Creating an optimized email marketing strategy is a key component to successfully implementing the inbound methodology. In this blog, we're sharing 10 email marketing tips to help you personalize your messaging and drive significant results.
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10 Email Marketing Tips To Optimize Your Strategy
In additional to following email marketing best practices, try implementing these 10 email marketing tips to grow your contact list, engage with your audience and improve campaign performance:
- Build your email list
- Segment your contacts
- Write a compelling subject line
- Determine a sending cadence
- Build relationships
- Personalize emails
- Follow best practices
- Use automation
- Use A/B testing & optimize your strategy
- Leverage an email marketing platform
Build Your Email List
Rather than waiting until right before the holiday season to build your email list, we encourage all businesses to focus on growing their lists year round. No matter whether your business sells goods or services, be sure to offer valuable content to your subscribers.
Valuable content can vary from downloadable eBooks, checklists and webinars to discount codes, product recommendations, abandoned cart reminders and more. To gain more subscribers, try using welcome offers such as a first-time discount for signing up.
Also, leverage a lead capture tool such as Justuno or Klaviyo's form builder to help you capture new email addresses from your site. Take advantage of behavioral targeting by targeting users who have visited a specific page or visited your site x amount of times.
Segment Your Contacts
Segmenting your contact list is one of the most important email marketing tips to follow. This will help you cater content to different buyer personas, which will help make your brand more relevant to your audience.
One-off email sends are a thing of the past. Improve your inbound marketing strategy by segmenting contacts. There are a multitude of ways to segment your contact list − by lifecycle stage, high spenders, coupon enthusiasts, loyal customers and so much more.
Write A Compelling Subject Line
The quality of a subject line directly impacts email open rate. Ensure a high open rate by creating intriguing and engaging subject lines that align with your brand identity. Follow these subject line best practices to capture your subscribers' attention and make them want to read what's inside:
- The shorter, the better
- Avoid spam language
- Create a sense of urgency
- Ask questions
- Use personalization tokens
If you're trying to capture more abandoned carts, try implementing these abandoned cart subject line ideas to draw more people in and capture that lost revenue.
Determine A Sending Cadence
Like many eCommerce businesses, you're probably wondering what the perfect number is when it comes to sending emails. There's no universal rule of thumb when it comes to establishing a sending cadence; however, we encourage all businesses to consider the goal of their campaigns.
For example, let's pretend you want to send out a weekly newsletter. If you have enough content to include new things in each newsletter, then once per week is probably fine. Analyze the newsletter's performance, though. If you notice a drop-off in open rate or subscribers, you may want to reconsider the weekly send and, instead, opt for bi-weekly.
No matter what your sending cadence is, continue to monitor your email performance to determine if you're sending too often (or not enough). Remind yourself of the goal behind each email send − if you don't recognize the goal from the jump, then don't send the email.
Build Relationships
We mentioned earlier that it's critical to focus on building your email list year round. This holds true for many reasons − one being that building relationships prior to the holiday season is key to increasing holiday sales.
Klaviyo reports that 60% of Cyber Weekend sales are driven by customers who engaged with the brand prior to Q3 that same year. To build relationships with your prospects, leads and customers, be sure to observe the data that's in front of you. Take a look at:
- Behavioral data − like the products a person views, time spent on your site, etc.
- Transactional data − like the quantity purchased, money spent, sale vs. full price, etc.
- Email engagement − like opens, clicks, number of times opened, etc.
Leverage this data to segment your audience, and optimize offers and content to send them emails that best fit their needs. Send people the right information at the right time to build customer relationships and guide them through the purchasing process.
Personalize Emails
Don't be afraid to get personal in your emails! Use personalization tokens to make your offer more relevant and eye-catching. HubSpot allows businesses to personalize content based on information from the viewer's contact record or company record.
Use a contact's first name, gender, annual revenue, lead type, lifecycle stage and so much more to personalize your emails. Include these personalization tokens in the subject line and preview text of your emails to create an individualized user experience and increase open rate.
Follow Best Practices
Implementing email marketing best practices is key for reaching your targeted inboxes and engaging your contact list. For one thing, always include alt text in images. If an image does not load on the recipient's device, the alt text tells them what your image is.
Additionally, use enticing calls-to-action (CTA) in your emails. Be sure to use these sparingly as too many CTA buttons may confuse the recipient. Make sure you're guiding them where you want them to go by making the CTA button stand out from the rest of the copy and linking to a relevant landing page.
Use Automation
Of all the email marketing tips discussed, we highly encourage you to automate your email efforts. Email automation helps brands guide prospects, leads and customers through the buyer's journey by sending targeted messages that are based on specific actions.
Set up workflows based on specific enrollment criteria so that your emails send to the contacts that are interested in a particular offer or piece of content. Then, determine how many emails you want to follow-up with, create and customize the emails and schedule them with a certain number of days between each email.
Automation saves marketing teams so much time and allows them to "set it and forget it." It's much easier than sending out individual emails to each contact in your database. Plus, it's especially great for following up with customers post-purchase.
Use A/B Testing & Optimize Your Strategy
A/B testing is a method that businesses use to evaluate a marketing variable against a control. It helps companies isolate individual elements of an email to see what influences the best results. There are a ton of elements to test within an email − templates, design, subject lines, preview text, personalization tokens, creative imagery, etc.
It's important to note than when A/B testing, there should be only one variable that makes version A different from version B. Ensure a large enough sample size so that your results are statistically significant and valid.
Leverage An Email Marketing Platform
If you really want to amp up your email marketing efforts, we encourage you to leverage an email marketing platform like HubSpot or Klaviyo. Though there are a ton of other platforms to choose from, we typically recommend these two to our clients due to the various features they offer.
Look for a software that offers features like profile, segment, URL and location targeting, hyper segmentation based on visitor behavior, detailed reporting, pre-built autoresponders and automation.
Conclusion
We hope these 10 email marketing tips help you improve your overall strategy and drive more conversions. If you have any questions about these eCommerce email marketing tips or would like to learn more about how Groove Commerce leveraged email to increase one client's revenue by 108%, contact us through the form below. A member of our team will be in touch!
