The best 3 tips for great email marketing results

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for positive results. But it is not that simple - since it is very common to receive an email that is immediately deleted, marked as spam or ignored altogether. As a business, you need to lessen this effect and determine why and how to overcome this and make the email marketing work in your favour.

Some businesses neglect the power of email marketing. This happens because most companies fail to see any positive results with their efforts - however, they also don’t see their own mistakes or shortcomings. An email marketing needs to have value, it has to be important for the consumer then, it can be a source of success. Some studies have shown that email marketing can generate even more sales than Facebook or Twitter, when done right. That’s why it is important to have all the tips to make your email marketing an important marketing tool. But some tips are better and more important than others, that’s why we focused on the 3 best tips that we think are easier to do and give more efficient results for your business.

1 - Know your audience and build a subscriber list

Perhaps the most important tip: know your audience. This is how to start and where all your efforts should be focused. The email marketing messages need to be relevant to your audience. They must be tempted to open it. And you should understand why they behave like that. Segment your audience based on age, geographical location, gender, etc. Each persona group has to be identified to improve the chances of increasing sales numbers.

And you must always keep building your subscriber/client/prospect list. There are plenty ways to add more addresses: create a signup feature on your website, make subscriptions forms right on your homepage, offering newsletters, when you are about to make a sale, and so on. You need to expand your list to get better chances of success.

By having a established audience, you can do A/B split testing, which is key to make sure what works best for your company. Split your audience into different groups or segments and discover which strategy works best. This will make you be able to get better results and make a more consistent campaign with the best practices.

2 - Consistency and regularity

People hate spam. However, people also tend to like consistency. If you never send emails, your audience will forget you - or even think you forgot them! The answer is to keep a steady flow, but not overwhelming. If you are sending content for the right audience, there’s no harm in doing it regularly. Some businesses can do it even daily, but in general, keep it weekly or two times a week.

3 - Right to the point

The subject line needs to be attractive. It doesn’t need to be necessarily short (although being short usually helps), but it needs to show a benefit to the client. Be creative, don’t rely on generic messages. Try to instigate curiosity, urgency, surprise or any other emotion that will catch their attention. A bad subject line can be disastrous: 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line.

Some more advice on making a great subject line:

• Connect to your subscribers on an emotional level so that they enjoy reading your emails. It must feel like the sender was human, not a robot nor a automated message.
• Avoid long sentences. Longer lines can be confusing and hard to understand. Studies point to the optimum length of six to ten words.
• If your company uses humor in its branding strategy, adding it to your email is a good idea - just be careful to not exaggerate, it may come off as unprofessional. Remember: provoking an good emotion is key.
• Numbers, values and questions can have good performance if done right. Just don’t make them confusing and keep varying.

The email content itself should also be to the point and short. What is the use of an opened email that the user won’t finish reading? The message needs to be very clear and concise for the client to make an action. Remember: people check emails all the time, on their phones, on work, and so on. You can’t waste their time or they won’t care for your email marketing. Make use of clean design, short texts and a clear point. Another tip is for the CTA: usually, using one major call to action is better to avoid confusion.

Don’t forget the preview text - that little message beside the subject line that appears even before the user opens the email. Generally, this is shown in the first part of the sentence of the email content, so don’t waste the opportunity putting clickable links or not important text there. Use all you’ve got to make them interested.

However, none of that matters if you don’t offer anything valuable to the customer. Don’t send an email it you got nothing to say or add. This is key: your company always has to show value. All of the tips above come together by knowing your audience, timing, testing strategies, great content, all of those culminating in bringing value to the customer.

If you want to know and experience more about digital strategies, email marketing, online support for your business and much more, try TinyBoat for free. A digital agency in london with complete solutions for your digital business.