Email marketing still remains a relevant and engaging way to communicate with your customers. However, it can be complex to get up and running and even more difficult to keep things fresh and maintain engagement over time. From list building to copywriting to measurement, there’s always something new to learn and improve.
For marketers and business owners with limited time, it can be difficult to keep up. That’s why we’ve compiled our top tips to give you a head start. Here are our top 6 email marketing tips for 2020:
1. Optimise your subject line
A successful email starts with a captivating subject line that grabs the attention of your audience. Good subject lines are often personalised or informative, which gives people a reason to open your content. Whatever your approach, it’s important to keep your audience and buyer persona in mind, and continually test different text to see what they prefer.
- Be descriptive
- Keep it short
- Limit punctuation
- A/B and multivariate test (marketing software such as HubSpot & Mailchimp make this process easy)
2. Use a real person’s name in the sender field
Studies on email open rates have found that trusting the sender is one of the most important factors in whether an email is opened or not. That means it’s vital to choose an effective and consistent “From” name and email address.
Getting an email from an actual person feels more friendly than one from a brand. So, we recommend (especially for any initial sales outreach or support requests) that you use an employee’s name in the sender field, rather than your brand name. Try to avoid generic company email addresses such as ‘[email protected] or [email protected],’ for email blasts as this can negatively affect your open rate and trigger your email to end up in the spam folder.
Here are a few handy tips on how you can optimise your ‘From’ email address:
Don’t use free webmail addresses
Free webmail “From” addresses are more suspicious than those from custom domains, increasing the chance emails from those addresses will be rejected or end up in spam/promotions folders.
Avoid the no-reply address
Sending from a no-reply address comes across as impersonal and uncaring to subscribers. It can also be frustrating if they need to reach you about something and can impact your inbox delivery rates in the long-term.
Allowing your recipients to reply to your email address can prove efficient and effective. They may need to get in touch with you regarding a query, which can spark meaningful conversations and ultimately can generate leads.
Use a valid email address
Using an actual, existing mailbox to collect replies to your newsletters isn’t just good manners. Some email providers, like Gmail, actually look into recipient behaviour after an email lands in the inbox. If a subscriber responds to your email, it’s more likely to be marked as important and can improve your deliverability rate in the future.
Personalise for the purpose
Ensure you have logical email addresses for each of the various enquiries/departments your business may receive communication about. For example if a customer gets in touch with your billing department ensure your ‘From’ email address is either a real employees name or along the lines of [email protected], to provide clarity to your clients.
3. Add personalisation
With personalisation token software (such as HubSpot), you can show personalised content to contacts in your customer relationship management (CRM) database. For example, you can dynamically display their name, date of birth and location in the subject line or body content of email marketing campaigns. This can greatly increase engagement with your email campaigns and gives your message a nice individualised touch.
Some other effective key personalisation tokens you can add to your email are a company, office location, subscription type and email address. When used effectively this can greatly improve open rates, click-through rates, form submissions and lead generation efforts.
4. Automate your emails
In this day and age with a sea of technology at your fingertips, chances are if you can think of it, software can complete it and do the heavy lifting for you. This is exactly the case for email automation. The less manual sending and copywriting on your plate, the more time you have to dedicate to high value-adding tasks for your business and strategic thinking.
Useful email automation you should be considering are nurture emails from an eBook download, thank you emails for booking appointments/making purchases, package tracking email information and important anniversaries for your clients.
Marketing email automation software such as HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign allow you to build emails in a simple drag and drop interface, visually map out automation workflows and provide in-depth analytics.
5. Experiment with send times
Email send times aren’t a one size fits all approach. Each company has different levels of engagement, content and unique customer attributes. We recommend experimenting and testing your email send times continuously to find the optimum day/hour for your particular campaign type.
To complete this you’ll need email analytics software such as Campaign Monitor, MailChimp or HubSpot to measure statistics such as the open rate, click-through rate and bounce rate across the various sends.
6. Use images & GIFs
The goal of email marketing is to establish and grow a relationship with your prospects, customers, or users, so holding their attention is key. The best way to do this once they’ve opened your email is to include captivating, great content. This can be achieved through quality professional images and GIFs.
GIFs
Animations can draw and focus attention on your product in an incredibly powerful way. GIFs rapidly display a series of images to produce the illusion of motion. Using an animated GIF adds a unique element to your email and can trigger the interest of the viewer, prompting them to click through to a landing page for a campaign and increase your chance of a conversion.
Images
The right images that convey the right message can grab one’s attention and make people take the desired action. Ensure that within your email marketing campaigns you use unique, high quality, professional images (avoid using stock images where possible) to keep with your brand identity and entice your audience to engage with more content.
Final thoughts
There you have it – our top 6 email marketing tips for 2020.
If you follow each of these steps you’ll be well on your way to crafting effective emails, improving your overall brand engagement and generating leads. If you would like to discuss any of these points in more detail or need assistance with your email marketing, get in touch with one of our marketing experts today.
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