Here are simple five tips and tricks to make your email marketing campaigns stand out, and help your brand start the new year in style.
- Subject lines
What’s the one thing that entices your audience to open your emails? The subject line! Your subject lines should be short and to the point, accurate about what’s inside the email and focused on the benefit. Don’t be afraid to get creative to draw attention to your email, or use strong action words or phrases. But be careful on using all-caps text—not only can they trigger spam filters, but can also be difficult to determine what is most important. If you must, use caps sparingly.
And number one, people like numerals, numbered lists and countdowns, so don’t be afraid to add in the number of days remaining in your sale or the percentage customers will save.
- Personalization
In today’s digital world, personalization is paramount to successful email campaigns. Marketers need to ask customers how, what and why they want businesses to send them emails, in addition to the types of content they want to receive. This way, you can set the expectations to their liking, and deliver what they are looking for—preferences are the key to longevity and ROI.
It’s important to note that you don’t want to be too personal. Personalization should make your recipient feel like your business care about them, but you don’t want to overstep this by trying to imply more than that.
- Omnichannel
Omnichannel functionality is built to send email to multiple devices. Given marketers are unaware of which device (mobile or desktop) their audience is opening their email on, it’s important that there is a seamless user experience across all devices, so customers can interact with you when and where they want.
53% of total email opens occurred on a mobile phone or tablet in Q3 2014, which Experian reports was an increase from the 48% seen in Q2 2014 . If your email marketing campaigns aren’t already mobile-ready, make that a priority.
- Email Segmentation
Segmentation is the key to increasing email marketing metrics and conversion rates for marketing campaigns—and to boosting prospect engagement. With email volumes on the rise and the serious potential for emails to be lost or buried, you can improve your marketing effectiveness during the holidays by targeting your campaigns to appropriate segments, rather than blasting the same campaign out to all your prospects.
- Realistic Expectations
Everyone wants to meet their numbers. Be sure everyone in the organization is aware of your goals and what needs to happen to ensure those goals are met. Just be sure to take the timeframe into consideration and set expectations appropriately.
Janelle Johnson is senior director of demand generation at Act-On Software.
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