Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your audience, building a relationship and trust between you and your contacts. It also allows your business to stay at the top of your customer’s minds and creates opportunities for them to engage with you, which is part of creating a base of loyal customers.
However, when creating email marketing campaigns, there’s a long list of things you should and shouldn’t do in order to ensure that your emails are providing value as well as being opened and engaged with by as many people as possible.
Don’t Send One-Size-Fits-All Emails
Sending an email to a large number of recipients that is intended to appeal to everyone doesn’t work. Even when you have a specific list of contacts that you’re sending emails to, they will still have a large variety of needs and the best to provide value to your contacts is to tailor your messages to them.
Do Segment Your Contacts
The more you segment your contacts, such as by demographics, location, job title, buyer persona, the more specific your messages can be, ensuring that you’re providing as much value as possible for your contacts. You can even use email marketing automation provided by SharpSpring, HubSpot, and other CRMS to track your audience’s website and email behaviors. For example, if there are particular pages on your website that contacts regularly visit or products they’ve recently viewed, you can send them an email specifically referring to their interest in that page or product.
This will not only make recipients more likely to open your emails, but it will also make them more likely to engage with your emails’ call to action, whether that’s making a call or clicking on a link.
Don’t Purchase Email Marketing Lists
Never purchase an email list. Apart from the fact that email lists rarely ever provide quality contacts for a business’s needs, anyone receiving an email from you needs to consent to join your mailing list. If the recipients of your emails haven’t opted in to your mailing list it could affect your ability to get emails into anyone’s inbox.
Do Have an Opt-In Strategy
Having a strategy for the best way to get your customers or anyone visiting your website to opt-in to your email marketing list will ensure that anyone you send emails to wants to receive them. This strategy could be in the form of offering an e-book or some kind of guide in exchange for their email address or something else along these lines.
Don’t Forget About CTAs
There are a few best practices regarding CTAs that you should follow in order to get the most out of your calls to action. The first of these is to remember that the best placement for a CTA is above the fold of your email. As man as 70% of email recipients don’t scroll lower than that, so if your CTA isn’t properly placed, the majority of contacts opening your email will miss it. It’s also recommended that CTAs be repeated at least three times in an email, although they don’t need to have the formatting or placement every time.
Do Review Your Email Metrics
In order to be sure your email marketing continues to be effective, you need to keep track of the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of your emails. Without doing this, you won’t know how your emails are performing with your audience or how effective it is. Fortunately, CRMs like SharpSpring and HubSpot will provide you with these metrics to make keeping track of your email marketing performance easier.
Don’t Forget to Add Preview Text to Your Emails
Preview text gives added context to your emails and adds to the likelihood of your emails being opened. Including preview text can also avoid the default preview text being taken from the first few words of the email, which are often statements about troubleshooting the email that likely won’t entice recipients to open it. Taking things into your own hands by choosing what will be displayed as preview text will go a long way.
Do Personalize Your Emails
52% of people say that when email communication is not personalized, they prefer to take their business elsewhere. Personalization creates a relationship between your business and your recipients and will increase the likelihood of recipients opening and engaging with your emails.
Don’t Use “No-Reply” Sending Addresses
This goes hand in hand with email personalization. Your customers want to feel like they mean something to your business. Using sending addresses like [email protected] feels impersonal and makes your emails less likely to be opened. In addition to this, it can affect email performance due to CAN-SPAM guidelines. Using a sender address with a person’s name in it creates more of a connection between the recipient and your company and can increase your open rates.
Do Keep Your Mailing List Updated
It’s best to keep track of your contacts and who has or hasn’t been interacting with your emails over a certain period of time. If some contacts haven’t been engaging with your email marketing, it’s probably best to remove them from your mailing list. This is recommended because even when a contact may no longer wish to receive your emails, they may fail to unsubscribe, so removing unengaged recipients from your mailing list will help avoid complaints or getting your emails flagged as spam.
Don’t Forget to A/B Test Your Emails
Also known as a split test, A/B testing can help you figure out what is or is not working by choosing one thing to change, then sending the original email to group A, and the changed email to group B. HubSpot and SharpSpring make A/B testing easy by providing you with all the tools you’ll need to optimize your emails. You should conduct A/B tests on your subject lines, preview text, even your email content.
Do Keep Your Emails and Landing Pages Consistent
If connecting your email to a landing page, the two should be consistent with each in colors, heading, calls to action, and more. You should also ensure that you have tracking implemented so that you can track how effective your strategy is. Fortunately, you can get help with both email automation and landing pages from SharpSpring’s and HubSpot’s CRM services.
RESULTS ARE VITAL
Need help with your email marketing? Vital Digital can help! We provide digital marketing services including, but not limited to content marketing, search engine optimization, and website development. We also provide HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier consulting to ensure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. Request a free quote and let us know how we can help.