8 Email Marketing Tips That Can Boost Your Sales
The question that we hear most about email marketing is ‘Does it even work?’ The answer is an enormous yes. If you follow the right email marketing tips of course. Many businesses still underestimate the power of email marketing, as they see poor results from their own email marketing campaigns. Often this is due to mistakes made by business owners when it comes to creating and monitoring their campaigns.
Not only are email marketing campaigns useful, they are also very cost effective. If done correctly, every $1 spent on email marketing sees up to $40 returned in revenue! Luckily, we’re here to help you achieve just that.
On that note, let’s take a look at 8 email marketing tips that can boost your sales.
#1 – Know Your Audience
This is arguably one of the most important email marketing tips that we will cover in this post. And I’ll tell you why… Every email that you send as part of your marketing campaign needs to be relevant to the recipient. The only way that you can make sure your content is relevant is to know and understand your audience. There is one problem with this, every subscriber on your mailing list is unique. This means sending the same generic email to everyone on your mailing list isn’t going to get the best possible results! Emails that are targeted and relevant to the recipient drive 18 times more revenue compared to generic emails.
So, how do you go about sending targeted emails?
List segmentation is how…
We’re only on our first tip and you’ve got a tip within a tip (that’s a lot of tips), how lucky are you! List segmentation allows you to split your email list into smaller, more targeted subgroups. Here at BAKDigital, we segment our mailing lists into each section of our knowledge base. Those are; Web Development, Social Media, Pay-Per-Click, SEO and Email Marketing. This way, we know that we are sending the most relevant content, to the people that are going to be most interested in it. In turn, increasing the chances of getting that all-important sale!
So, segment your list whenever and wherever possible. Now let’s move onto the next section of our email marketing tips…
#2 – Send Emails on a Regular Basis
People often refrain from sending emails on a regular basis through fear of ending up in spam. This is definitely something you need to be aware of, however, don’t let it prevent you from sending emails on a regular basis. After all, you need to buy a ticket to win the raffle. By sending emails regularly, you’re entering that raffle every week! The raffle being their inbox and your emails being the tickets, obviously.
It’s also a good idea to send your emails out at the same time each week. You may be sat there thinking, ‘when is the best time to send my emails?‘ Sadly, I can’t give you that answer right now as it will be unique to your business. However, I can say that sending your emails at the same time each week is good practice. It helps to build a list of loyal subscribers that open your emails as they know when to expect them. Once you have that list of loyal subscribers, you shouldn’t have any problems sending weekly or even daily emails without ending up in the dreaded spam folder.
#3 – Keep Your Emails Short
When you search for email marketing tips you often find that a lot of them focus on improving your open rate, which is important don’t get me wrong! However, it’s all well and good getting people to open your email, but once they do, you want them to take some kind of action. Normally, this will be a click through to your website. But first, you will need to grab the reader’s attention. Once you have their attention, it’s much more likely that they will take action.
One of the easiest ways to grab the attention and encourage people to take action is to keep your emails short and to the point. Avoid beating around the bush; make it blatantly obvious to the recipient exactly what email is all about as early on as possible. Whether it’s a discount, blog post or free trial; if they are interested, you will find them visiting your website for more information.
#4 – Personalise Your Emails
Like we’ve mentioned earlier in this post, every subscriber in your email list is unique. By personalising your emails for each recipient, you can make their experience unique too. You don’t need to go overboard and use their name in every sentence of the email as that may come across a little creepy. But using their name at the beginning of the email for example, or including content that is specific to their needs and interests can go a very long way. It makes the recipient feel special as the email appears to be exclusively for them.
Take personalisation a step further and include the recipient’s name in the subject line too. If you do, you can increase open rates by up to 26%! Which leads us nicely to our 5th email marketing tip…
#5 – Focus On Your Subject Line
The subject line of your email is the very first thing that a reader will see, so it needs to be perfect! I feel it’s important to mention something at this point – Writing subject lines that are engaging enough to make people open your email is NOT an easy task. And yes, I am talking from experience here. You can end up putting lots of effort into creating the perfect email, full of great content, and still get smacked in the face with a low open rate. It happens to us all and 9 times out of 10, it’s down to your subject line. Hence, why they are so important.
Always make sure that your subject line is true to the content of the email, not a gimmick or fake just to get the open. This is so important because at the end of the day, the purpose of your email shouldn’t be just to get an open. The purpose should be to create a trusting relationship with your email subscribers so they open your emails every time! We’ve covered subject lines in another email marketing post, so if you’re interested in improving your subject lines (which you should be) I’d suggest taking a look. For now, let’s move onto our next tip.
#6 – Clean Out Your Mailing List
One of the best ways to keep your engagement rates up is to monitor your email list and remove anyone that isn’t opening your emails. This can reduce the chance of your emails ending up in your subscribers spam box as spam filters often flag emails from accounts that have a low open rate. There isn’t a ‘best’ time to clear out your subscriber list but an idea is to do this around the New Year.
First of all, identify any people that have not been opening your emails. But don’t remove them from your list straight away. Set up a re-engagement campaign to try and re-spark an interest in what you have to offer. If they still ignore your emails, chances are they aren’t interested in what you have to offer, so remove them from your mailing list. You should also remove any email addresses that you receive a hard bounce from. This happens when the email address you are trying to reach is unknown or invalid. Most likely due to the fact that someone entered a fake email address when signing up to your mailing list.
#7 – Don’t Be Afraid of White Space
We’re now down to our penultimate tip and this one is arguably the simplest but also one of the most important. The headline for this section is ‘Don’t be afraid of white space’. I would actually take that a step further and say embrace the white space! Let me tell you why…
People are busy. They don’t have time to read through masses of text to find out what you have to offer. Which is why you need to have a well-structured email so that your subscribers can scan your email to find what they are looking for. One way to break up your emails is to use white space. Do this by keeping your paragraphs short, splitting up those paragraphs using subheadings and bullet points where possible. It makes your email much more user-friendly as it doesn’t feel overwhelming and essay-like.
But what if you have a great sales pitch that means your marketing email is going to be 1200 words long?
Direct users to your website using a ‘learn more’ link rather than having a long, off-putting email. This way you can start your pitch on a great, organised email containing white space. Then finish your pitch on a dedicated page of your website. Not only will this keep your emails user-friendly, but you are also increasing traffic to your website.
Take this blog as an example in practice, how off-putting and messy would it have looked if we would have condensed all of this content into a few giant paragraphs?
#8 – Think Mobile
Our email marketing tips would not be complete if we didn’t mention mobile users. Today, more and more emails are being opened on mobile. In fact, 56% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. With roughly 2.4 million emails being sent every second, you can get an idea of how many emails are being opened on mobile!
We really can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure that your emails are optimised for mobile. From how they look when they load, to making sure that your subject line is the right length to appear on a user’s screen. This can easily be done by sending a test email through to an account that you can access on your mobile before sending the campaign. You can then identify any areas of the email that need changing slightly to work perfectly on all devices before hitting that big fat send button.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. Follow each of these email marketing tips and with any luck you should start to see improvements in your email marketing campaigns’ performance in no time!
