The Definitive Email Marketing Guide [2021]

Email Marketing Strategies That Really Works & Boosts Engagement

Email marketing channels continue to offer wide room for creativity, innovation, and experimentation by creating highly personalized email campaigns. According to the data marketing association, 77 percent of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered email campaigns.

Why Your Business Need Email Marketing?

Did you know that? In this digital world, 38 billion people using email and it’s the best way to reach and provide value to prospects and customers. Email marketing unlocks the personalized engagement with your audiences. Businesses can promote, educate, and generate awareness about your brands that help the customers to make a purchasing decision.

Strategies of Email Marketing

Advanced Personalization

When it comes to successful email marketing campaigns, personalization is the key. While segmentation the email list makes sure to include the recipient’s first name in the email subject or body of the content. By leveraging the new machine learning and data science-based automation tool, you can ability to harness the data to send the relevant information to audiences/ prospects in a more personal way that mentions making them feel you care.

According to a recent study done by campaign monitor states that “Emails with personalized mentions are 26% more likely to opened and get six times higher transaction rates.” Another study found that “Advanced personalization mail gets 179% more CTR than conventional mails”

Text-Only Emails

Text-only emails are still relevant and equally play an impactful role in a well-grounded email marketing strategy. A combination of personalization and text-only emails will be like sending mail to friends that help audiences to stay subscribed to your email newsletters. You can also try some GIFs, memes, blog links, and video links to get the maximum effect. Our primary goal is here to make audiences to stay connected on a personalized and deeper level.

Benefits of Text-only emails:

• Get rid of spam filters
• It reduces privacy and security risk by not loading any images and irrelevant links.
• It will be effective even audiences have little to no bandwidth.

Engaging and Interactive Content

Interactive and engaging content can make your audiences take certain actions. Also, it will help you to build awareness and provide more value for your audience. Here, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) gives an extra edge to give interactive emails. For example, if your business promotes a product, you can include carousel images and shopping options in the email with the help of AMP. So, this will reduce a muffle at the same time it will make it easier for customers to make a purchase. Therefore, an interactive email reflects higher conversion rates for your business.

“Reaching the inbox is not your goal, engaging people is — Matt Blumberg”

Some other tips to create an interactive email:

• By incorporating the videos — Like How-to videos and educational content can grab the attention.
• Surveys — It will help to get the feedback and segmentation of your prospects/audience.

Leveraging Automation

In this digital era, automation helps to achieve and saves your precious time. By taking advantage of email marketing automation tools, you can send personalized, hyper-relevant, and timely emails to your audiences. According to the study automated emails can get 119 percent higher click-through rates (CTR) than promotional emails and also companies get 60% conversion rates through sending automated birthday email offers to people. The practice of sending automated and targeted emails to your audiences allows you to continue to engage with them and not to be left-back.

Practices of Automated Email Marketing Campaigns:

Welcome Mail — Once the customers subscribed to your newsletter, you can send automated welcome mail even can offer a surprise discount or offers to newly subscribed customers that compel them to make a buying decision.

Birthday Surprise — Offering discounts on customer’s birthday

Feedback Mail — Once the customers are done with the purchase, you can gather product feedback that will help to a deep understanding of customer’s perception about your products/ services or brand.

Remainder Mail — Sending the email campaigns informing them about subscription, account activities, and payment of bills about to expire or run out.

Privacy

In email marketing campaigns, ensuring an audience feels secure is another key factor. For that, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) email disclaimer is the perfect way to ensure another level of trust to any audiences/recipients you send emails to in the EU and EEA. At the time of origin, most of the marketers worry about the GDPR but positively it streamlines the email marketing practices. A study found that “41 percent of marketers saw a decrease in unsubscribe or opt-out rates and 55 percent decreased spam complaints, also 75% increased in CTR as well”. Therefore, a GDPR guideline builds trust & credibility about your brand.

GDPR Guidelines:

• Before adding your subscription list get consent from respective users.
• Add your detailed privacy policy providing detailed information about the data you collect, reassure the data will be safe, and also include the opt-in and out the subscription form.
• The consent email should end with a precise CTA button. For example, like invite audiences to take the next step “OPT-ME IN”.

By following these practices can makes you sway over new customers and also your subscribers will be happy to take the decision either “yes or no”.

Email Marketing Metrics That Marketers Should Track

Tracking the metrics is vital for successful email marketing campaigns and allows you to determine the performance of each mail so, that you can able to identify what’s works and what’s not., Analyzing the metrics will help you continue to develop a meaningful relationship with your audiences.

Email Marketing Metrics

Open Rate

This metrics tell you how much percentage of subscribers opened your email. A lower open rate indicates that people are not interested in engaging with your content. Here, the subject line plays a key role and you need to optimize for higher open rates. This metric will be more valuable and effective when you use it as a “comparative metric”. E.g., you can compare last week’s mail to this week mails will give some insights to modify and control the email campaigns.

Tips for improving the open rates:

• Attractive subject line
• Avoid spam filters
• Personalized content
• Recognizable sender name

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the metric that gives a percentage of people who click on or more links included in a given mail. This metrics will tell you “How your subscribers/audiences engaging with your content”. It reflects how many people are interested in learning about your products or services and brand.

By monitoring these metrics, you can run A/B tests and find a new way to get more attention and click in your emails.

Tips for improving the CTR:

• Perfect fonts, images, and colors.
• Focus on the length of the content.
• By giving the perfect CTA button.

Conversion Rate

This metrics tells you how much percent of people who clicked on CTA (Link) within a mail and completed a desired action. It will be like filling out the form, taking feedback surveys, or purchasing a product or services which you offered. If you see the statistics “60 percent of marketers looking into conversion rates to find out the progress of their email campaigns”

Tips to improve the conversion rates:

• Creating a sense of urgency that will stimulate subscribers to take action.
• Making the CTA button short and desirable.
• Include Action verbs
• Try to include enough space around it that a reader can glance at and know what to do.

Overall ROI

These metrics tell you the overall return on investment of your email campaigns. For example, if you spend a cost of 500 to run the campaign and you earned 5000 additional sales.

(Revenue — Expenditure on Campaign) / (Expenditure on Campaign) * 100

In this case, (5000–500)/500*100 = 900% ROI for the email campaign.

A study found that email marketing was found to have a median return on investment (ROI) of 122 percent. By comparing this it will be 4X higher than other types like social media, paid search, etc marketing campaigns.

Hence, Overall ROI gives you a clear picture of your email marketing success.

Tips to improve Overall ROI rate:

• Goal-Setting clear goals and selecting buyer personas (Buyer journey stages)
• Focus on deliverability — By focusing on where your mail lands like junk or spam filter web-based email services.
• Segmenting Email List — The life cycle of segments in email marketing is subscribers>leads>customers. Finding who to mail and who not to mail will improves email campaign performance.
• Sending at the perfect time will be sent the relevant content and time period. Try to determine the best days and times to send your emails that gives a big impact on engagement rates.

By measuring individual email performance, monitoring the health of the database, targeted follow-up emails, and sending contextual messages & optimization will lead to higher conversion rates. Following these metrics will keep you on right track for effective email marketing campaigns.