Since the dawn of social media, bloggers and marketing gurus have been predicting the death of email – more specifically, using email as a form of marketing communication. But the truth of the matter is, email is stronger than ever.
What is the state of email for 2022?
In 2021, companies have sent 7% more emails than they did the year before – and open rates increased by an impressive 13%, according to Campaign Monitor. According to a study by Litmus, email generates $42 for every $1 spent.
So, if email is so effective, how can your marketing strategy benefit from it? And why are some companies just being left on read? Let’s break it down.
Building Effective Email Campaigns
A/B Testing
It’s hard to tell what it’s working and what is not unless you run some tests. Comparing different subject lines against each other is probably the most common way marketers A/B test emails – but it won’t tell you much else than what makes someone open your emails.
Other things you can A/B test to know what resonates with your audience when it comes to conversion and engagement are:
- Format: Test different email templates, the order in which content appears, plain text vs HTML
- Tone: Positive language (“do this”) vs. negative language (“don’t do this”) can make a huge difference in the way people react to your content. And there are many other ways to test tone while remaining consistent with your brand’s voice: copy can be sales-oriented or information-oriented, for example, all the while still being consistent with your brand’s casual or professional style.
- Content: Sharing industry tips? Case Studies? Email is a great tool to gather which type of content can make people click through to your website. Remember to tag each button and link in your email with UTMs, and keep an eye on your Google Analytics report.
- Images: Are people more interested in your product in yellow or pink? You don’t need to guess – test both images and let your audience tell you which one they prefer.
- CTAs: Call to Actions can surprise you when it comes to their performance – test longer descriptive CTAs (“Download our Summer Catalog”) against short straight-to-the-point ones (“Download”), or just change up the wording on conventional CTAs (for example, “Order Now” and “Shop Now” can give you completely different results).
Audience Segmentation
Not all subscribers are created equal – and how they have interacted with your business in the past can have a huge influence on how they will react to your emails.
A Customer Management System (CMS) can give you insight on your email audience – for example, the people who have opened all your emails in the past 6 months and the people who opened none might need to be approached with different strategies. But why stop there? Creating lists based on customers interests, industries, value or frequency of past purchases, demographics, or location helps you understand your audience, and allows you to test what works for each different group your business is targeting.
How a lead came to be on your list is also an easy way to segment your audiences: a lead that willingly signed up to your newsletter has different expectations on volume and frequency of emails they might get from you than someone who was added to your list after a phone call.
Email Automation
Now that we understand the benefits of segmented audiences, it’s time to personalize the message that each segment will receive and determine the frequency of communications. Email automation helps with the heavy lifting of setting up an email journey.
Automation tools (such as ActiveCampaign and MailChimp) allow you to setup automatic emails that are sent based on behavioural triggers (how a person interacts with the business) or in the form of drip campaigns (emails sent on a schedule).
Have you ever received an email reminding you that you left a product on your shopping cart of an online store? That is a type of automated email based on your behaviour – in this case, adding a product to your cart and not reaching the checkout page.
Successful automated email campaigns take into consideration the entire marketing funnel, and what pains a customer or lead might encounter at each level of the funnel, as well as how their specific characteristics (aka, how they were segmented in the audience) might influence how they navigate the funnel.
What to avoid on your email campaign
We cannot stress this harder: Don’t be shady. Buying email lists out of the internet, or capturing people’s contact information without their knowledge is not only a lousy marketing tactic, but it also goes against GDPR regulations. You wouldn’t get a good quality watch from a guy in an alley, and you’ll certainly not get good quality leads from a random list bought online.
Do not spam your audience. On a Hubspot survey, 51% of respondents claimed that the high frequency of emails was their main reason for unsubscribing to a mailing list. While the sweet spot for frequency will depend on your audience, product, and content, most brands send around 3-8 emails per week.
Do not send irrelevant or low-quality content. Once again, understanding your own marketing funnel and what motivated your audience to subscribe to your email list in the first place is the key to developing content that your audience values and looks forward to receiving.
The bottom line
While specifics of what works when it comes to email marketing vary from industry to industry, and from brand to brand, we can easily say that understanding your funnel, your audience, and providing valuable content are the principles that guide the creation of successful email marketing campaigns. Once you have achieved all of that, email marketing is a powerful tool to increase audience engagement and ROI.
Not sure where to start? As a full-service digital marketing agency, Ballistic Arts is ready to provide your brand with everything you need for your marketing – including email. Let’s talk.
