E-mail is everything. There’s no better way to reach a customer or potential customer right where they live. Even knowing that fact, email marketing strategies have changed considerably in the past few years. If you’d like to supercharge your e-mail marketing, take a look at these tips from 8 of the best marketers around.
AWeber
Nothing beats valuable, punchy content. Your writing should captivate your readers so they are eager to open your emails.
The best way to send valuable content is to address a problem that your readers have. Show them that you understand their pain points, and provide a solution. If you can give your subscribers content that they can’t find elsewhere — like a Google search — you’ll become an invaluable resource to your prospects and customers.
Additionally, sending personalized content can help you more deeply connect with your email subscribers. Ask what they want from you. Then, set up automated email campaigns that deliver the right content to the right people at the right time. Not only will you save hours of time, but you’ll delight your subscribers by showing them you understand who they are and what they’re interested in.
It’s funny; as an email marketing solution for small businesses, we are asked all the time about the ‘best’ email marketing strategy, but more often than not, the answer is, “it depends.” The only way to truly know what resonates with your audience is to test, refine, iterate and ask. Split test your email subject lines, copy, images, links, calls-to-action, and so on until you uncover what your audience wants.
Finally, find a way to engage with your readers. Whether it’s through providing feedback forms or sentiment widgets in your emails, or simply encouraging your readers to reply to connect with you on social, gathering feedback is critical to building relationships via email.
Business Storytelling Tips
Subject lines and A/B testing are proven strategies. The next level of email marketing does involve artificial intelligence and content strategy together.
That could include automatically creating a newsletter through AI based on a designated content pool to personalize the experience and drive results faster.
Growth Hackers
When you send emails to your subscribers or your leads, you don’t want to be too salesy. It’s important to diversify the emails you send. In some cases:
- You could ask questions in order to start a conversation. This is a great way to get a conversation going and showing that you are interested in your subscribers.
- You can share insightful and interesting content such as blog posts, videos, infographics, tips, etc. This is called lead nurturing where you offer content for free without being pushy and allows you to stay in your subscribers’ minds.
- Discounts/Promotions: I mentioned that you don’t want to be too salesy but from time to time, it’s ok to be, just not too often.
When sending emails, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Have a powerful and interesting subject line. People open their emails because of your subject line.
- Keep your emails short: you don’t want to write a novel in your emails. Keep them short, concise, and straight to the point.
- Have a nice intro. The first 2 sentences of your email should entice readers to go through the whole email.
- Always finish an email with a CTA (Call-to-Action). This could be a question or asking people to take action by clicking a link.
Maria Johnsen
People get many emails every day. In order to stand out from the crowd, we create eye-catching emails with bright and colorful images that trigger emotional responses. We use A/B testing to see what type of color, image, and pitch get our leads and members to open the email. In the backend, we see if the email “A “with orange and gray color gets opened or email “B” with light and dark blue gets opened. We also use different pitches in A/B testing.
It is important to establish an emotional connection with customers. This is why we optimize email load time, deliver a polished brand message, and focus on the offer and not the photo.
A well-optimized email must be clean and simple to look great on smartphones.
We also integrate our email marketing efforts with social media, as people use networks to discover products and read customers’ reviews. Emails that are integrated with Instagram get more responses than the other social sites.
Adding videos within the email increases awareness and sales. This is why we add video intros in our and our clients’ newsletters.
Stories have a great impact on the audience’s perception. In fact, brand storytelling holds customers’ attention and influences consumer behavior.
Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help drive leads and sales if it is not spammed to death.
Mod Girl Marketing
When it comes to email marketing, it all boils down to personalization and knowing your audience. With that said, my “go-to” strategies may be completely different from another marketer who has an entirely different list of subscribers. My top-performing emails tend to be value-based emails that include a screenshot of a video and link to a landing page with a video where I offer tips to help them succeed.
So for me, images, videos, value, and segmentation work really well. Of course, you MUST have CTAs in every single email. Tell people what action you want them to take even if it’s just “think about this and apply it in your business.” Always provide value and be REAL. Even if you are selling in an email, show them the VALUE and be transparent about everything. People appreciate that, and they will buy from you time and time again, once you prove that you genuinely care about their success.
Weekhack
According to Forbes, the average entrepreneur receives more than 200 emails each day! If you want to get your email opened and read — you need to stand out in the inbox of your subscribers.
That’s why I focus a lot on creating subject lines that have the potential to get noticed by my audience. Before I send a single email, I write down at least five different subject lines and then go to Google and look there for inspiration. Remember, the subject line is the most crucial part of your email. If you don’t put the effort into creating a great one – there’s a huge chance that your emails won’t be opened.
And what’s the second most important part? That’s the opening.
If you don’t get the attention of your readers within a few seconds — you lose them! Make sure that you start the email with a strong message that resonates with your readers. Professionally and emotionally!
Local Dojo SEO
Make it easy for your visitors to subscribe
If you want to build your email subscriber list, make it easy for your readership to sign up. As intuitive as this sounds, so many organizations miss out on this opportunity. Set up a lead-capture form that’s easily identifiable and just as easy to sign up. Ask for the essentials and offer something of value in return (more on that below).
Offer Value
Unless you’re serving up the most engaging, valuable content, getting someone to sign up for your newsletter can be challenging. Offer something of value in return for their subscribe:
Free downloadable guides
Give people what they landed on your site for. Be a resource to your audience, which can ensure they come back to your site whenever they want to learn and initiate an action. For example, offer them:
- Downloadable checklist
- How-to guide
- Beginner’s guide to
- Glossary of industry terms
- E-book
- Blank templated sheets to fill out for their own purposes
- Blog content
If all your emails do is try to sell, this may result in a lot of unsubscribes. Instead, develop and maintain a blog and hold yourself to a regular posting schedule. Write about relevant topics, recent news, case studies, and more informational content.
When you develop your newsletter, incorporate relevant blog articles. That way, you can connect with your subscribers on a deeper level than trying to sell them the next service or product.
Automate
If you send manual emails out, it’s okay. But consider adding automated email journeys to increase the value each of your customers gets through these touchpoints. If someone signed up for a how-to guide, send them down a path that sends them a new part in a series over a few weeks.
If someone bought a product from you, send automated emails that shows them how to maintain it or get the best out of it. You get the idea.
With a little automation, you can increase subscribes, sales, views, and retention.
JB Online Marketing
We start e-mail marketing for almost every customer. In almost all cases, we do that with a lead magnet. Usually we do this by treating the biggest problem of the target group with a checklist or other helpful guide. For webshops, we now also work with new tools such as Listagram to collect e-mail addresses in a playful way.
We test a lot with different subject lines and A/B testing with discount offers. Sometimes, you see things you don’t expect, like an offer for a discount where the smallest discount works better. You really get rewarded if you help your user with good content, instead of spamming them with discounts and offers. We mostly supply them with helpful articles from where we try to make the sales. That way, we get a lot of cool e-mails back with people thanking us (our client) for their help. This way, open rates are really high, and we get lots of clicks and revenue.
