Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing techniques for most B2B as well as B2C services, and it wouldn’t be wrong to call it an “evergreen marketing channel”. The effectiveness of email marketing, however, depends entirely on your strategy. In order to make your campaigns more effective and generate revenue, you must review your approach to email marketing by analyzing the user behavior, reviewing latest technologies and trends, and streamlining your campaigns accordingly.
Change is inevitable, and your business must have the capability to embrace the change to improve its productivity. User behavior fluctuates due to a variety of reasons, i.e. market trends, changing needs, budget etc, so a periodic analysis can help you set more realistic and achievable marketing goals.
Moreover, keeping up with the latest technology can be highly fruitful, too; developments in machine learning have made email more powerful than ever before. With the power of data collection and analysis, you can not only predict consumers’ behaviour more effectively, but also influence their buying decisions.
This article will discuss 5 actionable items to improve your email marketing campaigns using latest technologies and trends and analyzing consumer behavior.
1- Build a Double Opt-in List:
Many marketers avoid the double opt-in subscription because they are of the opinion that the extra step may act as a repellant, resulting in a smaller list. But, let me tell you that a smaller list with better open and click rate is more valuable than a bigger list with a lower engagement.
Honestly, why should you spend money and effort in sending messages to people who won’t open your emails? So, if someone is taking the time to opt-in to your list, it means they are genuinely interested in your brand and these are the most relevant people you should have in your company information database.
2- Verify Your Email List Regularly:
At times, people on your email list change their preferences, i.e. they lose interest in your offers, have provided a fake email address, or they might have changed their address. All these changes can have a negative effect on your email deliverability: emails will bounce, will land in Spam folders and some users may even label you as Spam. This is why you must use a reliable email address verifier to clean your list on regular basis.
A good email address verifier, like ZeroBounce, can be of tremendous help in optimizing your mailing lists by:
- Removing invalid addresses from your email list which can significantly decrease the bounce rate.
- Scrubbing your list clean by removing known email complainers, abusers and spam traps.
- Appending missing data to your email address list such as first name, last name, gender, city, state, country, and IP registration information. This can be a great help in email personalization and segmentation which will ultimately improve your overall campaign performance.
- Scoring your valid emails for activity level, i.e. you can find out which catch-all emails are risky to send to, depending on their quality score.
3- Segmentation & Personalization:
Rather than sending out one generic email, you should send multiple tailored messages to different segments within your list. This segmentation can be based on locations or interests. You get better open and click-through rates only when your audience finds your emails more relevant. Segmentation is the first step in creating relevant content.
Relevance alone may not work too well if they don’t really think that your email is addressing them. Even if a subscriber opens your email, they can sometimes delete it before scrolling down, unless you grab their attention right at the beginning. Personalization with a simple, ‘Hi [recipient’s first name],’ can be a game changer.
4- Creative Content:
Content plays a vital role in all types of online marketing techniques; and so is the case with email marketing. You have to come up with creative content ideas to engage readers. Some ways to do so include:
- Write effective subject lines, i.e. “Alert”, “Ideas”, “Questions”, “Emojis”, etc.
- Keep it simple.
- Keep the message easy to read.
- Talk about benefits instead of features.
- Have at least one clear call-to-action.
- Consider the responsiveness of template for all devices.
5- Don’t Ignore Timing:
You effort of all the steps above may be wasted if you do not send the email at the right time. Testing different timings is the only way to determine the one that works best for you. For instance, you can send your campaign to half of your email list in the morning and email the other half in the afternoon to see which timing worked better.
You can further improve the timing by running more tests. If you find that the morning open rates are better than the ones in the afternoon, you can split the next campaign and send it at different morning hours to find your perfect spot.
The Bottom Line:
Email marketing is one of the very highly effective marketing techniques, but to achieve the results you want, you need to tweak your strategy on a constant basis.
