Email Marketing Productivity: 9 Tips For Success
Email marketing has been around for a long time, and with a good reason. It’s an effective method of generating, nurturing, and converting leads into loyal customers.
Email marketing also enables you to consistently reach out to your customers. As long as your subscribers are getting valuable content, influencing them to buy from you would be easy.
Why email marketing still matters
Considering that 99% of consumers check their email every day, email marketing is still one of the best communication channels. It also converts better and generates an ROI of 4200%, which is a lot higher than that of social media.
And if this doesn’t sound convincing, here are a few more stats showing the effectiveness of implementing email marketing strategies:
- 91% of grownups in the US prefer receiving promotional emails from businesses they’ve had dealings with.
- Email helps generate new leads 40 times more effectively than Twitter and Facebook combined.
- 40% of B2B marketers consider email marketing to be vital to their marketing success.
- 74% of teenagers have and use email despite the growth of social media.
Implementing email marketing tactics in your business offers a lot of benefits. Some of the advantages include:
Saving time and budget
Email marketing is cheaper than most mainstream marketing channels. It requires no printing or postage costs, except when investing in automation or tracking software.
Boosting revenue and traffic
Using email is excellent for maximizing impulse buying. With its help, you can drive higher sales as compared to other marketing strategies, as well as generate leads faster and more effectively. Besides, including relevant links in your email content can help drive targeted traffic to your website.
Improving customer relationships
Email marketing makes it easy to engage and involve your subscribers with your brand. It’s also important in providing value to your audience and gradually driving the user to a final buying stage.
Positively affecting brand recognition
With its help, you can develop a solid brand identity. Email marketing connects you directly with the customers’ inbox. Providing value is the key to standing out among other competitors.
Reaching the right people at the right time
You can segment your list and send emails depending on this email segment to generate the desired conversion.
How to boost email marketing productivity
Focus on personalization
Email personalization deals with sending targeted content to your subscribers by taking advantage of specific information about them. Personalizing emails helps increase email open rate by 26% and increase email revenue by 760%. Personalization shows your subscribers that you care about who they are and your achievements together.
Take a look at how Grammarly and Mint do this:
The first step to successful personalization is collecting relevant data about your audience by offering a valuable product or information. It will then be used to create a personalized email message. This goes beyond using someone’s name in the subject line. It involves creating engaging content that addresses their pain points, objectives, and desires.
Automate for better result
Email automation involves sending a transactional or promotional email to your subscribers based on specific events or triggers. For example, you can send a welcome email after a customer joins a mailing list:
Or you can send a reminder to a client who has a product in their cart without checking out:
Automation runs in the background and handles repetitive tasks, which creates more time for other valuable goals. Of course, it doesn’t mean that the content would be boring, ineffective, or generic. Advanced automation can be highly convertible, personalized, and filled with engaging content.
Write short emails and test subject lines
Long emails waste not only your time but also the time of your audience. To increase productivity, learn to write letters that are brief and straight to the point.
The ideal email length is between 50 to 125 words, as such letters have a response rate that is above 50%. Emails with the highest click-through rate have about 20 lines of text and up to 200 words. So, it’s better to keep your copies short and below 200 words.
The subject line of your email plays an important part in your open rate. Therefore, deciding on shortcodes to use in your subject lines is one of the efficient ways of increasing your email productivity.
Make sure your email list is clean
A clean email list is required to achieve peak performance for your email marketing campaign. Email verification can help discover and remove invalid addresses, increase your deliverability, and improve sender reputation. Also, users who constantly validate emails experience higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, and more accurate email statistics.
An unsubscribe link is another important solution that can help avoid being marked as spam. With its help, you can keep your audience happy and create a healthy email list.
Use segmentation and email preferences
In email segmentation, you divide your mailing list based on specific conditions and similarities to send relevant messages to a targeted group of people. It helps you turn mass emails and email blasts into a more logical and specific process.
Segmentation can be based on the users’ behavior, interests, geographical location, buying history, age, gender, and other factors. You can also add an “update your email preferences” link to let your subscribers choose what kind of content they want to receive.
For example, these are options that Zapier offers:
Perform A/B testing
The main objective of A/B testing is to optimize your email marketing metrics, increase engagements, and improve conversion rates. You can discover the type of emails that are more engaging and converting after sending two different types of letters to your audience.
Typical elements that can be A/B tested in your email campaign are your email subject lines, content, personalization, design, preview text, sending time and frequency, CTAs, and so on. A/B testing is about creating assumptions about any of these elements and performing a test to validate them. The best results can then be used to improve and launch better email campaigns.
Track and analyze your results
One major advantage of email marketing is the ability to track everything from the opens, clicks, and location. Tracking the performance of email campaigns will enable you to focus on more effective strategies, compare them with other marketing channels, and prioritize your time accordingly.
Besides, marketers need to go beyond measuring just the traditional KPIs such as the number of subscribers, opens, clicks, and delivery rates. It’s important to also consider long-term subscriber activity, the health of email lists, as well as optimization and engagement trends, to get the most from your marketing strategy.
Get the time and frequency right
The time and frequency of your email sending have a lot of impact on your open and unsubscribe rates. Studies have shown that the first letter often has the highest open rates. But the more you launch your email campaigns, the higher open rate can be generated.
Of course, you can’t just send more emails. The best time for generating a positive response from your mailing list without seeing a rise in unsubscribes is every two weeks. However, it’s important to test and discover the perfect time and frequency that works best for you.
Ensure emails are mobile-friendly
Sending mobile-friendly email campaigns is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. About 68% of email recipients view their emails on a mobile device. Therefore, it’s important to consider the appearance of your email on all devices to avoid missing out on the possibilities of engaging a considerable number of your subscribers that will generate results.
What you can do:
- Shorten your subject line (mobile devices don’t display more than 25 to 30 characters as opposed to 60 characters on a desktop)
- Use images as optional since some mobile devices don’t display them
- Don’t forget to test across all devices to make sure your email displays correctly before launching your campaign
- Place your call-to-action at the center close to the top to enable the on-the-go audience to discover it quickly. This is how Airbnb places it:
Wrapping it up
Productive email marketing requires time, effort, and most importantly, an effective strategy. It goes beyond creating a message and hitting the “send” button. It requires maintaining a healthy email list and ensuring that your audiences are happy with your offers.
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to grow your business. And integrating automation can help generate results without spending too much time working on them repeatedly.
