Email may have started out as a platform for either personal/social or business reasons like sending birthday greetings, check-up messages, application letters, and resumes, but it quickly became an ideal way for companies to reach out to their existing consumers and potential customers.
Email marketing then became a niche in itself, as it remains an important and effective manner of building and nurturing relationships with customers despite the rise of social media marketing and video marketing.
“Some users may need such an opportunity as checking the email address for existence. There are various options that allow you to find out similar information, but none of them can guarantee 100% certainty.
None of the options provides an exact guarantee; individual mail server settings affect this.
But few services provide a guarantee.Use free email verification for this goal.”
Not convinced? Take a look at the following data provided by HubSpot in a list of digital marketing statistics:
- 5.6 billion active email accounts are forecast for 2019
- 1.5 billion active users of Gmail in October 2018
- Marketing emails sent on Tuesday have the highest open rates
- Emails with emoji in the email subject have higher chances of being opened
- 91% of consumers like to connect with companies via email
With these numbers, you may want to beef up your existing email marketing strategy. Effective email marketing means building and cultivating relationships with current or potential customers to encourage further transactions and loyalty. But before you reach your goals, you have got to start somewhere. If you are not sure how or where to begin, the following tips may help.
Practice segmentation
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos remains the richest man in the world today despite being set back $35 billion due to a divorce settlement. Brilliant email marketing strategies help him stay above Bill Gates and it is as simple as changing the way you interact with your customers.
The Telegraph once published an online piece that refers to Bezos as an “email mastermind” and it shows in the email newsletters that Amazon sends to customers and subscribers. The e-commerce giant uses different kinds of segmentation by studying the purchasing behaviors of buyers. This allows them to offer suggestions on what people may be interested in buying next, further increasing the possibility of another transaction. What’s more, this paves the way for better email personalization with spot-on messaging.
If you can apply the segmentation tactic in your own marketing emails, you may see a difference in your engagement numbers the next time around.
Take advantage of Gmail’s Promotions tab
When Gmail rolled out its tab features some years back, marketers had quite a panic because it meant that it would be easier for recipients to ignore and delete emails. However, a Litmus.com blog post demonstrates that the Promotions tab is not one that you should fear, but rather one that you should embrace and leverage.
The biggest email service in the globe utilizes machine learning to group together emails that it believes offer the most value to the user and highlights them under headings like Top Deals. As a marketer, this is a chance for you to stand out with stunning visuals, attractive offers, and spot-on messaging. To grab this opportunity, you should look into annotating your emails to specify your promotion’s details. If you think this is too time-consuming, there are tools out there that can do the job for you. But if you are willing to delve in this yourself, all you need is some coding knowledge to make it work.
Measure, measure, measure
To improve email marketing means to measure performance. There are numerous email marketing tools out there with powerful features that can aid you in doing that. That said, you may want to look into the following metrics:
- Email open rate
- Click-through rate
- Form completion rate
These things can already tell you a lot about your current email marketing approach. By studying the numbers and results, your marketing department can optimize their strategy and find better ways to capture new leads and convert more customers.
Optimize for mobile
More and more people are relying on their mobile devices for communication and it shows: 49% of emails are opened on mobile devices, as IBM discovered. Now, this is a trend shift that businesses should take advantage of.
Optimizing your marketing emails for mobile is one of the important uses of email marketing software. You can ensure the full delivery of your message and be confident that recipients engage with your message instead of sending it straight to the bin.
Mind your email manners
People do not like spam, not just because they are annoying, but also because they infringe upon privacy and some of them extract information from users while others are predatory. Regulatory bodies have noticed, which is why standards like the GDPR and CAN-SPAM exist. And sticking to such rules is one the email marketing best practices you would want to stick to because they make sure your efforts do not end unopened in the spam folder. Apart from that, being compliant with regulations helps you avoid fines and keep your business’s reputation intact.
That is why, first of all, you need to acquire the permission of would-be recipients to send marketing emails to them. This is a common stipulation in email marketing and digital privacy protection laws and it is also one that is easily missed. Taking the time to do so shows that you respect your audience’s privacy and protects you from fines.
Automate and be prompt
Investing in an email marketing software would be a good idea, as it enables you to expand your audience reach. One-click and you can send an email to a long list of people. However, that is not the only reason you should put your money on an email marketing platform.
Customers these days expect prompt responses from businesses and most individuals actually like receiving emails from them. This is especially true when people have just signed up for a newsletter, a product, or a service.
Welcome emails have a high open-rate; as much as 82%, according to a study conducted by GetResponse in 2017. You can take this time to offer additional useful information and maybe give them a sign-up discount that can convince them to convert soon.
But to ensure that you would still have your target audience’s attention by the time the welcome email gets to their inbox, you have to act fast. That is where an email marketing automation application comes in. You can configure it to send a pre-written and designed email once it is triggered by new subscriber sign-ups. This way, you no longer have to worry about missing opportunities.
Apart from this, there are numerous ways that you can use automation to your advantage.
On Maximizing Email Marketing for Your Business
There are numerous ways how to do email marketing. Those listed above are only a few though they are some of the most common approaches that even top online marketing professionals include in their marketing arsenal. Indeed, they are simple methods but they can affect your strategies and performance greatly.
Also, there is no better time to start than now. As soon as you change the way you do email marketing, the sooner you can see the changes. Remember, email remains one of the highest producers of marketing ROI. It is even cost-effective as long as you work with free or economically priced tools, especially if you are a startup, a small business, or a solopreneur.
What’s more, you can be as creative and expressive in email as in your website, blog, or social media pages. This means that you can keep your branding consistent while being interactive in your marketing email messaging.
