19 Jul, 2019
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Email marketing deserves more credit. In today’s world, it seems that everything is focused on social media, and email is becoming viewed as something of a dinosaur; a way for brands to fill your inbox with campaigns you’ll never open.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, a 2015 report from the Direct Marketing Association states that email has an ROI of $38 for every $1 invested — that’s a 3,800% return. With numbers like this, email is without a doubt one of the biggest assets in your marketing toolbox.
Related: A Guide to Email Marketing Metrics and How to Calculate Them
To help you refine your skills (or just get started), we’ve put together this master list of nine email marketing tips to help boost your revenue.
A quick look at the data should prove a resounding yes. You would be hard-pressed to find a business that couldn’t stand to benefit from 3,800% ROIs. Every brand needs marketing and companies should be utilizing every effective marketing channel out there.
Related: 20 of Our Favorite Email Marketing Campaigns Built with Ampjar
That said, there are some businesses for which email marketing will be less relevant than others. Businesses that are almost entirely social media-based may find that trying to shift their focus to email may prove largely unfruitful. Still, it’s a good idea to expand your marketing channels for the future — if you start building an email list now, it will always be there if you need it.
For everyone else, email is a powerful tool that should not be overlooked. To give email the attention it so rightly deserves, let’s cut straight to the chase and jump into our list.
According to the Baymard Institute, 69.57% of customers abandon their carts after an e-commerce shopping session. Once they navigate away from your site, they may never make it back to complete their purchases — unless you play it smart that is.
Nowadays, it’s incredibly easy to follow up with customers who’ve abandoned their carts. Assuming you have their email address, just send them a note reminding them that they have an incomplete order.
Of course, since they didn’t finish the purchase in the first place, you may need to entice them a bit. Consider offering a coupon code or other promotion along with your email. This way, someone who was really on the edge may be convinced to finally go for it.
Anyone who was already adding items to their cart was pretty far down in your sales funnel, so if you play your cards right all you need is a little push to put them over the edge.
This email from GoDaddy does everything a good retargeting email should: it reaches out to the customer after they’ve already expressed strong interest and escalates the sale with an offer the customer just can’t refuse.
Not everyone on your list is going to have the same preferences and purchasing habits, and your emails should reflect that. Breaking up your list into chunks and catering to each individual group based on their preferences, website activity, the type of content they browsed, etc. will give better results than sending one massive eblast out to everyone.
For example, if you run a homeware store and have one customer that purchases a new scented candle every week and another that buys eco-friendly diapers, it doesn’t make sense to send both of them the same email about a sale on baby food. Instead, sort these customers into two groups, baby and candle, and send different emails to each of them.
You can choose any criteria you can think of for your segmentation. A few good ones to test out to start are location, purchase cycle, and content topic.
EMarketer says that “39% of email marketers who segment their email lists see better open rates and 28% saw better email deliverability and earned more revenue.” It’s definitely worth the energy to give this strategy a try.
Related: 6 Ways To Drive Traffic With Email Marketing
Email marketing is as much a science as it is an art. While marketing definitely benefits from empathy and our ability to communicate with others, it should also be based on cold, hard data.
Split testing your emails and looking at the analytics is vital, and it’s worth setting aside time each week to look under the hood. By comparing the results of two emails back to back, you can gain some important insights as to what’s working in your campaigns, and what isn’t.
Start by creating a campaign and sending it out to your subscribers. At the same time, send out another email and see how the two compare data-wise after the campaign is over. Look through the numbers and see which best achieves the goal you set out to reach. Once you have a clear winner, start the process over, but this time with two different versions of the best performing email. Continue refining smaller and smaller details until you have the perfect email strategy.
Few things say “spam” like an impersonal email that’s sent out to 10,000 members of an email list. When people see “dear shopper” pop up as the first line in an email, they instinctively turn away.
According to Experian, “personalized promotional mailings have 29 percent higher unique open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates than nonpersonalized (sic) mailings”. Another study by Marketing Dive says that open rates are up to 50% higher for personalized emails. That’s a huge ROI for taking a few minutes to have your email marketing app grab your customers’ names and throw them into the subject or greeting.
This email from Enterprise is an excellent example of email personalization. The subject catches the receiver’s attention by using their name before continuing on with the advertisement.
When you send out an email, the copy you write serves as your salesperson. Since there’s no one making direct contact with your customer and guiding them through the sale in person, you need to make sure your copy grabs whoever opens that email and leads them gracefully to your CTA.
Signing up for the mailing lists of people who are clearly doing hard sells (often for their training courses) is an excellent way to learn how to write persuasive copy. These entrepreneurs are often masters of direct response copywriting. Check out the opening of this email from Jared Goetz, an entrepreneur promoting his Shopify training courses:
The copy grabs you from the beginning and makes you want to learn exactly what these two have discovered. As an added bonus, Jared throws in some urgency (“limited spots”) to help drive more conversions. Signing up for email lists like this can teach you a lot.
When you turn on the radio and hear something by a band like the Beatles, you can tell who it’s by even if you’ve never heard the song before. You want your emails to have that same instantly recognizable quality so that when your subscribers find them in their inbox, they immediately know where they came from.
You can start working towards this by using a standout email template that oozes originality and displays your unique selling points front and center. Take a look at this email from CVS for inspiration:
The colors are bold and the logo pops out as soon as you open the email. No one will take more than a second to know who this email is coming from.
Robots are the future. Why waste time sending out your own emails when you can have a small army of cyborgs deliver them for you? Automated email programs allow you to schedule your emails in advance and can often advise you on the best time to send out a campaign.
What’s more, many of these platforms allow you to split test your emails, test for the best sending times, and even integrate AI. Automating your emails gives you time to focus your efforts elsewhere, while still running a successful email marketing campaign.
Tools like Ampjar Fast Emails can help you automate the email design process. Ampjar pulls your Instagram feed and makes stunning emails based on beautifully designed templates.
None of these tips mean anything if you don’t have any email recipients. The more subscribers you have on your list, the more potential sales you can make, and the greater your potential revenue (if you’re a content creator you can even monetize your list via email ads).
Related: How to Optimize your Instagram Bio Link and Landing Page
Ensuring that email signup forms are clearly visible across your web presence is the best way to grow your list. Make sure they’re front and center on your website, create a Facebook Messenger chatbot that asks for email addresses or even make posts on Instagram instructing your followers on how to subscribe.
This landing page from successful SEO blog Backlinko is a great example of an email signup form that works. As soon as you navigate to the site, you have only one clear option: enter your email into the form. Simple strategies like this can work surprisingly well.
The unsubscribe button doesn’t have to be the end of your relationship with your subscriber. While you do have to honor a subscriber’s request to leave your mailing list, you can also provide them with other options before they say goodbye. When you offer a middle ground between unsubscribing and receiving frequent emails, you’ll often be able to keep the subscriber on your list.
Depending on what your email strategy is, you can implement this in a few different ways. If you have a number of different lists, you can ask your subscriber to choose which ones they’d like to stay subscribed to. However, if you only have one list, you may be able to retain the lead by offering a less frequent mailing option — if you’re currently sending one email every three days, give them the option to only receive one email every week or two.
We hope these tips have sparked some inspiration in you. Think we left any pro-tips out? Send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll be sure to include them in another blog post.
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