Email marketing stands out as one of the most effective ways for brands to foster connections with current and potential clients.
Did you know?
$36 – this is what is expected to be received for each $1 spent on email marketing. That’s a higher return than you can expect from any other form of marketing.
Source: Litmus survey, 2022
A well-crafted email marketing strategy not only strengthens brand recall but also cultivates customer engagement. However, crafting impactful emails can be a daunting task if you don’t know where to begin. To assist you in your email marketing journey, we’ve created this handy list of essential tips.
1. Keep your contact list up-to-date
While creating and maintaining an email list is important, it’s equally critical to keep it updated. Subscribers’ priorities and interests are likely to evolve over time, if you work with B2B clients your contacts may change companies and their email addresses, often without notification. Regularly curate your list by removing inactive and invalid addresses, retaining only the most engaged and relevant subscribers to maximise your email marketing effectiveness.
If you are using “Lead Gen and CRM” software by Constant Contact, most engaged contacts can update their profile and subscription preferences via the link in the footer.
2. Segment your subscribers lists
Sending the same email to your entire subscriber list increases the possibility of unsubscriptions and low open rates due to irrelevance of topics. List segmentation should be one of the main principles of relevant high quality contact database building. You can group subscribers based on shared attributes such as their interests in particular products or services, events you met them at or campaigns the contacts were collected by, if you conduct international marketing, language will also be one of the main criterias of segmentation. Going further in tailoring your messages will increase not only open rates but will increase the chances of conversion.
3. Remember about the email preview text
The email preview text presents an excellent chance to capture your recipients’ attention while they browse through their inbox. Most email clients will pull preview text from the first lines of the body of your email. A compelling snippet of preview text not only makes your email noticeable in their inbox but also motivates them to open and read the email, instead of swiftly discarding it.
Marketing automation and CRM softwares such as “Lead Gen and CRM” by Constant Contact can let you edit the preheader text so that you can control how your message appears in the user’s inbox.
4. Have a strong subject line
As the age-old saying goes, first impressions are critical, and this applies for emails as well. A strong subject line conveys the essence of your email and creates a lasting impact. In a crowded inbox, your subject line is what highlights your message differently from others and connects with your audience. A good subject line is relevant and compelling, it gives the reader a strong reason to open an email.
5. Increase recognition with BIMI
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a protocol that incorporates a small brand or sender image alongside the sender’s name for visual identification. Your email marketing strategy should consider factors like consumer trust, which is essential for higher open rates. Your recipients must trust you as a sender to engage with your emails and content. To enable BIMI, you’ll need to publish a DNS record and provide your brand logo in SVG P/S format. Utilise the AuthIndicators Group’s BIMI Generator to ensure a correctly formatted record.
6. Optimise for mobile
In today’s digitally savvy world, owning a mobile device has become a norm. Hence, it is important to always practise a mobile first approach. It’s essential to analyse your data to identify the devices your subscribers use to access and engage with your emails. Given the limited screen space on mobile devices, character displays are also more restricted compared to desktop devices.Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure your emails are optimised for various screen sizes. The number of characters of the subject line that can be read on mobile devices varies depending on the device and email client.
7. Maintain appropriate frequency
Balancing email frequency is a critical aspect for businesses seeking to maintain customer connections. Excessive emails can annoy recipients and increase unsubscribe rate over time, while infrequent messaging risks missing engagement and conversions. Monitoring email open rates is key in finding the right combination. A moderate approach will be to start with monthly or bi-monthly emails to establish a positive impression, then gradually increase the frequency to once or twice a week as engagement builds.
8. Personalise
Personalisation of emails will build trust and capture attention quicker than general email that feels spammy and irrelevant. If your audience can’t relate to your content, they won’t find it valuable to read, which can adversely affect your email’s effectiveness. Marketing automation platforms such as “Lead Gen and CRM” by Constant Contact make this process seamless.
Here are the main parts of the email that can be personalised:
- Subject line and Greeting by adding a personalisation tags
- Email content: Standard information about your contact, images and blocks of text (Dynamic Content).
9. Send emails at the right time
Determining the optimal email sending time depends on multiple factors: your audience’s geographic and demographic specifics, holidays, email type, and more. For instance, if you’re targeting students, evenings and weekends tend to be most active for them. For a diverse, international audience, time zones become crucial. If you are targeting a B2B audience, it won’t be effective to send an email before holidays or during the holidays. A practical approach involves A/B testing different timing options and evaluating their performance. Additionally, leverage analytics to study your subscribers’ past behaviours by assessing their activity patterns on different days and times.
10. Let them unsubscribe
Surprisingly, allowing uninterested users to unsubscribe can benefit your emails deliverability and brand in general. You don’t want to come across as too persistent or annoying, especially to those with no interest in your services. Unsubscribe button or link is also a mandatory component in compliance with multiple global spam regulations. By facilitating easy unsubscribing, you reduce the risk of being marked as spam, which could harm your email marketing efforts in the long run.
What's next for you?
Balancing interactions with leads while staying not-intrusive is a key in maintaining optimal communication via emails. If you plan to establish your email marketing strategy in South East Asia and are looking for a reliable tool to realise your plans – do not wait more, reach out to our team at “Lead Gen and CRM” by Constant contact. Note, that you will not need to spend much time on learning its functionality by yourself, our dedicated team will take care of preparing your database and tailoring automated email workflows for your team to start with.
