Email is a crucial pathway that guides your leads through the sales funnel and towards purchasing your product. It is a huge part of lead nurturing and can either make or break your campaign. As such, we have put together 13 different email marketing tactics to help support and improve upon your campaign strategy.
1. Keep your email marketing fresh
In email marketing, keeping it fresh can mean both smaller and larger changes. Examples of refreshing your email marketing can be in the form of:
2. Focus on the little things
Many emails from entrepreneurs are not opened because they’re missing some of the basics:
- Strong headlines.
- Research guiding the best time to send emails.
- Being straight to the point.
- Presentation.
- Clear takeaways.
Making tweaks here and there can dramatically increase your open rates. When you have a captive audience, you create an opportunity to close the sale.
3. Write for your buyer personas
You can’t engage everyone with an email, so focus on one persona at a time. How does the email sequence you’re creating solve their problems? How does it make their life better/easier? How does it impact their challenges?
Your buyer personas should contain this information and much more that is useful for crafting your emails.
4. Reduce text and optimize calls-to-action
Customers and clients want to spend as little time as possible reading through their emails, so they’re likely to open up your campaign, give it a quick scan, and decide within just a few seconds whether to delete it or click through. That’s why you want your message to be short, sweet, and to the point. Cut down on long-form text, and focus on short messages that call the reader to action. Be a little bossy (in a nice way), and tell them what they need to do next.
For instance, if you run an office supply company and you want to increase printing supply sales, focus your entire email on one single call to action—buying more printing supplies. You could do this by offering a quick tip on getting more out of your toner, and including a coupon for a discount on paper, but the overall message and all links you provide should be focused on a single call to action, “View our hot printing deals now!” Your call to action should be obvious and visually appealing, leaving no room for doubt about what the reader should do next.
5. The long and short of subject lines
Most people quickly scan subject lines to decide if they’ll open or ignore the email, so don’t expect subscribers to dig through your subject line to figure out if they’re interested. Keep your subject line to 50 characters or fewer.
Also, avoid sales words and overused words. Most people know to avoid words like “free” in their subject lines because they trigger spam filters. But you should also avoid common words that are associated with sales, like “help,” “percent off,” or “reminder.” These words don’t always trigger a spam filter, but many subscribers will ignore them.
If your list is large enough, run an A/B test on your subject lines. Read more about A/B test for emails.
6. Find the prime time to send your email
According to Dan Zarrella, statistically, the open and click rates are highest (on average) in the early morning hours. The “early morning hours” timing is relative to your timezone. If you’re targeting multiple time zones, it may be best to segment your list by time zone ande send out your campaign based on when the best time is for each respective segment.
7. Give it away in your email
When creating your marketing email, make sure to include a value proposition that clearly outlines what you are offering the reader and the benefits it provides them.
If your main call-to-action falls below the fold, then as many as 70% of recipients won’t see it. Also, any call-to-action should be repeated at least 3 times throughout the email. Make sure to focus your copy on the benefits your reader will get from using whatever product or service you’re offering them. You can use the BAB copywriting technique to help with this, but there are also others such as the PAS formula and 4P’s technique which are equally as effective.
8. I read email on the train – 47% of email opens are on mobile
For brands that do not optimize email for mobile, the penalty is stiff. Return Path points out that 63% of users delete emails immediately if they are not optimized for mobile. Offer an elegant mobile experience from the start. If your initial welcome email is perfectly optimized for mobile, subscribers will know they’re in for a pleasant mobile experience for the duration of their time spent with your brand.
9. Don’t neglect Saturday/Sunday emails — unless your audience does
While not as overwhelming a winner as the 8:00 p.m. to midnight time of day, Saturday and Sunday did outperform their weekday counterparts in an Experian study of day-of-week performance.
Again, the volume of email sent on the weekends is low, just like the volume for evening emails, which could help those messages stand out more. The margins for clickthrough, open, and sales rates were not substantial, but in email marketing, every little bit counts.
10. Personalize email
Your website visitors, email recipients, and mobile subscribers, and those who have connected with you on social media will appreciate your messages even more if they’re personalized. Inject personalized recommendations into marketing emails for the ultimate in one-to-one communications. For example, you can create a unique email containing personalized recommendations based on each subscriber’s browsing behavior on your website. Adding personalized recommendations into marketing emails can increase sales conversion rates by 15-25%, and click-through rates by 25-35%. (Salesforce)
11. Re-engage inactive leads in your database
Research has found that the average inactivity for a list is 63 percent, meaning that once someone joins they are less likely to ever follow-up with your follow-up emails. Email marketing firm Listrak goes so far as to identify the first 90 days as the window for turning a sign-up into a devotee (and they lay out a plan for doing so).
What’s to become of that inactive 63 percent? Re-engagement campaigns are an excellent place to start. Read more about how to create an effective re-engagement email campaign.
12. Please use a real reply-to email address
Our twelfth email marketing tactic is to always use a real reply-to address.
The whole reason you’re sending a prospect an email is to engage them and get them to respond, so why would you use noreply@company.com as the reply-to address in your emails? Using a real person’s name like johndoe@company.com will not only help to make your emails more recognizable and credible, but it will increase your open rate and also make your email feel more personal.
The best possible approach is to use a dynamically populating email address, so that the email comes directly from the sales rep or the person who is assigned to the contact you’re emailing in your CRM system.
13. Check your email analytics frequently
Be sure to track your results in your email analytics. Discover the places that your lead nurturing process falters, and change it up. We find that a healthy curiosity about analytics is really helpful. To satisfy your curiosity, check back on your email analytics frequently and make adjustments as needed.
Subscribe to Our Blog
Join hundreds of people who get free and fresh content every week.
