Email marketing reigns supreme when it comes to digital marketing.
Even Facebook, which is currently a popular platform for marketing, does not come close. Effective email marketing returns $38 for every $1 spent by a brand. Plus, what makes email marketing so powerful is email is still a preferred channel of consumers to receive communications from businesses. An eMarketer article also states that 62.9% of the respondents selected email as their most preferred method of receiving communications from brands.
Based on just this information, email communication is a necessity for building brand marketing strategies. Today we will show you carefully picked 7 email marketing answers to email marketing questions, that can ensure your new strategy will be effective and thriving.
1. How to perform A/B testing?
Some tricks to get more ROI out of your email marketing can be elementary. However, they can mean the difference between your audience interacting with your emails or sending them directly to the bin. One of those email marketing strategies is performing A/B testing.
A/B testing is essentially dividing your email list into two and sending them two different email versions. Then, based on the received response you can verify which one gets the most attention. You can also do many variations on A/B testing. By splitting your list into smaller parts, you can send more email variations. If you decide on a larger test sample, your results will be more accurate. It’s important to select the names from the database randomly to get the best results. Handpicking your recipients can give false results, and be unhelpful in figuring out which version of your email really works better.
It’s also important to know exactly what you want tested. It can be either CTA, subject line, personalization options, images or the offer itself. Don’t generalize though! Concentrating on one or two options will give better results than putting everything at once.
You can also send your emails on different days of the week or times of the day. That could help you discover when your audiences are most likely to open your messages. By doing this, you can boost your open rates and your sales. If A/B testing is not advanced enough to you, try A/X testing instead. We can guide you on how to set it up on the Elastic Email dashboard in no time.
2. Is designing for mobile necessary?
In short - yes. An early 2019 survey conducted by Litmus showed that 41.9% of the respondents prefer to open their emails using mobile. 39.9% of customers, like to use webmail and 18.2% still employ their desktops for the task. This means that most people would rather do their email tasks on mobile, and that includes interacting with marketing emails.
That is why it is important for email writers and designers to keep in mind that they have to create a marketing email that would look good both on computers and mobile devices. It’s imperative, that email is fully interactive and functional on smaller screens. Sometimes, it will require you to send test messages on your account, to see exactly how the email will look like.
Cutting out mobile testing can result in link access issues, images not reading correctly or shifting of text. Therefore it’s best to optimize and ensure your audience will be able to interact with the important elements of your newsletter, like your latest promotions, newest products, coupon codes, and similar things. By including this view your audience can open emails on the go and see every part of your email correctly. As a result, you will be able to see higher engagement rates and more clicks.
But, if making a great mobile design is a challenge, you can seek the assistance of graphic design tools. If you want to advance in your writing and design, we strongly suggest checking out some free marketing tools we’ve picked to assist.
By utilizing them, you can send visually appealing email newsletters to your audiences without a sweat. You can also use our Email Designer to create beautiful emails within few minutes. Also, in Elastic Email, there is a toggle screen option within Email Designer, to make editing easier.
3. How to time my emails well?
I’m sure you’ve heard that the best day to send emails is Tuesday. We already covered this topic as well as many more common email marketing myths. It is, however, a good idea to plan your campaign for a specific time, by analyzing your statistics. That way you’ll have some idea regarding the time and day your subscribers open their inboxes.
Apart from sending each email marketing campaign at the right time and day of the week, you have to time your emails according to season.
For example, if you have products that can help people during the cold weather, such as wool socks, thick sweaters, and similar, you have to feature them a little bit before the winter months arrive. By doing so, you can help people prepare for the season ahead of time. This strategy can also work for holidays such as the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, December holidays and more.
4. Should I segment my contact list?
Your audiences have different wants or needs. Not everybody will appreciate the same things in life, or in an email, for that matter. And because of that, the general email campaign sent to all your subscribers might not be as successful as you hoped.
This is where one of very important email marketing tips comes in. Segment your audiences and run different but quick campaigns for each of them.
By segmenting your list and providing personalized emails you can increase your revenue and transaction rates even 6 times higher than usual. Furthermore, there are tons of creative ways you can run segmentation on your list, and we are sure to cover them in our future posts. A few examples are sorting by geography, age, shopping budget or gender.
The case point is, that by segmenting your contacts list you can tap into the preferences of your target market and maximize your profitability. This can result in more click-throughs for your newsletters and better sales for your online store.
5. How to personalize email messages?
According to an Oracle Marketing Cloud survey, most marketers believe that personalized emails are the most effective. However, many of them also believe that those emails are the most difficult to create. Due to this fact, personalizing emails, and doing it right, can be a challenge. With the Oracle updates, marketers now have access to enhanced AI-driven tools to streamline the personalization process.
There are many options to start the process and send successful personal campaigns. You can start your personalization strategy using software that lets you study the behaviors and preferences of your customers. You can also follow their activities on the web and feed that information to an email marketing software. Once you have collected enough data, you can use it to ensure that every newsletter you send to recipients contains only content (or products or services) that are relevant to them.
Personalization goes hand in hand with segmentation. Try to implement both of those techniques to maximize your potential. You can send specific messages only to women, divide groups by their birthdays or age, and get higher results than sending generic emails.
6. Explore the full potential of email marketing services
The capabilities of effective email marketing software are not limited to helping you send out your emails in a timely manner. This makes them essential software for startups and growing businesses. They are also equipped with tools that allow you to drill down into your campaigns’ performances. You can employ such tools to gain a comprehensive outlook on how your email marketing is doing.
Furthermore, some email marketing services can be integrated with each other, providing smoother and more efficient performance. With so many options for application integration, you can pick and choose software that can help you increase the quality and transparency of your email marketing. And, with a clearer view, you will be able to further improve on your campaigns.
7. Optimize your strategy
When you have a better idea about what makes your customers tick and what the things are that make your newsletters successful, you can refine your email marketing strategy
This is where you can apply what you have learned by having an in-depth look at your email marketing performance data. Once you do, you can send marketing emails that hit all the right buttons which will bring you more revenue. It would also help to optimize your email drip campaign, which could include introductory newsletters that let your audience know about what they can get from your brand.
Effective email marketing begins with the right strategies
Though email marketing is an effective form of marketing in the digital space, a lot of success still depends on the contents of your communications and how you deliver them. For you, to achieve your sales and business growth goals, it is imperative that you apply email marketing best practices, especially when it comes to understanding what your audience wants from you. It would also help if you allow your email recipients to choose how often to receive newsletters from you.
Email fatigue, or inbox fatigue, is what you call when contacts become overloaded with email from brands. This happens when they receive certain types of newsletters too often that could be better received weekly, monthly, or seasonally. When they get tired of getting communications from your brand, your contacts are most likely to click unsubscribe to reduce their email clutter.
Still, you can prevent that from happening. When you include the kinds of things that your audience loves to receive and read, especially informative items and those that contain deals, you can keep them happy and keep them converting.
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