You’re here looking for tips for successful email marketing. Maybe you got swayed by the good old, ‘email marketing is obsolete’ myth. Either that or you have been flushing your hard-earned pounds down the drain with poorly designed campaigns. Here are our two cents. Email marketing is more effective now than it ever was. In fact, it has an ROI of 4300%. Oh yes. Read that again.

That said, the margin of error is getting slimmer. Open rates are dismal. Unsubscribe rates are at an all-time high. You cannot afford to run ad-hoc campaigns anymore. That’s why we have created this list.

Tips For Successful Email Marketing – Top 10!

This is a list of 10 easy tips that will infuse life into dead campaigns. On the other hand, if you have never run email marketing campaigns before, this will be an eye-opener. Either way, it’s a win-win. So stay tuned.

#1 – Start working on deliverability

What’s your email deliverability rate? First things first, your email MUST make its way into the recipient’s inbox. Standing guard are some sophisticated spam filters that use machine learning and AI. These filters will sniff out anything that they identify as spam. Unfortunately, legit emails sometimes fall prey to these filters too. How will you run a successful campaign if your emails end up in the spam folder? Here are some tips to increase deliverability:

• Request the subscriber to whitelist your email address
• Don’t rent or scape lists ever. Build your own.
• Filter our subscriber addresses that bounce frequently.
• Don’t use spammy words. All capitals are a strict no-no.
• Don’t use too many exclamation points.
• Try not to embed a form inside an email. You can use a CTA button instead.

This is not an exhaustive list of tips mind you. But it should help you get started. More so, if deliverability is your primary challenge.

#2 – Make that unsubscribe button as visible as the CTA button

Here’s one of the best tips for successful email marketing. Make that unsubscribe button pop out. A lot of email marketers make this mistake. They design a flawless email. Then they make the unsubscribe button minuscule in comparison to everything else. That’s the easiest way to qualify as a spammer by the way.

Let them unsubscribe if need be. There are numerous reasons why someone wants to unsubscribe. You bombard them with irrelevant emails. They are not interested in your products anymore. They want to decrease the frequency. Ensure that unsubscribe is a one-click process. If they find it too cumbersome, they may report you as spam. You do not want that.

#3 – Using segmentation is one of the underrated tips for successful email marketing

Does your email marketing team use segmentation? If they don’t, you need a new team. Segmentation is a much-underrated email marketing tool. You must segment your list into distinct groups. If you have the data, you can even create personas. Rather than sending a cookie-cutter template, send targeted emails.

If you still haven’t segmented the list, here are some steps to get started.

• Location – Segment by people living in a particular location.
• Age – Segment the list by age group.
• Interests – What’s their interest? Be specific while segmenting. Health is a broad interest whereas diabetes is something specific.
• New Subscribers – Create a group of new subscribers. Use best practices to target them with emails.

#4 – Time your emails

Timing emails is one of the tips for successful email marketing, that never fails. Did you know that email open timings vary across the world? In the United States, 21% of email opens occur between 9 am to noon. In the UK, it was 5 PM pre-pandemic. But that has now changed. Brits now open their emails at 9 am too. That said, the open rates in the UK are pretty consistent during work hours. There’s a momentary dip during lunchtime. But that’s to be expected.

Use country-wise segmentation to time your emails. Have UK customers? 9 am might be your best shot. Ditto with the US. If you send an email in the evening, newer emails will bury it by the next morning.

#5 – Design mobile-friendly emails if you are looking for tips for successful email marketing

Email design probably deserves a separate article. It’s what makes or breaks your campaign. At Rockstar Marketing, our email marketing team brainstorms for hours on design. What colour combinations work? Which fonts work best? At the same time, we ensure that there’s consistency with the brand image. However, there’s one common thread that ties all our campaigns together.

They are mobile optimised. 81% of readers access emails on mobile devices. If it’s not responsive, it’s difficult to read. They are probably squinting. Some may even try to pinch and zoom. But after a while, anybody will get tired. That’s when they zoom into the unsubscribe button. You can avoid this easily though. Here are some tips:

• Use mobile-friendly formatting. Here are some ideas from Campaign Monitor.
• Keep the fonts large.
• Media-heavy emails are not necessary. You can design great emails with text only.
• If you are using images, ensure that they are compressed.
• Highlight the important aspects.
• Space out the links.
• Give the CTA button prime real estate.

#6 – Speaking to the reader in the subject one of the best tips for successful email marketing

The subject line will determine how easily a reader opens the email. It’s your best shot at catching attention. You can invoke curiosity, surprise, fear & hate. Rockstar Marketing’s email marketing team split tests various subject lines. One that works consistently, is creating urgency. For example, ‘Just 30 mins left’. It automatically screams to your audience that time is running out. People like them have already grabbed the opportunity.

It’s a great way to entice someone to open the mail and read it. The rest, of course, depends on the copy. But even getting an open and a click is half the battle won. Subject lines shouldn’t be too long. Conversely, too short is likely to be ineffective too. Find the perfect length through testing.

#7 – Do not be a salesman

We all run email marketing campaigns with specific business goals. Sales being one of the common. But, people hate salesmen for a reason. Don’t be that guy who sends a welcome email and follows it up with a sales pitch. Don’t get us wrong. We are not saying that you shouldn’t sell. You absolutely must.

But, there’s a way to do it. Disguise the sales pitch beautifully. The reader should notice the perceived benefit first. ’Just 30-Mins left: Grab your free t-shirt’. It tells them that time is running out. Secondly, it’s offering them a physical product. The benefit. You should use the benefit to gift wrap the sales pitch. That’s one of the best tips for successful email marketing with sales goals.

#8 – Email Marketing is actually CTA Marketing

We have seen countless emails where the CTA is inconclusive. Another rookie mistake is to add one CTA too many. A CTA button or text is THE most effective part of your email. Use it sparingly. But ensure that it’s bloody good. It must be impactful. Your intention must be clear. What action do you want the customer to take?

Maybe it’s clicking on a link. Make it evident. Also, make sure that the CTA is attractive enough for them to take action.

#9 – Using a spellchecker is one of the rare tips for successful email marketing

Believe it or not, typos make their way into emails. Radicati group conducted a study on this. Guess what they found? 81% of email readers discovered spelling errors in emails. There were grammatical mistakes too. They found this to be unacceptable. Grammatical errors reflect poorly on your brand. They also are a spam trigger in some ISPs by the way. Why would you want to make your email look amateurish? Use that spellchecker. Run it through a grammar check.

If you are a one-man operation, things might get a little tough. We know how difficult it can be when you are donning multiple hats. Here’s a great guide on common grammatical errors in emails. Read that list and try to find the ones that you are guilty of using.

#10 – Monitor and Tweak

No email marketing campaign is perfect from the get-go. You have to keep monitoring and tweaking it. Whenever you run a new campaign, use A/B testing. There’s no other way to find which campaign performs better than the other. This is where a skilled email marketing team comes into the picture. Your email marketing team should stay one step ahead the campaign. They should monitor every bit of granular detail. Here are some of the metrics that our email marketing team monitors for every client campaign.

• Email Open Rate – The average open rate is 21.33%. What’s yours? If your email open rate is poor, here’s a guide that can help.
• Click through rate – This is the percentage of your subscribers who click on a link inside an email. For instance, a CTA button,
• Unsubscribe rate.
• Spam Rate.
• Conversions.
• Bounce rate.
• Share rates.
• The ROI for the campaign.

The more metrics you track, the clearer the course of action.

To sum it up

No amount of tips for successful email marketing can be a substitute for an inexperienced team. Email Marketing can be an effective ally to your other marketing channels. The Rockstar Marketing team frequently clubs it with Google Ads campaigns and SEO.

If you would like to overhaul your digital marketing efforts, speak to us today.

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