Five Important Steps for Hacking your Email Marketing Campaign

It’s a well-known fact that marketing can make or break a business, a startup, or any other enterprise, depending on its effectiveness. Once you realize just how large a role it plays, it becomes clear why marketing can eat up so much money. A common rule dictates that about 5% of your overall budget should go to marketing, and possibly even more.

Marketing as a business has been constantly evolving, seeking new creative ways to advertise products or services, often by riding the wave of new trends or technologies. This resulted in what can almost be described as an arms race to find the ultimate advertising method. Many marketing channels fell out of favor in this process, but one tactic has, time and time again, been proven to yield terrific results if done properly.

That method is email marketing.

Email marketing still stands as one of the most reliable ways for you to grab people’s attention and see a satisfying return on investment. Open rates for email marketing stand at about 25%, while the average ROI is around $38 per dollar invested.

These stats are nothing to scoff at, and any company aspiring to grow should implement this advertising method in some form.

The catch, though, is that email marketing needs to be done right, or your numbers will be but a far cry from what you’ve read here. You certainly wish to avoid that, so, to help you do so, here are five critical tips on how to get the most out of email marketing.

1. Hook Them In With the Subject Line

A well-worded subject line draws the reader in rather than driving her away, and this might be the most vital thing to pay attention to. To make sure you benefit maximally from subject lines, think about the following:

• Make the subject line short: 50 characters seems to be the goldilocks zone for subject line length, so use that space wisely.
• Avoid words like “miss,” “sale,” or “free” - these words have gone stale, and people associate them with annoying and uninspired marketing. Ditch them and go with something more refreshing.
• Try making the subject lines questions: questions can serve as terrific hooks, as they spark curiosity, so you might want to take advantage of that.

2. Personalize Emails

Personalizing emails by including recipients’ names and cities they live in increases response rates—click-through rates rise by 24%. But personalization goes beyond just names - keeping tabs on users’ activities and sending behavior-triggered emails accordingly is also a key factor.

Some believe this tactic takes a lot of time and effort to implement, but that isn’t the case. Loyalty programs and keeping track of your subscriber base make email personalization a relatively straightforward tactic for boosting response rates. You can learn more about your subscribers by sending out questionnaires.

[ Recommended: 4 Easiest Steps to Make An Email Marketing Campaign Successful ]

3. Include Media

Assuming the reader has opened your email, adding images, GIFs, or videos can serve as a great attention grabber, helping them avoid abandoning it immediately. Emails with video content get open rates 19% higher than the rest. Furthermore, a video can communicate your message more quickly and creatively.

The only thing you need to look out for is compatibility. For instance, GIFs don’t tend to work correctly on Windows Phone 7, so make sure the first frame contains all the essential info so everyone gets the gist.

4. Make Emails Mobile Friendly

Another crucial piece of advice - the mobile market plays a huge role in email marketing, and that role becomes more dominant by the day. The average order value of mobile users has gone up to $66.40, compared to that of desktop users $86.20. Seeing that people are spending more through mobile orders, you should capitalize on that front as much as possible. To pull that off, you should consider making these changes:

• You would be wise to shorten them, given the comparatively small screen sizes of mobile devices. Try to keep the subject lines to 30 characters or fewer.
• Fix the “From” name: seeing who the email comes from and recognizing your brand name drastically increases the likelihood of your emails being opened. Much like subject lines, make this name as brief as you can - under 23 characters ought to be enough.
• Make the interactive buttons larger; it makes intuitive sense, since smaller mobile screens make otherwise normal-sized clickable buttons a nightmare to press, mainly when clustered closely together. To compensate for this, ensure that these are scaled up for mobile users.
• The landing page must be mobile-friendly: you might enjoy more site visits with the previous tips, but your bounce rate will surely rain on that parade if your landing page is difficult to navigate for mobile users. Ensure that your site can accommodate them well to prevent this problem.

5. Segment Email Marketing

What’s email segmentation? It means segmenting your email recipients into groups and tailoring your tactics to each group's characteristics. Think of it as large-scale personalization - you can segment them by age, residence, occupation, interests, or whatever metric that’s of use to you. It sounds so trivial, and yet you can reap tremendous benefits from segmentation, as it allows you to personalize emails to a much higher degree.

Besides the demographics above, some innovative segmentation strategies include email engagement (active vs. inactive recipients), geographic location, past purchases, or amount spent.

These master tips will go a long way to enhancing your email marketing campaigns. With just a few simple tweaks, you can extend your brand’s reach, as well as better connect with subscribers and potential new customers alike.

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