With almost 150 billion emails sent every day, it’s no surprise that email marketing remains one of the most widely used channels for business communication.
To get the best results from your email marketing campaigns, it’s important to craft stand-out messages that encourage engagement from your subscribers. A low open rate or having your emails reported as spam is only going to hurt your sender’s reputation and damage your bottom line.
With that in mind, let’s learn more about the top tips you can use when coming up with email campaigns to improve your results, be it email newsletters, sales emails or something else.
Anf if you’re not quite sure if email marketing is your communication channel, please read ten reasons why you should try it.
Top 10 tips for effective email marketing campaigns
To build a successful email marketing campaign, you will need the following:
- Responsive design
- Personalization
- Catchy email subject lines
- The right timing
- Offer something of value to subscribers
- Creating relevant content
- Double opt-in
- Carefully considered links
- Segmented lists
- Calls to action
Keep reading to find out more about these email marketing strategies in detail and how you can use them to improve the success of your campaign.
Responsive design
Mobile opens now account for more than half of all email opens, and it’s easy to see why. With most people now owning and using smartphones that make it easy for them to get access to their emails on the go, you can expect that more and more of your marketing emails are going to be opened in smartphone apps rather than on a personal computer.
Because of this, it’s important to use a responsive design so that an email looks and performs great no matter what device it is opened on. Make sure that calls to action are obvious and easy to tap, and make sure that the font size is ideal for reading on a smartphone.
Personalization
Personalization is key, but it’s important to be careful how you do it. Simply entering the name of your recipient in the email can actually be harmful if the rest of the message is irrelevant to them.
Personalized emails can also come across as suspicious if you are sending an email to a new subscriber that you have not built a relationship with over time. When it comes to personalizing your emails, it’s about much more than simply greeting them by name.
In fact, you do not have to use their name at all to create personalized content – instead, send messages that acknowledge the individuality of the subscriber, such as their demographic or their purchase history with your brand.
Writing great email subject lines
Subject lines are going to be the first thing that a subscriber sees when your email is delivered to their inbox, which is why it’s so important to make sure that you get this right in your email clients.
When crafting the subject line, it’s important to make sure that it is short, to the point, and gives the subscriber an idea of what to expect from the rest of the email. Subject lines that are no longer than 49 characters tend to have better open rates.
It is also important to avoid using any spam trigger words in subject lines, as these could see your entire email sent to the spam box before the subscriber even has a chance to see it.
The timing
Emails with the best open rates are not being sent during business hours. In fact, sending at night is a good email marketing strategy since this is the time when most of your subscriber list is not going to be busy at work.
Some studies have even found that between 8 pm and midnight is one of the best times to send an email for opens, clickthrough, and sales. Along with this, weekend days tend to outperform weekdays, as again, subscribers have more time to pay attention to your content.
In any case, get in touch with your customers on a regular basis. Email frequency has a major impact on how your campaigns perform. You can’t ignore your lists for months and then send out dozens of email messages in one week.
Create an email strategy for a few weeks in advance and make sure your email program accounts for the different timings of your campaigns.
Offering something of value
Offering something to subscribers in return for joining your email list is not only an ideal way to build up your list quickly but can also help to keep subscribers engaged. Most people are no longer interested in being bombarded with marketing emails trying to get them to buy something.
They are more likely to engage with messages where there is something in it for them (WIIFM), such as exclusive content, free templates, and tools, or exclusive subscriber discounts that they can take advantage of.
Creating relevant content
When it comes to writing the body of your email marketing messages, it’s important to keep it short, sweet, and to the point. A few paragraphs with a call to action are not only going to be much easier to read compared to a lengthy email, but they will also leave some interest in finding out more, which encourages the reader to actually click through.
If you’re writing too much in your email body, then readers aren’t as likely to click on your link to find out more since they will already have all the information that they need.
👉 Read more on writing email content: The anatomy of an email, that everyone wants to read.
Using double opt-in
Using double opt-in is always a worthwhile strategy for any email marketing campaign. With single opt-in, you simply collects email addresses from subscribers.
Double opt-in involves an additional step where the subscriber must confirm that they actually want to receive marketing emails from you to their email address. Bear in mind that with this method, you are likely to get fewer sign-ups.
However, quality is always better to aim for than quantity when it comes to building your email list, and double opt-in allows you to find subscribers who are actually interested in receiving information from your brand and therefore more likely to engage.
Using double opt-in makes sure you’re getting in front of potential customers, not a disinterested, cold audience. As a result, you can expect your email deliverability to improve as fewer emails land in the spam folder. Your unsubscribe rates will be improved as well.
Being mindful of links in emails
When building emails for email marketing, it’s important to consider how and where you use links. Wherever links are added, keep these best practices in mind:
- Links should be clearly labeled and easy for the reader to identify. To achieve this, make sure that links are underlined and use a different font color to the rest of the text. Link key phrases that clearly demonstrate to the reader where they will be redirected if they click on the link.
- Make sure that any links you add actually direct to where they say they will go. This is an obvious step, but it’s easy to make mistakes. Since you can’t correct any mistakes once the email is sent, spend some time clicking through the links to check them before you deploy the email campaign.
- Make sure links are properly structured throughout the email.
- All URLs should match with the content being offered. Avoid URLs in your email that direct to pages with a different URL since this can look like phishing.
Types of links in emails
- Contextual Links: These are links that are highly relevant to the content. The most important and relevant links should be placed at the top of the email. You can also add links to appropriate promotions, articles, or product pages. Placing them at the beginning of the email means that they are more likely to generate click throughs and foster customer engagement.
- Bonus Content Links: These are links that include offers outside of any contextual email content. For example, you could include an invitation to join a webinar in the side navigation panel or a banner that includes a link to a special offer. Any bonus content links that you add should be clearly marked and the offer value clearly demonstrated. Improved user experience is guaranteed.
- Permanent Links: Finally, consider links that are always available in any email communications that you send. For example, this could include a link to your website homepage, social network links, and more. One link that should always be available and easy to find is the link to unsubscribe so that any recipients who no longer want to receive your content can easily opt out.
Segmenting and targeting different email lists
Segmented email lists provide more relevancy to the reader and generate around eighteen times more revenue compared to more general messages, with a click-through rate of almost 10% higher.
While there is a time and place for sending mass messages to your email list, it’s important to segment it to make sure that your subscribers are receiving more relevant messages.
With most email marketing tools offering the segmentation feature as a part of their basic offer, it can be considered lazy not to use it. You can remove inactive subscribers, target a specific section of people in a stage of their customer journey, and more.
You can expect your overall email performance to increase, from open rates to conversion rates and just about every other email metric you can think of.
Using the right calls to action (CTAs)
No email marketing message is complete without a clear call to action, a crucial element of email design. Make sure that you are clear on what you want your readers to do when they receive the message and make this obvious using links or buttons within the email.
For the best results, consider using multiple calls to action in your emails. For example, you can include one in the first paragraph and one at the end of the message.
This reduces the risk of the call to action being overlooked and gives you a better chance of email recipients clicking through to buy a product or learn more. You can tweak the CTAs in your email marketing software and even choose
Tips for email marketing wrapped up
Serving the right type of content to your email recipients is not rocket science, but it can feel like that for a good reason. Engaging an entire list is a challenge even for the most experienced email marketers. Hopefully, these email marketing tips can put you on the right track and get you more results from your promotional emails.
One way to improve your email engagement and get on the good side of email service providers is to validate your email lists. Successful email campaigns go out to valid emails only.
Try Bouncer and eliminate outdated, duplicate, misspelled, fake and all other types of addresses from your mailing list. Sign up today and you can validate your first 100 emails for free.
