Since the early days of email marketing, just about every industry has jumped on board. Marketing messages swamp work and personal inboxes, and it takes a lot more to stand out than it once did. Last year, we spent a whole month talking about the power of email marketing, but this important component of the marketing toolbox has just continued to evolve since then.
Is email marketing still as effective as it once was? It can be, but it’s harder to achieve meaningful results than ever before. Only the most strategic, savviest email marketers will succeed at generating leads and driving revenue via their email campaigns. Are you employing these strategies to make your email campaigns more effective?
A marketing email can only make an impact if it reaches people when they are receptive to its messages. There is data (much of it conflicting) about the best time to send emails for different industries, but the specific times of day and days of the week your subscribers are most likely to open and engage with email messages is best determined through testing. Take a look at the open and click-through rates of your past email marketing campaigns, formulate a hypothesis about the timing that works best for specific types of messages, and then test it until you can determine what patterns work best for your business.
Don’t limit yourself to sending e-newsletters and other blasts to all your subscribers at once. Instead, segment your lists and tailor your messages so that you can deliver targeted content to specific groups of subscribers at ideal points in time. For example, your newly engaged prospects should not get the same messages as your leads that are close to closing, and your C-Suite decision-maker contacts should not get the same message as your product end user contacts.
But to truly compete, you should go beyond simple segmentation and move toward smart marketing automation. Create automated workflows that your prospects can trigger through specific actions on your website, engagement with your content or any other activity you deem important. Well-crafted email workflows can nurture your leads at a pace that is perfectly matched to their movement through your sales cycle without requiring much oversight from your marketing team.
Your subscribers will never see your content, no matter how compelling it is, without clickable subject lines inviting them to open the email and engaging headlines encouraging them to read through to the end. Make sure your subject lines spark readers’ interest, and avoid language that may be flagged as spam. But don’t just guess. A/B test different subject lines and preview text for each message you send to see what draws the most interest.
Today more than ever, it’s crucial to keep subject lines concise. Most smartphone and mobile device email apps will truncate subject lines longer than 25-30 characters, and we suggest staying within that limit whenever possible, especially if a significant percentage of your subscribers open emails via mobile.
The inbox is becoming a fiercely competitive place, but optimizing these elements of your messages can help your company break through the clutter. Is email marketing still pulling its weight for your brand?
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