, don’t forget about creating contextual and catchy call-to-actions (CTAs) for generating the desired outcome from your customer.
CTAs work as a signboard on websites and emails. If the CTAs are not contextual, the customer will not take the action that you want him to. For instance, including the CTA of ‘read more on a sales announcement email will confuse your customer. It will lead to no action from your customer.
Craft unique CTAs for your emails. Refrain from using the repeated and generic CTAs that a customer sees daily on different websites, such as ‘Buy Today’, ‘Read here’, etc. These boring CTAs will hardly get a click or two. On the contrary, creating urgency in your CTAs will increase the likelihood of getting clicked by most customers, such as ‘Flash 24-Hour Sale’, ‘Avail 30% off Now’, etc.
Writing an email to your customers doesn’t have to be a complicated task. No wonder email is a formal communication medium, but that doesn’t mean you have to use an austere tone and words beyond one’s comprehension.
Many amateur email marketers make the mistake of overcomplicating their email messages. The customer will discard a difficult-to-follow and understand the message, and who knows, he might even opt-out from your newsletter.
Hence, use a friendly and conversational tone. In addition, pay extra attention to the flow of your message. Use the following tips to make your messages easy-to-understand for your subscribers:
Be mindful of your audience or the segment you are sending the email to. Use the tone that your audience would like and connect with; for instance, sending an email crafted in a funny tone to a bunch of medical professionals will not bring desired results.
Your emails represent your business; thus, ensure to appear professional and trustworthy to your customers. If your emails look shady or spammy, the customer will walk out from your email list. And in the worst-case scenario, if your emails are marked as spam by customers, your account can get blacklisted.
Therefore, always proofread your messages before clicking the send button. Make sure that your messages are free from grammatical and spelling errors. Sending an erroneous email to your customer can cause irreparable harm to your company’s reputation in the market.
In addition, do not use uppercase to write your subject lines or add unnecessary question marks or exclamation marks in the subject line. It makes your email appear spam to your customers, and they might delete the email before even scanning its content.
Leverage the power of personalization to compose your emails and derive effective results from your marketing campaign. Personalization is more than simply adding your customer’s name in the salutation.
You can provide a personalized experience to your subscribers by tracking their activity on your website, considering their past purchases, and the products they have added to their wish list. Personalize their messages, provide them with the content they want to see, and you will reap excellent results from your email marketing campaign.
Remember not to treat your emails as a blog post where you can add detailed pieces of information. The email’s content should be short, concise, and to the point.
Keep yourself in your subscriber’s shoes. Will, you read an email that has 8 to 10 paragraphs and numerous headings? Of course not; who has time to read such long emails, right? Therefore, refrain from writing long emails. Stick to the old-school method of short and interesting email copy that the reader won’t mind reading.
Deciding upon how many emails you want to send to your subscribers largely depends on your email marketing goal. The frequency of sending emails plays a pivotal role in realizing the marketing goals of a business. For instance, if your goal is to generate traffic on the website, sending more emails will help you attain your goal. Similarly, if your goal is to remind your existing customers about your brand, sending a limited number of emails will be enough to do the trick.
Keep testing different email frequencies to check what helps you the best for achieving your goals.
Timings play an essential role in the marketing game. Sending the promotional emails at the wrong time will render your campaign null and void. Hence, send the emails to your subscribers when they are awake and spare a few minutes to read your email.
For instance, if a business’s customers reside in foreign countries, it must send the emails when its customers are awake and read and respond to the email.
Similarly, if you are holding a sale or launching a new collection, send an email to your customers 24 hours prior to the scheduled time of sale, collection launch, etc.
So, there you have it, readers, effective email marketing tips and tricks to help you boost your eCommerce sales and make you pull off a successful email marketing in 2021.
Do you have some other email marketing tipsto share? Please share it by commenting below. We would love to hear from you.
