10 Tips To Help You Become A Better Email Marketer

Email marketing can seem daunting at first, but with a little bit of know-how, you can be turning your contacts into raving fans in no time. Whether you’re looking to attract more customers or re-engage with old ones, these 10 tips will help you become an expert email marketer and improve your business’s bottom line along the way. Here are some different methods to help you build your list.

1) Research: Know Your Audience

Before you can market to your audience, you need to know who they are. How old are they? What do they do for a living? Are they parents? If so, how many kids do they have and what ages are they? Once you know your audience, segment them.

For example, if you’re selling pens, don’t just target people in New York City; focus on people with school-aged children in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Being able to narrow down your market allows you to target your message better and makes it easier for them to identify with what you have to say. Targeted email marketing is effective because it makes customers feel special.

2) Clear Subject Lines = Higher Open Rates

Emails with clear, concise subject lines will have higher open rates. According to Litmus, 40% of emails with unclear or jabberwocky subject lines are deleted without being opened. This simple tip is so important because if your email isn’t interesting enough to make someone want to open it, you’ve lost them before they ever get to your content. It’s imperative that your reader can tell what kind of content you’re sending by just looking at the subject line.

3) Timing Is Important

Optimizing your emails is all about timing. Whenever you send an email, that’s your chance to generate a lead or customer. Make sure to send out your email at an optimal time of day, when most people are online and able to respond quickly.

According to Adestra, a digital marketing company that works with brands like Netflix and eHarmony, emails sent between 6 am and 10 am see 8% higher open rates than those sent later in the day. At lunchtime (12-2 pm), there’s also a big spike in opens. If you don’t have data on how subscribers interact at different times of day, try sending two different emails with similar content and track which one performs better over a few days or weeks.

4) Personalization Goes a Long Way

As an email marketer, you want to make sure that each email that you send out is as individualized as possible. If your emails start to feel like mass-produced messages, people will become more and more irritated with them. They will begin ignoring them and potentially worse yet, deleting them before they have read anything at all.

Make sure that you are always keeping your messages updated with new products or promotions or any other information that might be relevant to your audience so they continue to feel personal. Never lose sight of why you’re sending out these emails in the first place – it’s not just about making money off of advertising space, it’s about building relationships between your brand and its customers.

5) Tailor Emails to the Device

With an estimated 56% of emails now being opened on mobile devices, businesses need to start designing their email campaigns for smaller screens. Email marketers should get into a routine of tailoring every email they send out to be as mobile-friendly as possible.

Start by ensuring that each design element is simple and easy to read on a small screen. Remove words from your subject line that are no longer necessary, like Image or File (and even things like Hi! can be dropped in some cases). Make sure graphics aren’t too big and don’t take up more than 25% of your page width.

6) Content Trumps All Else

If you’re not building a relationship, it doesn’t matter how good your offer is. In fact, if you have to sell people, your message will be ignored by most. Focus on providing value first and marketing second; that’s why content marketing works so well as an email marketing tool. The more helpful your emails are, the more likely people are to read them—and possibly open them in future emails.

Once they’ve opened one email and enjoyed its contents, they’ll open another. And another…and so on. It all starts with high-quality content that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise in a specific field—something people want to learn about or know more about already.

7) Create an A/B Test Plan

Testing is one of the best ways to improve your email marketing. If you haven’t tested your emails in a while, it might be time to reevaluate your strategies and see if there are any aspects that could use some improvement. Try setting up an A/B test plan—which should include three-to-five different tests—and track how each performs in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You can learn more about this here.

By testing different elements such as subject lines, value propositions and even offers, you can find new ways to improve email engagement without spending a lot of extra resources.

8) Segmentation is Key

In digital marketing, segmentation is a great way to help you focus your efforts. Whether it’s reaching out to bloggers or doing a giveaway, an effective email marketer can use email campaigns based on target groups. Take care that your content matches what you’ve chosen and keep in mind that every target group will have different expectations and needs when it comes to online marketing messages.

9) Brand Consistency Wins Every Time

Email marketing is like any other kind of marketing – it needs to fit in with your brand’s image and personality. If you’re a travel agent that sells luxury cruises, for example, your email marketing should be just as upscale and high-end as you are.

This includes everything from your HTML design to fonts to wording style. All of these little elements are important if you want customers to take your emails seriously enough to open them – or buy what you’re selling! Otherwise, they’re going to be turned off by emails that don’t fit with their expectations and mark you as spam.

10) Get Conversions

It’s all about conversions. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and make it as easy as possible for them to convert. When it comes to email marketing, there are five main types of conversion: phone calls, email signups, downloads, purchases and subscriptions.

In order to get conversions from your emails, you need great subject lines that drive attention toward your call-to-action (CTA). Also, consider high open rates so you can get readers coming back over and over again. Here are a few tips to help you become a better email marketer.

If you really want to explode your email marketing skills I suggest you take a look through the 30 Email Hacks here.

Finally

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