Four Email Practices To Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is, even after all these years, still one of the leading forms of marketing that are regularly conducted. In fact, 29% of marketing managers rate email marketing as a leading marketing channel, a whole 4% higher than social media, which came in at 25%. With this in mind, even though email is certainly not the most recent marketing channel invented, it can still be used to generate new leads for your business.

That said, over the last 10 years, a lot has changed when it comes to creating effective email marketing campaigns. If you’re still using the same formats and structures that you’ve been relying on for years, it might be time to make a change.

In this article, we’ll help you outline some of the best recent practices that you should incorporate into your email marketing campaigns. With these, you’ll be able to completely revive this division of your marketing strategy and start to increase your conversion rate. 

Online Contact Lists Are Not Your Friend

A decade ago, one of the most effective ways that you could hit the ground running with email marketing was to find online email lists and use them as the basis for all of your outward content. You would simply find a long list of active emails and then send your marketing materials directly to these people.

Nowadays, with advanced email security technology, this is perhaps the fastest possible way that you can get your accounts flagged for spam. Not only do people not want to receive emails from unrelated companies, but this practice is also incredibly ineffective. 

Instead of just searching for online contact lists, you need to take a more long-term approach to this. Fill your site with opportunities for users that are interested in what you offer to add their email addresses to your mailing list. You could do this by offering a free insight or resource when they sign up to your mailing list or pose it as a way to get updates directly to their inbox.

Whatever you do, be sure to grow your own audience instead of just finding one pre-made online.

Personalization Is Key, And It Goes Both Ways

70% of consumers are frustrated when a brand sends a generic email that doesn’t apply to them in any way. If you’re just sending out generic emails without any elements that personalize your message to your consumer, then you’re missing out on a great opportunity. Personalization starts with a name, with the very least you can do is to include an auto-generating name function in the header of the email.

Additionally, many users prefer emails that feel more personal from a company. Most of the time, companies will use a NoReply email, which can feel incredibly impersonal and instantly marks the email as just a marketing message. Instead of using this format, you should always send your marketing emails from a real company account.

This way, users will receive a message that looks like it’s coming from a real person, instead of just a company. This slight difference can make an email marketing campaign radically more successful, as it allows you to insert a level of humanity behind your marketing materials. 

Instead of a faceless company communicating with the masses, personalization that goes both ways will ensure your company seems human, real, and trustworthy.

More Than One Offering, More Than One Marketing Channel

A great way to further the personalization of the marketing emails that your company releases are to segment your user audience based on interest. If your business is split into three sections, then you should build a mailing list for each of those functions separately.

This means that if you’re an adventure and tourism company, have three separate mailing lists for volunteer opportunities, hiking adventures, and scuba diving trips. Due to how niche these interests are, you’ll be decreasing your engagement rate if you send emails to all of these groups at once.

Be sure to increase personalization by creating segmented contact lists depending on your specific services. You can even include links to sign up for other contact lists in your email signature if you want to further the sales funnel that your marketing emails provide.

If you’re not sure how to add an email signature in outlook, then be sure to follow the linked tutorial.

Get To The Point On Your Subject Line

In our busy modern world, emails quite truly live and die by the subject line. With an ever-decreasing attention span, people don’t care enough about random emails that land in their inboxes. The vast majority of users will only read the subject line, using this as a determiner of whether they open the email or just drag it into the trash.

With this in mind, you should try to make your email subject lines as direct and to the point as possible. Don’t resort to the early 2010s method of clickbait. While this may result in a higher initial engagement rate the first few times you do so, it’ll only end up with much lower conversion rates and customers that instantly scrap your emails.

Instead, you should include a subject line that explains exactly what is going to come up in the email. With this, the only users that will click on it are those that are truly interested, allowing you to gain a much higher conversion rate from email marketing. At the end of the day, email marketing is all about driving your customers to your website, with conversion tactics like these being essential for strong email marketing campaigns. 

Final Thoughts

Email marketing is a tried-and-true marketing tactic with embedded analytics. Due to its extreme flexibility, your business can put this technique to use no matter what industry you work in. Whether you’re working on B2B leads or are sending out information about your latest eCommerce product launch, there is always space in email marketing for you.

What’s more, considering how low the bar to entry is with email, you’re able to build up a list of contacts over several years, creating a solid base of contacts for the long run. With the above tips, you’ll be able to make every single email that your marketing team sends count, turning this into one of your most valuable marketing channels.

Over time, and with a little update to the structures, styles, and techniques you’re using in your emails, you’ll be able to completely rejuvenate email marketing as a lead generation tool for your business.

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