Email marketing tips to boost your campaigns

Six tips to achieve email marketing greatness.

Email marketing is a key player in your content strategy. Studies show over 97% of people check their email every day, which makes email a very interesting channel for creating a lasting, ongoing relationship with your audience.

At the same time, email marketing represents a unique way of keeping readers inside your brand universe. Away from the ads and buzz of social media, email provides readers with a noise-free environment. Successful brands use this to their advantage in order to immerse readers inside their brand. Mirroring your website elements like your logo, typography, images and tone of voice can help level up your brand image.

When used well, email marketing is a great tool to complement your content marketing efforts. Read below to discover some great tips to take your email campaigns from good to great.

1. Be relevant

The first and most important thing to remember about email marketing is that your contacts receive a lot of emails each and every day. You need to cut out the noise and deliver only value to their inbox, in a timely manner. Content should always be relevant to your audience, starting with localising it to the language and experience of every recipient. And whether you want to help educate, entertain, inspire, or solve a problem, you want to make it all about your audience. Successful brands like project management tool Trello employ a 90/10 approach, with 90% of content being educational, and 10% promotional. Trello focuses on subjects like time management, team motivation, and productivity in order to support their audience, and has enjoyed consistent growth in their subscriber count as a result.

Being relevant means not just being helpful and consistent, but also timely. The biggest cost of an email marketing campaign isn’t measured in “spend” like ads, or with “time” like content, but in “unsubscribers”. When you appear in your audience’s inbox too often, or appear too self-promotional, you risk alienating your subscribers and perhaps losing them for good. So be like Trello, pinpoint the challenges your contacts may have and try to solve them. And when you need to speak about your products and services, remember to highlight benefits instead of features.

2. Be consistent

One of the key elements behind the success of your emailing campaigns is consistency. If your objective is to build a long-lasting relationship with your clients and leads, then consistency is your path to success when it comes to delivery, content, format, branding and design. Before starting, make sure you have the resources to make your email marketing an ongoing effort, and grow your list of subscribers over time.

The downside to being inconsistent in your approach to email can be costly. Let’s say you have a contact list of 5000. One day you send an email to 4000 contacts. Next day you contact 60, and the following one 300, and next you do nothing for a month. This approach will raise a flag to mail servers who will label you as inconsistent in time and recurrence, affecting your sender reputation and possibly landing your emails in the all-dreaded spam folder.

3. Define your strategy

Email success starts with your strategy. Knowing exactly what you want to get out of your email campaigns is a must. Are you looking to drive visits to your website? Nurture your leads? Maybe your objective is to increase brand awareness or drive sales?

Knowing the objective behind your strategy will help you define your content and what kind of email you want to send. A newsletter is sent periodically to direct traffic to your website, and is more carefully crafted to look appealing and engaging. An email flow is triggered automatically after filling out a form and is usually meant for lead nurturing purposes. A transactional email like a ‘thank you’ or ‘welcome’ email has little design and is sent automatically for confirmation purposes. Understanding your strategy will help you define the type of emails you will be sending out.

4. Bullet-proof your subject line

Your subject line is the first thing your readers will see, it needs to spark their curiosity and hook them into wanting to learn more. Some good tips for your subject line include adding numbers or summarising what the email is about. Stay away from capital letters and exclamation marks, and avoid overused words like free, giveaway, finalist or prize, as these will open the door to the spam folder. Instead, consider providing an insight or adding industry-related keywords with high monthly traffic.

Subject lines are one of the most contrasted elements inside A/B Tests. Make sure you try different subject lines, learn from your results, and your open rate will take off in no time.

5. Shine with design

Consistency is not only about sending your emails regularly. It’s also about mirroring the look and feel of your website. Your emails should reflect brand assets like your logo, corporate colours, typography and tone of voice. By keeping readers inside your brand universe across channels, you help build trust and professionalism.

Keep in mind the user experience is another important part of your email. No one likes cluttered emails with overlapping elements. Keep everything tidy and well-spaced, and remember to test your email on different devices and browsers.

6. Learn from your metrics

Like Peter Drucker says: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure”. Keeping a close eye on the metrics behind your emailing campaigns will help you learn and rock future campaigns. Your overall success lies in learning from metrics such as your open rate, click through rate and bounce rate. These essential indicators help gauge the success behind your campaigns and help you reach new heights. Also, keep an eye on the evolution of your subscribers list. This key metric is often disregarded and can help measure the success behind your email marketing efforts overall.

Your email campaigns are ready to shine

Email marketing is a key part of your content strategy. Whether you want to convert sales, drive traffic to your website, highlight new products or services, or become top of mind in the eyes of your audience, email marketing can yield great results for your business. And when you want to ensure your content will be appreciated everywhere your business needs, you can count on us for help.