Despite continuing to offer high ROI and being more welcome among audiences than intrusive ads, email marketing campaigns can still flop. Keep the following five strategies in mind so the same doesn’t happen to yours.
1. Curate Your Mailing List
A healthy, up-to-date mailing list is fundamental for all your other email marketing efforts. Such a list builds up gradually by engaging and interesting subscribers. You can persuade them in various ways — offer free promotional materials or welcome discounts, have interested parties complete surveys, etc. The ideal mailing list contains only subscribers who’ve opted in themselves and are interested in hearing from you.
That also means maintaining the list. Some people sign up on a whim and never engage. Others might buy a product at first but stop opening campaign and other emails after that. Don’t be afraid to sunset such recipients! Start sending them fewer emails, and maybe try a re-engagement campaign. If even that doesn’t work, removing them will lower bounce rates and help keep you in good standing with email providers.
2. Segment for Success
Segmentation is always prominent in advice articles, and with good reason. Despite showing interest in your offerings, everyone who signs up has individual preferences and expectations. While crucial, segmenting results can be underwhelming if you only aim for basic grouping criteria like location and age group.
Optimal segmentation hinges on a behavioral approach and opens up several avenues worth pursuing. For example, you can segment based on engagement, focusing on rewards for already active users or re-engagement strategies for unresponsive ones. Or, you could track the type of content users are most responsive to and tailor follow-up emails accordingly. Focusing on different customer journey stages is also a good idea.
3. Prioritize the Mobile Experience
Even if you specialize in something as corporate as B2B enterprise sales, you should assume that recipients will view and interact with your emails via smartphone. Adopting a mobile-first design while keeping responsivity in mind for other platforms is not just a courtesy; it’s meeting the majority of today’s users on their home turf.
Designing for mobile comes with both practical and mindset shifts. For example, your subject line should be short enough to display properly on small screens, while your CRAs should always come in catchy button form that’s easy to thumb select. Be sure to also get to the point and don’t overload your emails with multimedia content so recipients can open, skim over, and engage in seconds.
4. The Subject Line, and Beyond
A glimpse at your email is often enough to explore further or outright dismiss it. That means everything about this first impression, not just the subject line, needs to be immaculate.
Always put your brand forward in the sender info. This ensures consistency and is more recognizable than the “yourname at yourcompany” format. Just add something like experiences or insights at the end to differentiate email types.
You’ll find tons of advice on creating the perfect subject line that doesn’t include taking advantage of preheader text. It basically doubles the amount of characters you have to work with, so make the text gel with the subject line, and give readers a taste of the contents.
5. Make AI a Core Part of Your Plan
AI platforms are unsurprisingly making forays into email marketing. A carefully integrated AI strategy permeates everything from email customization to data-driven analytics. Failing to be aware of the possibilities, let alone integrating the appropriate tools, will actively harm your ROI potential.
For example, AI has brought us a leap closer to true personalization. You can now craft and send emails with personalized subject lines, product recommendations, and entire copy segments tailored to individuals’ preferences and user data. Names seem quaint in comparison.
AI also excels at A/B testing automation, letting you simultaneously test dozens of minute changes to an email’s structure to come up with definite winners.
Most importantly, AI tools make data-driven predictive analytics possible. They can highlight recipients who are most likely to convert and guide your efforts in nurturing them into high lifetime value customers. Moreover, AI excels at determining and automating send times for maximum impact.
Finally, AI can predict how subject lines, content, and other elements will be received by different audience segments and identify subscribers who may soon become disengaged, allowing you to take appropriate action on time.
Raghav is a talented content writer with a passion to create informative and interesting articles. With a degree in English Literature, Raghav possesses an inquisitive mind and a thirst for learning. Raghav is a fact enthusiast who loves to unearth fascinating facts from a wide range of subjects. He firmly believes that learning is a lifelong journey and he is constantly seeking opportunities to increase his knowledge and discover new facts. So make sure to check out Raghav’s work for a wonderful reading.
