10 ways to power up your email marketing
Back to list of articlesEach and every day, there are over 144 billion emails sent across the World Wide Web. Trying to stand out in that noise may sound impossible, but it’s not. Email Marketing continues to be an excellent means of reaching new and existing customers with a high ROI to boot. You simply need to know the secrets behind it all.
That’s why we’re here today. I’m going to show you ten unique ways to power up your email marketing. These tactics are solid gold and evergreen as they come. Combine these with the golden rules of email marketing for startups, and you’ll have a strategy that can beat the competition every time!
10 Unique Ways to Put Your Email Marketing Into Overdrive
At the heart of an email marketing campaign, you want people to open your emails and follow through with the call-to- action you’ve included within them. It’s far easier said than done, but today I’m going to show you how to leverage every aspect of today’s technology to maximize your email marketing efforts.
1. Segment Your Email Lists
Take a look at your current email list. Right now it’s probably one giant river of different email addresses with nothing more than a name attached to them. You send them all the same newsletters and the same emails and you’re not getting the return you want.
Instead, you should segment your email list into different categories. There are tons of factors you can use to separate and categorize your subscribers, but I like to recommend my top three:
- Leads (They haven’t bought anything yet)
- Conversions (They bought something)
- Valuable Customers (They frequently buy from you)
These three factors are a great place to start. You can most certainly go into more detail like demographic, age, location, and so on, but I recommend starting with these. When you organize your subscribers into these three categories, you can easily create three different types of emails dedicated to each group.
Leads should get more information like links to your company blog posts so they are convinced to buy. First time buyers should get more options based on what they bought, and valuable customers should get exclusive deals and plenty of options for what to buy next.
If you start sending emails that are directed to your different types of customers, you’ll start to personalize the experience and cater to their needs.
2. The Subject Line Sweet Spot
Your subject line is the email equivalent of a headline in a blog post or article. It’s your one and only opportunity to grab their attention and increase your open rate and subsequently your click- throughs. According to research done by Adestra, there’s a “dead zone” between a length of 60 to 70 characters.
Less than 60, or more than 70 showcase a higher open rate, but it’s not all about length. While that same research showed that subject lines with fewer than 10 characters did have an open rate of 58%!
Longer subject lines (above 70 characters) are good for clickthroughs, but shorter subject lines are best for open rates.
3. Create a Swipe File
Ever heard of a swipe file? It’s a place where you store inspirational things you can use as ideas for your next marketing campaign or project. In our case, it’s a place where you can store emails that made your jaw drop. Don’t worry, it’s not stealing. Here’s Mark Twain to explain:
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”
Or, more concisely we could call forth a classic phrase: “good artists copy, great artists steal.”
You can do this quickly and start building up ideas based on categories you define. Check out my swipe file in my Gmail:
As you can see, I save emails based on specific factors like their overall quality, their subject lines, their CTAs, and so on. By building up a list of inspiration emails, you’ll have a lot of ideas to draw from when designing your own.
4. Optimize For Mobile (Right Now)
You’ve probably heard that most people are using mobile devices to access the internet, but this effect is just a prominent in the field of email marketing. Check out these statistics:
- 48% of all emails are opened on mobile devices
- 69% of mobile users will delete an email that isn’t optimized for mobile
- 89% of marketers aren’t optimizing their emails and are losing out on leads
Scary, isn’t it? Luckily you can make this change fairly quickly. You should consider compressing your images so they load faster and increasing the size of your links and CTA buttons, but ultimately you want it to display properly.
To do this, go into your email program’s HTML editor and find this code:
<img style="max-width: XX%; max-height: auto;" class="alignCenter shadow" src="YOUR IMAGE SOURCE.JPG"/>
Now, you’ll want to change the part in blue to reflect the percentage of the screen your image should take up, as opposed to a set number of pixels. Around 80% is fine, and this will ensure it displays properly on any device.
If you’re not a fan of coding, then you could alternatively look into email programs which offer responsive templates.
5. Send Emails at Night
You can work on putting your emails together any time you’d like, but you shouldn’t send them until later. Why, I hear you ask? The answer is because more people open emails between 8PM and midnight than they do during business hours.
This data comes to us from an Experian email marketing study which showed that the night owls were offering open rates of 21.7% from 8PM to midnight. This was also the time with the highest click-throughs.
Source: Experian Marketing Services
You’re competing with every other email in the user’s inbox. By sending your emails at times when people aren’t being flooded with them, you stand a better chance of getting noticed.
6. Utilize Behavior-Triggered Emails
Behavior-triggered email campaigns are amazing because they allow your CRM or software to send an email when certain things occur. Have you noticed how you’ll get an email if you decide to back out on a purchase, or you don’t login for several days? Those are triggered by your actions.
These types of emails have an open rate that is 152% higher than traditional emails! Here are some examples of triggered emails:
- A Welcome email when the sign up
- Lead nurturing emails when someone expresses interest (these educate the lead)
- Customer satisfaction (sent several days after a purchase is made)
- Leaving their cart before purchasing (inviting them to come back and finish the sale)
7. Personalize Your Emails (And Your Landing Pages)
Earlier in the post, we talked about segmenting your email lists. This is the first step in personalizing your emails and providing your users with an experience that is geared toward them and their needs.
If you’re only doing this on your emails, then you’re missing the point. If you bring someone from a personalized email to a generic landing page, then you’ve lost the magic of that experience. Instead, focus on creating a unified experience that mirrors the same style and look from the email to the landing page.
Create landing pages for each of your segmented lists and pair them with your emails for maximum success.
Personalized #emailmarketing gets 2.5x higher CTR and generates 6x more sales. Click to Tweet
8. Offer Something For Free
People love anything that’s free, especially if it’s something they need. Bluewire Media proved this theory when they tested 6,300 subscribers to what resulted in the highest opens and clicks. The result? Free templates and tools.
Depending on your audience, giving away something can massively increase your email marketing success. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Ebooks
- Infographic PDFs
- Expert Interviews/roundups
- Free tools or images
These ideas will work better or worse depending on your audience, so try different ideas to see what resonates best.
9. Listen to Reader Feedback
In many cases, people sign up for an email list to gain access to knowledge they want or need. The best thing you can do is remind them that you’re here to help and you want to help solve their problems.
Consider running a poll of common issues your audience may be having. Encourage them to vote, and then focus your next email towards providing a solution to that problem. Whether that’s a free gift, a blog post, or something entirely different is up to you.
If you can target your reader’s needs and offer them actionable solutions, you’ll provide them with emails that blow their socks off!
10. Use The Right Words
Our final tip is simple and easy to implement. It’s all about using the right power words to boost your message. When you’re writing the subject line or body of your email, start incorporating words like these:
- Sale
- Now
- New
- Thank You
- Your
- Be the First
- Tips
- Act Now
- Limited-time offer
Conversely, you should avoid overused words and phrases like these:
- Guaranteed
- Huge
- Hass-free
- Once in a lifetime
- Grounbreaking
Try to be urgent and descriptive with your wording, and don’t oversell or over promise with the hopes of pulling them in.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is alive and well, you just need to know what makes it’s heart beat. These ten tips and strategies give you actionable concepts to implement into your marketing today and power up your email marketing. Take them and let us know how they helped your efforts out in the comments below!