Harness the true value of email marketing through the right approach. Know how to compel your target audience to interact more with your business via emails.

Email marketing can offer a variety of business opportunities, from lead generation to customer interaction to boosting sales. Additionally, it provides unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and return on investment. Of course, email marketing has many layers to it.

In order to ensure that your emails get read and that your subscribers’ interactions with your campaigns are fruitful rather than unpleasant, numerous things go into creating and running successful email marketing campaigns.

Maintaining a consistent level of engagement and action on the part of the recipients with regard to their emails and business is one of the major challenges that email marketers confront. Getting someone’s email address is a fabulous privilege, but getting them to open, respond, and keep this cycle going may be quite difficult. In order to encourage prospects to become devoted customers and boost brand revenue, your email subscribers must continually be encouraged to take more action.

Let’s walk you through the process of how to pick and use the right email marketing features. Furthermore, gain actionable insights and ways to implement the best practices that boost interaction rates and other key email marketing performance indicators.

Email Marketing Features All Marketers Must Know That Lend A Helping Hand In Inducing More Action

Having the right email marketing tool in your hand is very important. It makes the whole process of creating, executing, and tweaking the campaigns a hassle-free task. Moreover, knowing which features of the email marketing tool will prove beneficial in pulling off a campaign and driving more action is equally important. The top features to be aware of are:

Robust Data Analytics and Insights

Data is the lifeblood of modern email marketing. Different email marketing tools provide varying amounts of reporting functionalities. The most basic email marketing metrics, such as email open rate, bounce rate, complaint rate, unsubscribe rate, and click-through rate, should be used as a starting point.

One of the best ways to use these analytics data is through A/B testing. In fact, the majority of email marketing platforms include built-in testing capabilities. Your marketing ROI could increase by up to 37%, with proper A/B testing. Some email marketing tools go so far as to support multivariate testing that contrasts three or more variants simultaneously.

Email List Management

Any email marketing toolkit should include a strong and efficient email list management feature. This will enable you to create and maintain a high-quality email list database.

If you don’t have a proper email list with contacts who are truly interested in hearing from you, you can’t start an email campaign, let alone drive more engagement.

Furthermore, to be able to get a high engagement and conversion rate, you must be able to clean the email list regularly to get rid of inactive and outdated email contacts.

High Email Deliverability   

A high deliverability rate is one feature of email marketing software that you shouldn’t skimp on if you intend to spur more involvement and interaction. It ensures that your emails land in the inbox and not the spam folder of your subscribers.

Email Automation

Not all of email marketing’s goals are to bring in new clients and leads. Getting current clients to spend more money with your business over the long term is a crucial strategy for increasing revenue.

Email automation simplifies and streamlines the entire customer retention and loyalty approach. (Moreover, a study shows that in comparison to average consumers, engaged and loyal customers can benefit a business by increasing the revenue by 23%.) It is easy as pie to boost customer lifetime value. Furthermore, it enables you to automate requests for client feedback, provide special offers to customers who make substantial purchases, and start re-engagement efforts when subscribers go off course.

All of these strategies improve your relationship with customers after they have made a purchase from you, which raises client lifetime value. Furthermore, it keeps the loop going on and on automatically, keeping your subscribers engaged at every touchpoint.

Automated emails promise a positive experience. You’ll be able to create stronger relationships, draw in new subscribers and clients, and as a result, generate more click-through traffic and see higher conversion rates.

Segmentation

Any email marketing approach must include segmentation. Why?

It guarantees that the right people get the right messages at the right times. By doing this, subscribers will feel more connected to you and find it simpler to contact you and your company for the information they require.

The capability to divide your contacts into groups or segments is one of the essential components of any top-notch email marketing tool. Look for email marketing software that provides you with sophisticated, predefined segmentation like engagement levels, interests, and purchase behavior.

Strategies to Boost Engagement and Interaction with Email Marketing

Inspire Action

A call to action (CTA) is an inevitable part of every marketing campaign email. They help in pushing the email recipients to take an intended action: sign up, buy anything from you, visit your website, explore your newest hot launch, and so on and so forth.

Email just so happens to be a fantastic technique to motivate action through the CTA buttons.

CTAs are simple to include in emails. Certainly, they have a wide range of capabilities.

• Emails containing a single call to action saw a 371% increase in clicks and a 1617% rise in sales.
• CTAs have a 4.23% average click-through rate.
• Even better, personalized CTAs outperform basic, generic ones by 202%.

It all depends on you how you harness CTAs to inspire your subscribers to respond to your emails in a specific way.

Numerous users only read the first few lines of the emails. In fact, some of them do not even read past the fold. CTAs should be incorporated into emails at various points because of this. Giving your readers a few opportunities to engage with your email content is necessary, but you don’t need to go overboard or demand a lot of different actions from them.

Finding a balanced formula on how many CTAs to include in the emails and where they should be placed that works for your target audience are key. Give them plenty of options to take immediate action within your concise email content.

• Create segments of your email list. Then, create specific, personalized CTAs for each segment.
• Consider the next action: When the next step is actually something else, several marketers make the mistake of making their CTA represent the end goal. The CTA must be connected to the following stage in the sales funnel in order to be effective. The CTA needs to make clear what can be done following the click.
• Use persuasive dialect: Users must be convinced to click with CTAs. The CTA button’s color and size catch the user’s attention, but the wording is what persuades them to proceed. CTA copy should be convincing in addition to being action-oriented.
• Add a sense of urgency into the CTAs: It’s crucial to motivate people to take action while you have managed to catch their attention.

Your email’s call to action is a crucial component because it’s where the action really happens, but it must also work in concert with the other elements of the email to convert users. The CTA must address the user directly and urge them to proceed to the next step in the marketing funnel in order to be most effective.

Keep email design in mind

What plays an important role in making an email marketing campaign successful – the email content or the email design? Well, without any surprise, both are important. 

Successful email marketing campaigns are well-balanced, offer recipients something of value, and have that aesthetic appeal. Additionally, they are loaded with recipient-friendly, conversion-focused content. And if you want your emails to have as much of an impact as possible, you must prioritize both.

Optimize the Absorption Rate of Email Content – Did you know that it takes the human brain as little as 13 milliseconds to recognize an image? A well-designed email should take into consideration the fact that your brain has evolved to process visuals much more quickly than text. Understanding how your clients’ brains function is key, and imagery plays a significant role in this.

If you choose a compelling hero image as your opening, it will draw attention right away and keep readers interested—exactly what you want if you want recipients to read your entire email from top to bottom.

You may develop a visually appealing email design that best represents your content using HTML emails and email template builders.

The use of templates is quite straightforward, and they continue to improve. However, they still email templates. You’ll have a difficult time distinguishing in your audiences’ inboxes if your email appears to be a bland template and doesn’t appear to be distinctive to your brand.

You don’t necessarily need to have a graphic designer at your disposal to succeed at distinguishing. However, you must ensure that the presentation, layout, and content of your emails are appealing. The elegant design conveys professionalism, makes the content easy to read and understand, and increases interest in what you have to say and convey.

Make mobile optimization a priority.

Recent data shows that more emails are read on mobile than on a desktop: 55% of emails are now opened on a mobile device first. Executing email marketing campaigns that display and function well on mobile devices is fundamental expertise that is a must nowadays, especially as desktop openings start to plummet. This entails designing mobile-responsive emails that can be read on a range of screens and devices.

There are many great resources available even if you have zero experience in HTML coding. Email optimization for mobile phones is greatly simplified by a variety of marketing tools, such as Mailercloud, which offers a library of pre-made responsive email templates. With the appropriate tools, all you need to do is enter the content and images about your business in the templates, and you’ll be ready to shoot your email campaigns.

Pay heed to the preheader text: When it comes to email marketing best practices, the emphasis is frequently firmly set on subject lines. Specifically how to make them brief and simple (yet intriguing and informative).

While still necessary, the pre-header text is frequently disregarded. Also called a ‘Johnson Box’, it corresponds to the first line of the email text that is seen as a preview in a user’s email client inbox. It is a priceless addition to the subject line and gives you valuable additional characters to leverage to get your subscribers to click and open your emails.

Pre-header content should be brief, to the point, and simple to read because the length changes depending on the email client and device being used. Pre-header text can be split-tested in the same way that subject lines are. Furthermore, it can be customized to different target audience segments, their preferences, and for mobile devices as well. You will receive this information via the native analytics platform of your email service provider.

Make sure the CTAs are mobile-friendly as well as finger-friendly: The idea of using a brief, convincing CTA is one that most marketers are familiar with. As text-heavy emails don’t perform all that well on mobile, it’s essential to bring CTAs as high up in the copy as you can and use as little prose as possible in mobile-friendly marketing emails. 

Using buttons in place of links is also advised. This is mostly because hyperlinks, like a lot of text, don’t take advantage of an email’s mobile-responsive design. When utilizing a mobile device, buttons are more recognizable and simpler to click on. The mobile user experience will be improved much more if there is enough white space surrounding the button.

Use line breaks: It’s essential to divide your text into a few shorter paragraphs.

Mobile email readers have the very little attention span, so it’s critical to make your message as simple to understand and follow as possible. On a mobile device, nobody will read a complete page of text.

Add content breaks with extra white space to the email and enable the reader to focus on each section individually rather than being confronted by an overwhelming wall of text.

Monitor the device that most of the subscribers use to access emails

Effective email marketing has become more dependent on the use of mobile-responsive design since the surge in mobile users. Analyze your email marketing stats to discover which device your subscribers prefer to read and interact with your emails on.

Understanding how your audience consumes your email will help you improve their email experience and support a multi-channel journey that will boost engagement and conversions.

Since most email marketing tools don’t offer a preview-pane size that is very broad, emails should be between 600 and 800 pixels wide. The preview you create, along with your subject line and preheader text, might persuade a user to interact with your email and click through, making it potentially more essential than your entire marketing email.

Link up your social media networks

Since everyone uses social media, your emails should be optimized for it as well. You can provide people the option to share content from your email to their social media accounts. This could be in addition to including buttons that encourage readers to follow your brand on social media platforms as well. Free marketing, that is.

Strategies to Boost Sales with Email Marketing

It takes meticulous planning and analysis to produce the kind of email marketing campaign that boosts sales. When drafting such emails, keep the following in mind:

• Determine which emails your customers respond to the most by tracking sales and purchases.
• Each email should contain a compelling call to action (CTA), such as clicking on the product or service, downloading a user guide, or conversing with a representative about the same product or service.

Emails announcing the launch of new products and services

You have a wonderful opportunity to contact clients when you receive a new shipment of goods. Informing both infrequent and regular clients about your newest arrivals will increase traffic to your website.

Consider sending a weekly email that highlights your most recent products if you consistently receive shipments on a certain day of the week. By doing this, you give your readers something to anticipate each week and, hopefully, look forward to.

• Take into account crafting a theme around the new launch in the emails.
• Use real images of the products and services.
• Do not introduce more than 7 products or services, as it may make the email overloaded and intimidating.
• Add appropriate links in the emails to certain products so that they are easily traceable and accessible by the recipients.

Alert emails reminding people that they left certain items in their cart

You may prevent losing the opportunity to make sales by sending emails to customers who abandoned their carts. When a customer exits your website without buying an item they have added in their cart, abandoned cart emails prove to be a great helping hand. This kind of email acts as a nudge to return and purchase the products left in the cart. Even if they have planned to, people frequently fail to finish their purchases because they get busy or preoccupied.

• Create a compelling subject line, maybe like “Forgot Something?” This sort of pinch in the subject line should be pertinent, non-deceptive, and explicit.
• Include a sizable image and a succinct description of the products.
• Keep the entire text in the email brief.
• Finish off the email with a persuading “Buy Now” call to action button, landing the email recipient right into their cart.

Give a coupon code or post a sale alert

Sales are always popular. Additionally, buyers are pleased and motivated to make a purchase when they receive an email with a coupon or discount code. Think about giving your emails promoting an upcoming or ongoing sale a theme, like a forthcoming holiday or an end-of-season deal.

Mention the sale in the email subject line. When feasible, including product photographs. To make the discount clear, use a large typeface.

Give your clients bespoke tips and tricks 

Demonstrate your expertise in what you do by sharing some pieces of advice. This, indeed, will portray you as a reliable source of information about your products. By sending client emails that aren’t specifically designed to close a sale, you can gain their trust and ultimately increase your sales. In reality, the emails ought to touch on the present issues of your subscribers. Encourage your clients to get in touch with you if they need additional information or assistance.

Use email personalization tactics to send out product recommendations

Making personalized recommendations based on what you know about your consumers will help you increase sales. A follow-up email could suggest well-liked products similar or related to the products that the customers have recently bought.

When you advise your clients about relevant products, you’ll not only increase sales but also give them the impression that you know their needs. Confirm the suitability of the products you recommend. Losing the customer’s trust can happen when you suggest products that don’t make sense to them.

Ways to Drive Action with Email Marketing

If done in the right way, an email marketing campaign can significantly increase your business in all aspects – new customers, recurring purchases, brand outreach, and more.

“Customers don’t sign up for email – they sign up for your brand.” – Bob Frady

Here are a few tried-and-true tactics to help you design a fantastic email marketing campaign that accelerates action and traffic to your brand and business.

Customers Value Authenticity – Provide them that in the Emails for Better Connection

Being real is important. Customers want to see an honest portrayal of who you are and how dedicated you are to your cause.

As customers place even more value on a company’s beliefs and values, a brand’s ability to express its principles and create a true connection with its audience will be among the most important factors deciding its survival in the coming years.

Nowadays, more than 60% of buyers consider a brand’s value alignment before making a purchase. Additionally, these customers aren’t duped by hazy promises and catchy buzzwords; they want to see evidence that you actually live up to your commitments.

How to Thrive when Everything is Personalized?

Personalization was king in 2020. It will continue to be a crucial component of any effective email campaign through and beyond the future years.

But how do you stand out when everyone is following the same rules of email personalization?

It can be difficult for marketers to become familiar with their clients without coming off as creepy or overly friendly. A constant focus on the attempt to humanize your email interactions will be necessary to achieve and maintain this equilibrium.

Ineffective emails stop being opened by subscribers, which increases the likelihood that they will unsubscribe and they will be spammed. Too many irrelevant emails sent to subscribers account for 67% of all unsubscriptions. Here, personalization and segmentation are viable solutions.

Transactional rates in personalized emails are six times greater.

Strong and effective email list segmentation and gathering as much data as possible about your subscribers are the cornerstone of every email personalization strategy. Start by segmenting your whole email list into groups based on people’s online behaviors, buyer personas, locations, or any other criteria that correspond to your marketing goal.

Personalizing your email campaigns as per the segments of the email list has been shown to enhance open and click-through rates, which in turn can increase revenue and ROI. According to studies, emails with tailored subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without, and their revenue is 5.7 times higher.

These outcomes are a result of tailored emails being more pertinent to subscribers. Your subscribers will receive an email that is personalized for them, and contains their names and offers that are in line with their interests rather than a campaign with generic offers and messaging. A truly personalized email marketing campaign includes these core elements: relevancy, automation, and timeliness and comes from a real person.

Implement dynamic content: Adding dynamic content to your emails is another way to personalize them. Briefly said, dynamic content is email content that adapts based on the actions, preferences, and interests of the user.

Don’t Just Send Out Plain ‘Sales’ Emails

Email marketing is unquestionably intended for brand promotion and product/service sales. But that does not imply that you will always cover the same ground in your emails to your clients. Subscribers begin to lose interest in your email and the brand if you consistently send out the same sales email. And then there comes a point when they stop opening your emails, which either puts you on the spam list or causes you to be unsubscribed.

Send your subscribers some fruitful content if you want to get them to read all your emails to the fullest. It can be anything related to their current problems or some kind of information they are looking for.

Create Email Designs that Portray your Brand’s Voice

60% of the people prefer to engage and purchase from a brand they are familiar with. Emails operate in a similar manner. Emails from well-known brands are always opened by recipients. Brand consistency in the emails may create this familiarity and confidence.

Keep in mind that branding extends beyond the business name and logo you include in your email and covers the tone in the email as well. Therefore, the content of your emails should speak your brand’s voice in addition to the email style, graphics, colors, text type, and logo. The more on-brand your email campaigns are, the more reliable it becomes for your audience.

Make the First Touchpoint – the Email Subject Line – a Killer One

You’re familiar with the proverb “don’t judge a book by its cover,” right? However, email marketing is one area where this falls short. Your email’s subject line determines whether your recipients will open the email, delete it immediately, or, even worse, flag it as spam (A study says that 69% of the email recipients mark the email as spam, solely on the basis of the subject line). Certainly, the subscriber interacts first and foremost with the subject line first which gives them a glimpse into the email.

The subject lines are a very important factor that determines the email open rates. To get beyond the first obstacle, it’s imperative that you create a great email subject line because 47% of email receivers open an email based just on the subject line.

• Keep any sort of drama in the subject line to a minimum – avoid using capital letters and too many exclamations.
• Carefully use words that are known to increase the email open rates.
• Keep it brief. Optimize it as well for various email clients, browsers, and screen sizes.

The internet is filled with enough clickbait. People, therefore, do not require it in their inboxes, which is an utterly private space, either. You’ll have the reverse effect if your subject line is stated so obviously that it exists solely to get recipients to click without actually giving them any context. In order to convince the recipients to open, read, and trust the email, concentrate on creating an email subject about why they should care for.

How to write effective subject lines?

• Hook them right away. Use catchy language, an impressive statistic, a relatable phrase, or express the value.
• Bring in a fun element. Wordplay that is plentiful attracts! These small metaverse wonders of communication have a very impactful role.
• For readability and accessibility, it’s still preferable to employ a natural speech, even if your brand has a more somber tone.
• Activate readers’ responses. Including a call to action in your email subject line is always a good idea. Readers appreciate that your email’s purpose is made obvious by doing this.
• Pose a query. Instead of making a general statement, try posing a question to your audience. Questions are more likely to be opened since they immediately engage people in conversation.
• Use brackets and parentheses to organize large amounts of information or to bring out essential information without using capital letters.

Try to Strike a Genuine Dialogue with your Subscribers

Like a real-world face-to-face conversation, an interesting email invites the recipients to answer by giving them a cause and the chance to do so. Real dialogues appeal to all subscribers. They find human-to-human communication to be more sincere, which makes subscribers feel valued and cared for. Computerized emails lack such potency and appear more generic.

Therefore, you should include your name in the sender’s field to establish a warm and trustworthy relationship with the subscribers. Additionally, make it possible for your email recipients to reply. One-way communication rarely produces as much as two-way communication. This enables the customer to ask questions about your brand and to discuss their experiences. The likelihood of subsequent interactions increases as a customer feels more cared for.

Perfect the Email’s Structure

The use of structure is crucial when crafting email copy. Reading through several lengthy lines of content can cause someone to regret opening your email and click off before continuing. Your email’s readability will be improved by adhering to a logical structure and keeping paragraphs brief and to the point.

Nobody enjoys reading lengthy, boring content. As soon as they open an email, subscribers always desire to immediately access the key information. And if they are unable to learn any, they will simply delete the email without reading the contents. They are less likely to open your email in the future as a result of this. Therefore, it is advisable to utilize concise and direct language in your email text, whether it be the subject line or the email’s body content.

Closely Understand for Whom you are writing for

Depending on the size of its user base, every firm has a unique experience with email campaigns. You must understand who your target audience is regardless of the service or product you’re offering. Furthermore, you need to be aware of the customer’s position in the marketing funnel as well as in their customer journey.

You can modify your email copy to meet the demands of your readers once you know who you’re writing for.

• The characteristics of the people that make up each target audience must be known.
• Making client personas is a quick and easy way to accomplish this.
• Utilize email marketing analytics reports to learn more in detail about your subscribers and how they interact with your emails.
• The study which devices they use to access and interact with your emails, the time they are opening them, and the clicks that indicate the products or services they are interested in.

Each will enable you to learn more about the daily lives of your subscribers and get to know them better as people. After all, the most crucial aspect of comprehending a target audience is keeping in mind that there are actual people behind the email addresses you are communicating to. You can use all this information to determine how your email marketing campaigns should unfold and bring in more action.

Ensure your Email Contacts’ Database is Opportune

To make sure that you are able to encash your email list database, you need to have contacts who are genuinely interested in your products and services. Thus, it is very important to maintain email list hygiene by timely removing contacts that have become outdated and inactive.

Otherwise, if you keep sending emails to inactive email contacts, the emails will bounce; increasing the bounce rates and further damaging your domain reputation. Every email list has a natural decay rate, which makes the email list cleaning process even more important.

When you send email marketing campaigns to fully-active subscribers, they will be more receptive. This will, consequently, increase the engagement rates 

Monitor the Progress

To understand the degree of an email campaign’s success, it’s critical to continuously track your email marketing performance.

Knowing what’s working and what isn’t will help you enhance your email marketing efforts. You may examine the percentage of recipients who read your email, what links they clicked on, the offers that piqued their interest, and the effectiveness of your emails in bringing visitors back to your business using all these data. Additionally, it’s simple to evaluate the effectiveness of several campaigns and determine what kinds of communication work best for your audience.

You can identify who is actively involved with your emails by looking at the analytics and reports. Subsequently, you can specifically target these people with specialized promotions and offers as a follow-up. You encourage individuals to take action by rewarding engaged subscribers.

Some of the important email marketing metrics to analyze are:

• Email open rates
• Click-through rate
• Conversion rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Spam complaint rate

Send the Emails at the Right Time and at the Right Frequency

When it comes to your email marketing campaigns’ success rate, timing is essential. Making a proper time choice is a crucial step in achieving your goal of increased open and click-through rates.

Another critical aspect is to send the emails at the right frequency. Sending too many emails may soon irritate the subscribers. Worse, some of them may even straight away delete the emails without opening them, thereby damaging your email sender’s reputation. On the other hand, sending the emails few and far between may slowly and steadily diminish your visibility in the recipient’s inbox. Subsequently, they will forget about you and your brand.

With that in mind, you ought to make use of all the resources at your disposal to ascertain which time and frequency would be ideal for your subscribers.

There isn’t a single one-size-fits-all formula. It all depends on the kind of your business and email marketing objective.

There are various marketing automation solutions that can assist you in carrying out sophisticated multivariate testing in order to determine the best time to email your subscribers. It is no surprise that, on average, 51% of businesses are presently employing automation. This will allow you to concentrate on the crucial components of your email marketing strategy while also saving your company a tonne of time and money. As a result, users will get your communications at the right time. You can avoid wasting time and money on ineffective email marketing methods by using this form of email optimization.

The Landing Page Needs to be Equally Conversion- and Customer-centric

Imagine you get a profitable offer for your preferred book in an email. To place an order right away, just click the CTA button. You expect to get on the product offer page, but instead, you find yourself on the website’s home page. Don’t you feel let down and irritated?

The negative impact of such an incident prevents buyers from making similar purchases in the future. Make sure your email content corresponds with your landing page at all times to avoid seeing this.

Wrapping it up!

Email marketing is both a demanding and thrilling process because there are so many opportunities and room for growth and performance. If properly implemented, it provides a solid foundation for developing well-thought-out campaigns that will increase sales and grow your brand.

What will put you ahead of your competition is making a significant effort to communicate with your subscribers as they progress toward becoming devoted customers in a more customized, yet apt way. Furthermore, you need to keep track of all the current trends and harness the best practices mentioned in this article.