Email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. If you’re not using it, you’re leaving a pile of cash on the table.
Marketing Sherpa’s benchmark survey found that over 60% of organizations feel that email produces an ROI at budget time.
Every dollar spent on email marketing generates a $40 ROI. Email has higher conversion rates compared to traffic from search and social media combined.
Here are 7 tips for a powerful email marketing strategy
1. Write Catchy Email Subject Lines
64% people open an email because of the subject line.
Dan of inform.ly tested the use of power words like ‘hack’ against commonly used words like ‘simple secret’; the term ‘hack’ increased click throughs by 28%.
Adam Rifkin’s analysis of social media posts reveals that headlines with verbs get more clicks.
As per John Caples, author of the marketing classic ‘Tested Advertising Methods’, 1932 these are the elements to an effective headline.
1. Self interest
2. News
3. Curiosity
Remember that the next time when you’re writing an email subject line.
For Sean Pault, these four words- “You are not alone” as an email subject line got him over 90% open rates. These words connect with the audience and reassure them of your presence. The sense to belong is one of the strongest human emotions and these words capitalize on that.
Sending this as a subject line gets replies. Reply back, ask what they need help with.
A subject line that’s best used for webinar reminders, is [FIRST NAME] followed by where are you?
Joe where are you?
or
We miss you Joe
This subject line beats the industry average of 24% open rate and 4% click through rate respectively (according to Mailchimp) and gets you a 43% open rate and a 15% click-through rate according to Steve Young.
Email subject lines need to attract attention, just like headlines do. Here are a few tips on that:
- When writing for an online audience showing numbers as numerals immediately catches their attention as per usability czar Jakob Nielsen. Scanning is more prevalent among newsletter readers. Numbers hold them by the throat.
- Pique curiosity. A headline’s success depends on four factors and chief among them is curiosity.
Here are 557 email subject lines for your inspiration.
2. Personalize the Emails That You Send
Even waiters were able to get better tips with personalization.
People like personalized service. This is because people feel good about them and love anything that tends to that.
MailerMailer’s Email Marketing Metrics Report revealed that personalizing email subject lines improved open rates by 8.8%.
Another research, this time, by Marketing Sherpa showed that personalization of the subject line resulted in a 17.36% increase in click through rates.
Just see the example below
Subject line A: PadiAct Takes Your Targeted Subscriptions to a New Level
Open rate: 13.86%
CTR: 2.41%
Subject line B: [First name], PadiAct Takes Your Targeted Subscriptions to a New Level
Open rate: 14.79%
CTR: 3.03%
Open rate increase: 6.67%
CTR increase: 25.31%
Source:MarketingSherpa
Merely including the first name in the subject line caused a CTR increase of over 25%.
When HelpScout pitted a fancy newsletter template against a simple template the simple template got over 20% more open rates. Simple works, because it relates to your audience.
You can achieve personalization by changing a few things in your emails
- Most opt-in forms ask the reader mail and name. If possible include the name of the reader in the subject line. Sending emails based on the location of the reader and offering special deals on geo-location won’t hurt in any case.
- Adding a sender name fetches more leads. Hubspot noticed a higher click through rate when emails from their company also featured the name of a person from the team.
In 2011, Hubspot added a “HubSpot” sender name of some random person from the marketing team in the emails they sent instead of just the company name.
The test resulted in 292 more clicks and 131 more leads.
In another Marketing Sherpa case study, Doggyloot saw 750% increase in its clickthrough rate by sending an email wishing the customers’ dogs a happy birthday!
Personalized subject lines worked their magic in Obama’s reelection too. His Digital Team split tested email subject lines, while the best ones raised $2.5m in donations the worst ones raised less than $500,000.
Adding personalized content, like thanking the donors of the first election in emails targeted to them significantly increased the amount of donations.
“This was kind of revolutionary at the time and overall more than half of the $1bn raised by the campaign came from online donations. This A/B testing probably resulted in $200m in additional revenue”- Obama’s director of digital analytics, Amelia Showalter
The emails helped to gain donations from more than 4m Americans, recruited tens of thousands of volunteers and publicized events.
3. Segment the List Based on Buyer Personas
A HubSpot study reveals that marketers who segmented their list from 2 to 6 received an 8.3% CTR while marketers with just one list generated a lower average click-through rate (7.3%).
You can add personalized recommendations based on each consumer’s browsing behavior on your website.
You can segment your list based on their demographics, their interests, and their industry. Like Copyblogger, you can separate the lists based on the e-book they downloaded.
4. Combine Blogging with Email marketing
You combine blogging with email series by taking some of the best posts on your blog and sending them as emails.
The autoresponder series based on relationships building on Kissmetrics had 16 emails and performed well.
The second one is the autoresponder series from Copyblogger.
When I subscribed they sent 20 emails with highly relevant content on copywriting, marketing etc. It seemed more like a free course though.
The examples aren’t just limited to the field of marketing alone.
There’s a website Once a Month Meals which provides easy recipes that can take care of the entire month’s food supply with one day’s cooking. When someone signs up for the “Once a Month Meals Secret Handbook” they receive tips and tricks for saving on meals, secret recipes. All these emails contain lots of links back to their site.
I say it’s one of the smartest ways to combine blogging with email marketing.
5. Mobile Optimization Works
When Medscape sent mobile optimized emails they witnessed 53% more click through rate. They chose 5 most popular areas for mobile optimization from the total of 33 newsletters sent namely,
- Cardiology
- Family medicine
- Internal medicine
- Diabetes
- Endocrinology
A Chadwick Martin Bailey Study shows that 75% of consumers are highly likely to delete emails they can’t read on smartphones.
The same study shows that 66% of people under 30 use smartphones to open their mails.
Tips to Help You Score with Mobile Email Marketing
* Use a narrow vertical format. Most smartphones are touch based devices and a vertical format helps them see the entire email just by the flick of their hands.
*Use large fonts. Plus, the links and images should be above the fold.
6. Welcome Series Increases Conversions
When StudentBeans wanted to increase revenue from their website they launched a welcome email series. The very first email they sent contained information on the next six mails that they were to receive.
It increased engagement and since they were announced beforehand didn’t raise any alarms.
For the first email in the series, one of the team’s subject line tests experienced the following open rates:
- 46.47% – Claim Your Free Cocktail plus Top Student Offers
- 41.2% – Claim Your Free Kinder Bueno plus Top Student Offers
- 30.9% – Top 12 Student Offers – Welcome to studentbeans.com
They also witnessed a 33.9% increase in clickthrough rate for men when the color of the links was changed to orange.
7. Add Different Kinds of Content
Video doubled the click through rate for Ragan Communications. Previously Ragan used text mails for the promotion of its live events. As an experiment they sent a video email and experiencing higher than average click through rates made it into a series.
They placed a screenshot of the video in the email and included three lines of text about the video.
Video emails yielded an average CTR of .51% compared to text only emails which had .25% as CTR.
Concluding Thoughts
In these times of stress where organic traffic is inconsistent and ad costs are on the rise as each day goes by, its email marketing that can save your business.
Building a targeted, relevant list to which you can market to is an evergreen source of traffic provided that you keep providing value.
As they say, the money is in the list.
