This blog article will provide you with 14 practical email marketing tips to assist you in emailing potential customers and existing customers. Email is one of the most used methods of communication, especially in the professional world. Email marketing may not be the most flashy or exciting method of marketing. However, it is arguably one of the most important methods and is one that every digital marketer should know about.
Why Email Marketing?
With the recent surge in social media marketing, many believe that email marketing is no longer beneficial. However, email marketing skills are still critical towards generating leads, retaining customers, and increasing brand awareness. Therefore, aspiring digital marketers need to be familiar and comfortable with email marketing. After all, once you collect a person’s email address, you can now contact them on your aspiring digital marketers must prioritize terms rather than hoping they see one of your ads or social media posts. For this reason, email marketing still offers by far some of the best return on investment of any marketing platform at around a 40 to 1 ROI.
So, in this blog article, we’ll identify 14 practical email marketing tips that will help you succeed with email marketing and impress your boss.
1) Send Quality Content and Information
Nothing is more annoying than receiving an email from a brand that serves no purpose or adds no value to the email recipient. Digital marketers have the opportunity to create value with their emails and entice the recipient to visit the brand’s website or other essential links attached within the email.
A digital marketer’s ultimate goal is for the email recipient to stay on the mailing list and not opt-out. Ways digital marketers may ensure recipients remain interested in receiving emails from the brand is by offering giveaways, infographics, and more to keep customers engaged. Remember, the more value you can give to your email subscribers, the more they will like you and want to open up your emails. This then gives you the ability to slip in your promotions and sales emails. Try to stick to the golden rule of 80% of your emails providing value, and 20% of your emails are used to sell your product/service.
2) Ensure You Have a Strong Email List
Having a solid email list is the first step to reach your target audience. Take the time to gather contacts and collect as many email addresses as possible. You also want to make sure that the email addresses you collect are of people that are potentially interested in your brand; if you email an individual who has not subscribed to your email list, there’s a good chance your email will be marked as spam. If you get too many spam complaints, this will ultimately start to hurt your deliverability score which will impact emails ending up in your subscribers inbox. So, please only email those that have opted in.
3) Spend More Time on the Subject Line to Make it Click Worthy
The first thing a recipient of an email sees with an email is the subject line. The subject line dictates the tone of the email and its intended purpose, and in most cases, most email users do not engage with an email if the subject line is unappealing. A popular rule of thumb is to spend 80% of your focus on nailing the subject line and 20% on the body of the email. After all, if your subject line can’t hook them, they won’t read your email. With that being said, though, never use clickbait subject lines. There is no faster way to lose email subscribers than by tricking them to click into your emails.
47% of email users open the email based on the subject line. With that data in mind, aspiring digital marketers must prioritize the subject line.
Ways to improve the subject line include:
- Add an element of curiosity
- Add an element of urgency
- Integrate a question to the recipient
4) Utilize Emails for Mobile Devices
Around 62% of emails are opened on a mobile device. If your email incorporates visuals, consider extra spacing to make sure your emails look good on mobile.
If your email is unreadable or tough on the eyes from a mobile device perspective, chances are your intended audience will not want to read your email. Once a potential or current customer decides they are not interested in the email, they might unsubscribe from the mailing list altogether.
So, take the time to optimize the visuals for mobile devices and use great spacing. It is also vital to utilize short subject lines so the viewer on the mobile device may see all of the content without anything being cut off.
5) Keep the Email List Fresh
Obtaining email addresses is one of the primary keys to success concerning digital marketing. Once a company has an email address, marketers have the opportunity to target specific audiences for specific promotions whenever they want.
Maintaining and refreshing an email list is essential because a well-maintained list ensures a brand targets potentially interested customers. With that being said, make sure to scrub your email list every month so that you aren’t still sending messages to those that never open your emails. Most companies are charged per email recipient they are emailing, so you don’t want to be wasting money on those that have never open your emails. Furthermore, these people are hurting your ability to analyze how well your emails are performing properly. But, before getting rid of email addresses completely, see if you can try to re-engage with them somehow via some type of special offer. If you still can’t get any bites from these people, it might be best to clean them from your list.
6) Know the Best Time to Send an Email
With all the work you put into creating a successful email, you want to ensure you send it at the best time to ensure that the email gets seen.
The best time of day to send an email (in order) are:
- 10 AM
- 8 PM
- 2 PM
- 6 AM
These are generally true, but you’ll want to look at your email open rates to track this specifically for your email list, as every target demographic can be different.
7) Know the Best Days to Send an Email
Similar to knowing the best time to send an email, you must know what days are best to send the email so that you may prepare ahead of time.
Knowing the day, you need to send the email also provides you with a due date to ensure you get the work done.
The best days to send an email (in order) are:
- Tuesday
- Thursday
- Wednesday
Once again, the above is generally true on average, but you’ll want to make sure you look at your analytics to determine the best days.
8) Break Up Your Email Copy
With emails, you want to be as simple as possible and get right to the exact benefits for the email reader. With your email copy, you want to ensure content that excites the reader and encourages them to read all the way through. Make sure to use plenty of spacing and focus on breaking up long sections of text as nobody wants to read an email novel.
9) Send Welcome Emails
Welcome emails are essential for digital marketers and brands to adopt because they serve as a first impression to the potential or new customer. Welcome emails may be sent as a way through subscribing, purchasing, or registering for an event.
Sending a welcome email is the first step in introducing a potential or new customer to your brand, and it is essential to send it. In addition, they are often a great place to let your subscribers know what they can expect from being an email subscriber of yours and how frequently they can expect to hear from you.
Welcome emails may be automated and activated instantly as part of an email automation sequence.
10) Reply-to-Address
You must ensure you have the correct reply email. If the potential customer replies to the email, you want to ensure it is not an automated no-reply email. Furthermore, your open rates will increase if the email is sent from a person as opposed to from an automated email address such as info@company.com
11) Avoid the Spam Box
A digital marketer’s worst nightmare concerning email marketing is either unsubscriptions or the email arriving in spam.
There are several ways to avoid the spam box. Here are a few ways:
- Avoid buying email lists
- Those people did not subscribe
- Avoid spam trigger words such as “Buy this now.”
- Avoid emojis
- Don’t mislead with subject lines
- Don’t have too many links or attachments in your email.
12) Add a Compelling Call-to-Action
- “Redeem your code now for 20% off your first order.”
- “Share this code with a friend for free shipping on both your orders.”
- “Click here to buy our brand new Summer 2021 Tanks.”
13) Send A / B Test Emails
Split testing with emails allows you to monitor your brand’s performance. It is also important to remember that when experimenting, you change one variable at a time. You should be A/B testing your Subject Lines, the day/time the email is sent, the body of text, and Call To Actions.
14) Consider Online Training
There’s a lot more to learn about email marketing than just this quick overview. Getting emails takes a lot of time and money to acquire for a business, so once you get them, you want to make sure you’re able to convert them into customers at a high rate. There are plenty of online certification courses that can give you an overview of email marketing. Still, if you want to get hired, you need to make sure you prioritize work experience, as work experience is the #1 thing hiring managers look at when determining who to hire.
If you want to get real-world work experience as an email marketer, consider taking JobPrepped as we’ll not only train you in email marketing, but we’ll also give you the exact work experience that hiring managers want so you can get an entry-level marketing job quickly. We’re proud to say that we’ve helped 3,000+ people get entry-level marketing jobs, and 94.3% of JobPrepped students get marketing interviews or job offers within just 3 weeks. A certification in email marketing may not completely differentiate you from competitors in the job hunt. However, consider getting a certificate in email marketing if you feel you would like to expand your knowledge and take steps to become a professional.
Good luck out there!
Will Lazar