Email marketing creates the potential for personalized communication with customers. It can lead to higher customer retention, boosted brand image and increased sales. Building relationships with your audiences this way is a popular eCommerce strategy. However, if email marketing is not executed well, it can have negative results. Therefore it’s important to consider these best practices in order to reap the benefits of email marketing.
Why Use Email Marketing?
There are many benefits to email marketing. Some of them include:
- A cost-effective marketing strategy
- Personalized and targeted communication with customers
- Improved customer relationships
- Easily trackable outcomes
- Boosted sales
- Heightened brand awareness
However, in order to achieve these benefits it’s best to know the ways to do this. This list of best practices will help point you in the right direction.
Use Audience Segments
Something crucial in email marketing is that the emails are personalized. However, standards of personalization are rising, and your shoppers will expect top quality personalization. This goes beyond just using their names in the email. In order to provide uniquely personalized results for each individual, this can be expensive and hard to achieve well.
Audience segmentation can achieve personalization at scale. Creating targeted segmented groups based on preferences, behavior or even anonymous click profile data is a great way of achieving personalization through email marketing.
This means that larger audience segments can receive emails that are relevant to them. Recently, this can be achieved through anonymous first-time user data, via click profiles. This means that no data infringement occurs, as there are strict data privacy laws these days.
Schedule Correctly
There are certain times in the day when email marketing is received best. This should be considered. You don’t want to send email marketing in the middle of the night, for example, as it will not produce the best results.
Certain periods of the day see users more active. This also depends on demographic, behavior patterns and time zones. You should make sure that your email marketing takes all of these factors into consideration, as well as more standard statistics.
For example, GetResponse results in 2020 found that the best hour for open rates is 4am, whilst 6am produces the best click-through rates. These are all things that should be considered when making your email marketing strategy. Precision is more important than an influx of emails.
High Quality Content
The content included in your emails should be of a high standard. First impressions make a huge difference, so the subject line should be creative and compelling. You want to have a hook that ensures that shoppers want to look at what the email contains. It should be an angle that is attractive to readers.
Within the email, the text should not be overwhelming. It should reflect the brand image and tone, whilst selling your products effectively. It should be simple, clear to understand and well worded. This will all help contribute to your positive brand image, and help the readers feel connected to your business.
Clear Call To Action
Having a clear CTA is important, as that’s the whole point of the emails. There’s no point in having email marketing if they aren’t leading your shoppers to take action. If you want shoppers to click through to your website then make sure this is clearly visible and accessible.
There should be no confusion about what the CTA is, and audiences should understand this. They should also be enticed by this: demonstrate why it’s in their benefit to take the action. Using simple words such as “shop now”, “learn more” or “get started” will help make things clear.
If you are offering discounts or loyalty programs for customers who are on the email marketing list, make sure they know this. This will help entice them to take action more.
Mobile Optimization
Making sure that your emails are optimized for mobile is crucial. Most shoppers will ultimately look at the emails on their mobile devices. Therefore, it’s no good for the emails to only look good on browsers. Instead, make sure that they are optimized for mobile devices.
Some ways to achieve this is by ensuring that you have:
- Responsive design
- Simple and clear content
- Optimized images and other media
- Device testing
- Accessible links
- Minimal scrolling
Conclusion
Following these email marketing best practices is a great way of ensuring that your emails will produce the best results. When done well, email marketing can grow your customer base and help boost sales. When done badly, it can have adverse effects. If you follow the tips put forward here, you will be on your way to seeing positive results.