Why use email marketing?
Email marketing is one of marketers' oldest tools. But that doesn't mean email marketing is “outdated”. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are three times as many email accounts as there are profiles on Facebook and Twitter combined. That's why email is still alive and well and an effective strategy for converting leads into customers.
However, getting permission to send emails to people is easier said than done, and it's actually only the first step on the road to a successful email marketing strategy. In fact, it's very much the emails you send afterwards that create value in the long run.
So here are 10 tips to make your email marketing more effective all round.
1. Define your goal
One of the very first things you need to do is ask yourself: “Why should I use email marketing at all?” If you don't have a goal for using email marketing, you won't get the results you want either.
So take a step back and consider what your goal with email marketing really is. It might be to:
- Be “top of mind”, so your business is the first one your customers think of when they need help or are looking for a preferred partner.
- Educate potential customers and build trust, so they discover that you're the best-qualified partner on the market.
- Remind existing customers to use your products or services.
Once you're sure of your goal with email marketing, it will also be easier to define your target audience and optimise your emails so they support your goals.
2. Find the right balance between information and sales
When you send emails to customers, it's important to find the right balance between information and sales. It can be tempting to send potential customers a good offer along the way, but you mustn't bombard them with offers. First you need to build their trust, for example through content marketing.
A good rule of thumb is that your emails should be 90% information and 10% sales. That way, you don't scare your leads away before they've got to know your business.
3. Make sure the opt-in text and the newsletter itself match
You should keep your promises. You've probably heard that before, and it applies to email marketing too. So there needs to be consistency between what it says on the page where the recipient signs up to get emails from you and what your emails actually contain. If not, you lose your customers' trust.
In addition, the GDPR requires you to only send emails whose content relates to the topics described in the opt-in text.
To establish a bond of trust between you and the customer, it's therefore best to be as specific as possible in the opt-in text. Tell the recipient exactly what they can expect when they receive emails from you, and ideally roughly how often you'll send them.
4. Give your emails an engaging subject line
Even if potential customers have signed up to receive your emails, it's far from certain that they'll open them. To get a high open rate, it's therefore all about making the subject line interesting. Your job is to convince the recipient to spend 10-30 seconds of their life reading your email.
But how exactly do you do that?
- First, make it clear what the recipient gets out of your email. For example, you could start your subject line with: “Get the best..”, “learn all about..” or “don't miss”.
- Make your emails personal, so they come across as relevant to each recipient.
- Say it straight. In other words, don't wrap your messages in clichés and expressions that are hard to decode. Instead, get straight to the point and keep your subject lines under 50 characters.
- Run an A/B test to try out different versions of your subject line on a smaller group of your recipients to see what works.
5. Create a call-to-action
What should happen once the recipient has actually opened your email? What action do you want your recipients to take? These are important questions to ask yourself if you want to use email marketing to generate new leads.
So you need to make it clear what the recipient's next step should be. Should they fill in a form? Read a blog post or buy a product in your webshop? Spell out what you want the customer to do with a clear call-to-action.
6. Keep email design and copy simple
Emails are displayed very differently depending on whether you use iPhone, Gmail, Outlook or one of the many other email providers out there. So make sure you keep your design and copy as simple as possible, so your message gets through and isn't lost in poor design and convoluted sentences.
7. Write alt texts for the images in your emails
Alt texts for your images are essential. An alt text is an alternative text that describes an image and can be entered in most email platforms and marketing systems.
The reason you need alt texts is that only some of your recipients get to see the images. Some have image display turned off by default, so each user has to take action themselves to show them.
So if you have both text and images in your email, you need to describe what's in the images. Otherwise there may be strange white boxes in the email that confuse the recipient.
8. Make it easy to unsubscribe from your emails
Over the years, email marketing has gained a somewhat tarnished reputation, and with good reason. Even though it's actually a breach of the Danish Marketing Practices Act and the GDPR, far too many businesses send emails without the recipients' permission. And just as many businesses make it hard for recipients to unsubscribe from their emails.
Although you might think it's best to hold on to recipients at all costs, people will only become more annoyed and frustrated with your business if they want to unsubscribe from your emails and can't easily do so. You also risk being blacklisted as a spammer by the major email clients such as Gmail and Outlook.
That's why you should always make it easy for your recipients to unsubscribe by placing a link at the bottom of the email that says, for example, “unsubscribe from all emails”.
9. Test, test and test again!
One of the best things you can do when doing email marketing is to test every parameter. First of all, test the technical side. Does your email look the way it should? Most modern email platforms have built-in test features, so you can see how your emails look on iPhone, in Gmail and in Outlook.
The next step is to test which time of day gets the most engagement on your emails. For example, you could test whether it affects the open rate if you send emails before or after lunch.
Finally, you need to test the content. That doesn't just mean the subject line, as described earlier. You should also test which calls to action work, and how it affects the open rate if you change the sender name.
10. Remember the law on email marketing
Most people have the spam rules under control when doing email marketing. Even so, new cases and reminders keep appearing, so it's important to follow the rules so you don't end up in the Danish Consumer Ombudsman's sights.
BONUS: 3 types of email that work
To succeed with email marketing, you need to make sure you follow the customer through the different stages of the buying journey. Your emails need to be both relevant and interesting to recipients and make sense in relation to when they receive them. That's why it can be a good idea to take a bird's-eye view of your email marketing strategy and divide your email marketing into 3 categories:
- Welcome emails:
With welcome emails, you can establish a relationship with the customer. This is how you introduce your brand and tell the customer what next step to take. Welcome emails have a really high open rate, so you should go all out to create the best possible welcome email. This is when your recipients are most receptive, and you should make the most of it! - “Complete your purchase” emails:
If a customer has put an item in their basket and then left the website without buying it, you can send them an email reminder to complete their purchase. You can also use this type of email to remind the customer of the products they never bought. - Follow-up emails after purchase:
Holding on to your customers is at the heart of a well-run business. That's why it's important to maintain the relationship with the customer after they've made their first purchase. This can be done in many ways, including a follow-up email that says “thank you for your purchase”, an email asking the customer about their buying experience or an email recommending related products.
Let our specialists handle your email marketing
Do you want to succeed with email marketing? Get help from our specialists and send emails that actually work.
Write to us using the contact form or send us an email at info@amplify.dk. You can also call us on 70 60 50 28, and we'll be ready to help you with your email marketing.
