For years, the industry has loudly proclaimed the impending death of email. Ignore them—email continues to be the number one direct channel to your customers when taking daily use and consumer preference into consideration.
Email marketing is actually thriving, partly thanks to the channel’s flexibility and universality, but mostly due to email’s familiarity. This is especially true when we consider the mobile revolution, a shift in society that has pushed anywhere, anytime email usage into the spotlight. Email marketing is changing and evolving, much like everything else in the wild west that is digital marketing. Any assertion that email marketing is dead is laughable. The research just doesn’t support that.
Being creative and investing in your email strategy is one of the easiest ways you can maximize your user’s LTV without massive investment. You can even automate it! Here are ways you can optimize your campaigns for conversion and create something impactful for your organization.
Utilize Personalization Without Using the User’s Name
You may think you’re warm and personable when you use the customer’s name in email marketing efforts, but research shows that it may work against you. The rise of phishing, identity theft, credit card fraud scams and more have made consumers wary of personalized greetings in email communications.
It’s true that organizations should be working on building relationships through personalization, but it needs to be implemented in a meaningful manner. Things like referring to user’s previous purchases or suggesting related products have shown to create positive responses in the vast majority of recipients, and research backs that up.
What does effective email marketing personalization look like? Consider tracking individual customer purchases and browsing, as well as their individual response to email campaigns. Use this data to personalize campaigns targeted to their needs and behaviors.
Optimize For Mobile (Or Just Give Up)
The rewards for a successful email marketing campaign are high, but the penalties for not optimizing for mobile are just as high. If your organization is not optimizing email marketing campaigns for mobile, beware— 63% of US Consumers delete an email that isn’t optimized for mobile immediately. Aim for an elegant email experience on mobile from the get go. This helps to coax customers back into your sales funnel by promising a stellar mobile experience.
Work Those Subject Lines!
The research shows that emails that have longer subject lines show no increase in email open or click through rates. This same research supports the assertion that subject lines with less than ten characters have open rates of 58 percent.
How do you find subject lines that work for you? Try this:
- Develop a hypothesis for testing
- Prepare A/B testing for your subject lines
- Track data on all email marketing campaigns
Adjust your subject lines as needed. Copy exhaustion is real! What may have been successful previously can wear out its welcome once the novelty has worn off.
Pay Attention When Users Abandon Before Purchase
Tailor your organization’s frequency and number of abandoned cart emails to the specific purchase and those product’s typical purchase window. Expensive items, for example, may require more time to justify the spend so they will have a larger purchase window.
Remain mindful of your industry’s typical purchase window and send abandoned cart emails accordingly.
Engage Inactive Subscribers
Data shows that an average of 63% of an email list is inactive. These are the people least likely to read your follow-up emails. So how do you go about re-engaging these folks? You identify the inactive subscribers on your email marketing list.
See if you can get them back on board by sending them an email—tell them they are missed and you want them back. Consider a special offer or a discount to further entice them back into your arms. Move those who are responsive back to your active email marketing list. Let anyone who didn’t respond know that they will be removed from your list if they don’t respond within a specified length of time. Remove the ‘dead names’ from your list.
You can also implement the following to help:
- Subject lines should clearly communicate what your email is about.
- Offer incentives on a regular basis: discounts, contests, and coupons all motivate people to open your emails.
- Determine the best frequency to send for your business: Don’t be afraid to test!
- Sending a newsletter? Limit the amount of promotional content.
- When people unsubscribe, ask them why they’re no longer interested and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
As with all marketing campaigns, creating effective email marketing campaigns is a process. A combination of good strategy, planning, and analysis is necessary to improve campaigns.
