Email marketing has long proven itself to be an effective tactic. Successful campaigns engage users and result in the growth of the company’s turnovers. Yet how do you put together those campaigns and messages that will be effective?
In this article, we’ll share 10 email marketing recommendations that’ll help to grow your sales, as well as give you the names of a couple of best-ranking tools that can help to automate and simplify the process of building your email campaigns.
10 Email Marketing Rules to Increase Your Sales
1. Arrange your recipient lists & even split them
Whether you obtained a person’s email address via obligatory registration on your website, an ad, giveaway contest, referral, or anything else, there are many reasons why it’s not wise to place your entire client database into a single list for your email send-outs.
To give an example, even if you have the exact same discount, deal, or special offer for all your clients, these people most likely fit into separate target audience groups. They could be of different ages and may have various interests. These can be people who have already been doing business with you for a while and those who you haven’t won over yet, to list a couple of examples.
Moreover, smaller lists tend to have better deliverability results, and you surely don’t want to lose anyone from the list.
So, do your best to single out more specific lists and bring in client segmentation. The least you can do is split your regulars from those who you’re only planning to encourage doing business with you. Investing time in creating variations of a single message for various groups brings immense value! You can play around with the wording so as to speak the same language with your audience or put an accent on that side of the offer that this group will relate to best.
2. Write killer email subject lines & relevant content
Subject lines matter more than one may think at first. Technically, if you haven’t grabbed the attention of the reader with the email’s subject, the chances that it will be thrown in the trash without being opened and read are enormous. Here are some tips:
- Catchy phrases and wordplay are one part of the deal, the other one has to do with the value that you bring to this individual client.
- You can welcome your new users, offer coupons, discounts, or anything that they can use right off the start.
- On a similar note, congratulating your customers on holidays and attaching a “gift” (for instance, a free delivery for their next order) is a great idea too.
- Tone matters a lot here as well, thus, based on the business specifics, maneuver the words carefully.
- Also, avoid writing in Caps Lock as all letters in uppercase are often perceived as yelling.
To give you a hand with subject lines, there exist numerous tools that can help generate email subject lines on the basis of an input keyword. For instance, on the screenshot below taken from the ActiveCampaign website, there’s an example of how such free generators work.
3. Text length matters
There is no one-trick pony when it comes to the optimal length of your emails. In some situations, short word volumes with many images outperform long “scrolls”. In others, it works vice versa. Nonetheless, you’ll never know which tactic suits your particular email marketing campaign until you check and see for yourself. Consider alternating between several options and monitor the results.
According to the stats that were collected by HubSpot on ideal email length:
“Data suggests the ideal length of an email is between 50 and 125 words. Emails this length had a response rate above 50%. A similar study found emails with approximately 20 lines of text, or about 200 words, had the highest clickthrough rates. When in doubt, keep emails short and under 200 words.
4. Visual appeal is an eye-catcher
Dry texts are considered “flat” reading and are applicable for business correspondence. Bearing that in mind, time put into assembling beautiful email templates pays off. Fonts, colors, images, quotes, icons, videos… No matter which of these elements make it to your email page, sticking to a style is a great pointer to note down.
Multiple tools grant the opportunity to simply customize the design of an email using drag-and-drop functionality without the necessity to turn to difficult coding. Here’s an example on the screenshot taken on the Campaign Monitor website.
In much, the same rule applies to many of the emails that are sent from CRMs, for instance, half-automated email templates that are used by sales specialists. In such cases, though, you might be in need of assistance from your CRM administrator or Salesforce developer to make things look great.
5. Use personalization
Among the major things that you need to keep in mind deals with personalization. That said, instead of crafting your message for a vague receiver, consider addressing people in emails using “you”. Similarly, it is easy to automatically pull out the client’s first name in the email using code (ex., Dear [client_name] will appear as Dear John).
Such a communication approach creates a dialogue between you and the recipient of the email. It makes your message more personal and your offers more special as if catered just for this single person (not a bunch of people in a send out list).
Bottom line, when creating an email and a campaign, make sure to keep in mind every single person who’ll open it and read it. Ask yourself, does this email bring value to this person? Is it of interest to them?
6. Test the messages you plan on sending
A/B testing is a great tool not to overlook. By showing half of your audience one call to action and a different one to the other, you can test which of them are more powerful and work better. In the same manner, you can test subject lines, headings, and any other message texts that you send. After some time, you can end up with a unique “almanac” of those tips and tricks that are right for you.
7. Double-check all the links & clickables
You may add many things to your email template. These can be videos, images of your products, various buttons with calls to action, surveys, review invitations, just to name a few. Yet regardless of which elements you’re including, it is crucial to check (and then to double-check) that all your links lead your users to the needed pages or places.
You would be surprised how often people add broken links to emails or those that lead to irrelevant or non-existing pages! Landing on a “Page not found” or “404 error” ruins the recipient’s experience, and is a rookie mistake that you certainly shouldn’t make.
8. Adapt your email for mobile devices
It is no secret that the world is going mobile. This means that more and more people use their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices for everyday actions, including opening emails. This is exactly why it is very important to make sure that your email template looks just as appealing on a mobile device as it is on the desktop.
In many cases, it makes sense to get rid of those elements that just don’t fit on mobile. Therefore, before launching an email send out, spend a minute or two to check that it will look good and will function properly on various screen sizes that are smaller than the desktop version. To be fair, you wouldn’t want to be losing the attention of your recipients just because they fail to get your message.
9. Send emails on a schedule
Consistency is vital as well. Ideally, there should be a fixed interval of how often you send emails to your customers. After all, you shouldn’t disappear from their radars entirely and, on the other hand, you mustn’t flash before their eyes too often. The latter usually leads to your recipients spamming you or having them unsubscribe from your send-outs.
It is considered good practice to plan your email marketing send-outs ahead of time, say, for a week or two in advance. Share the latest news, handy articles, the best deals, whatever is relevant and of interest to your email receivers.
Some tools that can help you organize the send-out process better and design beautiful emails are:
- MailChimp
- AWeber
- Sendinblue
- HubSpot tools for emails
- Drip
- Campaign Monitor
- Active Campaign
- Email Octopus
- Mailjet
10. Analyze how successful your campaign was
No matter how well or badly your campaign performed, you must do your correction work to find out what went well or wrong. Allocate the strong and weak points, take a look at the statistics of the email openings, and make conclusions. Re-use those tactics that work well with your target audience and, likewise, avoid the not so effective “moves” in your future emails.
Many tools offer reporting and analytics tools to help you track the needed data and metrics simply. For example, here’s a screenshot that’s taken on the MailChimp website showing such features.
Final Word
To wrap up everything mentioned above, running email campaigns is a wonderful way to connect with your recipients. By crafting visually appealing templates with good content that’s valuable to your customers and prospects, you have a great chance to promote your business and start selling more.
