What does email marketing offer you? For a start, it offers brilliant ROI, the ability to implement personalization at scale, opportunity to foster lasting relationships with customers, and means to carve a unique brand identity, among many others. This is what makes email the go-to marketing channel for pretty much every business out there. But, it also brings with itself its own set of complications. Because it is used by billions across the globe, the landscape of email marketing keeps evolving with every passing day. And if you fail to keep yourself abreast of the latest best practices, you will find yourself struggling to keep up with your competitors.
In today’s article, we are going to dive deep into a host of potent email marketing strategies that will empower you to implement high-performing campaigns. Read on to find out!
Build an Organic Email List
Building an organic email list is a crucial component of growing your business. After all, if you don’t assemble an audience, who will you send your newsletters and promotional emails to? However, list building is a rather tricky affair. You would want to keep the following pointers handy.
- Use single or double opt-in while acquiring new subscribers. It is absolutely imperative to seek the consent of your contacts before adding them to your list. It goes a long way towards earning their trust and building your brand reputation in the process. Employing a single opt-in presents less friction during the subscription process, which is why more brands incline toward it. However, if you decide to go ahead with implementing double opt-in, nobody’s going to hold it against you. Yes, it might have a higher failure rate, but you will always remain assured that the contacts you gain at the end of it are indisputably interested in hearing from you.
- Whatever you do, never, ever purchase an email list. We understand that building your list might be time-consuming at times, but believe us, buying a list isn’t going to get you anywhere. Such lists are chock full of invalid and inactive contacts. When you send emails to such addresses, you only heighten your chances of getting flagged by spam filters. Let’s say, by some sheer miracle, you somehow manage to mine a few legitimate addresses. What next? Should you mail them? Definitely not. These people have no idea about you and when you attempt to send them messages without their consent, you’ll invariably find yourself flagged or blocked.
- Ensure your content quality is top-notch. Along with adding new contacts to your list, you also have to focus on keeping them engaged. You will be able to achieve this only if your content game is on point. Remember, when someone subscribes to your newsletter or communications, they do so in the hope of picking up some new and original insights. If you fail to offer them that, they’ll gradually grow increasingly disengaged. Besides, if your content is gripping, it’ll motivate your existing subscribers to spread the word with their friends and family, providing your list with new contacts in the process.
- Be clever with gated offers or lead magnets. Make sure that whatever resource or content you are gating – an ebook, a tutorial, a white paper, a survey – holds enough value such that new visitors will be tempted enough to provide you with their email addresses in exchange for it.
- Keep as few input fields as possible in your signup or opt-in forms. Ask yourself- what is the bare minimum you need from your visitors to add them to your email list? Their name and email address, correct? So, your signup form should have no more than 2 fields either. If you want to include one more to ask for their contact number, go ahead, but in any case, make certain that there are no more than 3-4 fields in your form. Excessive data fields can plant suspicion in visitors’ minds and eventually deter them from subscribing.
Increase Your Value Proposition With Email List Segmentation
How many emails do you receive daily? Upwards of a hundred quite easily, right? Now, how many of them do you actually open? Only the ones that are relevant to your current needs, interests, and pain points, of course. Well, that’s the power targeted messaging holds. Email gives you the scope of enhancing the value proposition of your emails by allowing you to implement personalization at scale. However, to do that, you first need to segment your list- divide your contacts into different sections based on various parameters such as age, gender, occupation, past purchases, preferences, position in the sales funnel, and the like.
So, what are some things you should keep in mind while crafting your segmentation strategy? Take a look
- Chart out a simple segmentation framework. Don’t try to cram in too many parameters from the beginning itself. This will make matters unnecessarily difficult for you. The best course of action, thus, is to start with 4-5 fundamental parameters and then add on more with time. While complex segmentations certainly provide you with stellar results, they also demand massive time and resources from your end. Hence, always pit the returns against the investment before proceeding.
- React as per your audience. The segmentation parameters that you define are based directly on your customers’ behaviors and interactions, right? And you know as well as we do how incredibly dynamic it can be. Therefore, you must be flexible with your segmentation strategies. Keep an eye out for the latest trends and data and work them into your plans accordingly.
- Be clear about your objective. Different businesses have different goals in mind for segmenting their lists. Some do it to increase engagement, some to improve deliverability, some to amp up sales, and some do it to achieve all of these. Having clarity regarding your segmentation goal is essential as it goes a long way towards shaping your strategies.
Practice Email Accessibility
To foster an inclusive online environment, several international legal frameworks have now made it mandatory for businesses to make their content and communication accessible for people with auditory, visual, cognitive, speech, or physical disabilities.
Here are some practices you can follow to make your email campaigns accessible.
- Design your emails using a single-column layout. This will help you steer clear of multiple rendering issues commonly encountered with multi-column layouts such as overflowing text, overlapping columns, and shifting of images among others. Besides, given how the majority of emails are coded using tables, implementing a single-column layout will help you to establish a logical reading order. As a result, people using assistive technologies like screen readers will have no trouble consuming your emails.
- Make sure to write alt texts for every single image being used in your email, and make them descriptive. Screen readers rely on them to interpret images for their users. Thus, the more detailed your alt text, the better the user experience you will be able to deliver.
- Be mindful of the color contrast. This has a huge impact on your email’s readability. The ideal contrast ratio between the text and background should be, at the very least, 3:1 for large fonts and 4.5:1 for small font sizes. Of course, it is not possible to determine this with the naked eye. Thankfully, there are multiple online tools such as Monsido, Contrast Ratio, Coolors, Contrast Finder, and others that you can use.
Monitor Your Performance Meticulously
You will never be able to drive your campaigns to their full potential unless you are tracking your performance effectively. To do so, you first need to design a foolproof email campaign report. What are some of the metrics it should include, you ask? We’ve listed them below.
- Clickthrough Rate (CTR): CTR tells you about the total percentage of subscribers who interacted with the links in your emails. It helps you monitor the engagement your campaigns are able to generate.
- Conversion Rate: This metric lets you determine how many of your recipients went ahead with completing an action that a particular link asked of them. Apart from validating the quality of your emails, the conversion rate also offers you much-needed clarity regarding your ROI.
- Bounce Rate: The bounce rate informs you of the total percentage of sent emails that failed to land in your recipients’ inboxes. A high bounce rate might be indicative of a lot of inactive or invalid email addresses being present in your email list.
Wrapping It Up
Figuring out the recipe for the ideal email marketing campaign might be a little time-intensive. But, once you crack the code, there’s no looking back. We hope that the tips and tricks we shared with you today will come to your aid in the future.
