Update October 30, 2023 Source: Business
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Haphazard discounting or giveaways and creating a relationship with your customers. You don’t want to devalue your brand to the point where customers think it’s cheap. They might not be compelled to make a repeat purchase. As a small business owner, you must constantly consider how customers perceive your brand. One way you might accidentally degrade their perception and harm your reputation is by foisting an annoying email marketing campaign upon their inboxes. While email can be an effective — and cost-effective — marketing method, companies must find a way to enjoy its benefits while building positive customer relationships and respecting their recipients.
We’ll highlight email marketing best practices and share examples of top marketing software that can take the guesswork out of your campaigns.
Email marketing best practices and mistakes to avoid If you want to start spreading your company’s message via email marketing campaigns, follow these best practices to ensure you don’t alienate current or potential customers by being a nuisance.
1. Don’t flood your customers’ inboxes. Inundating subscribers with your messages can quickly alienate them. Marketers send billions of emails daily, and many go unanswered and unopened. If you send too many messages in quick succession or emails that don’t pertain to your audience’s needs, you’ll likely bore them and risk losing them altogether.
A release schedule ensures your messages don’t go out too frequently. Most email marketing software allows you to set release timetables that vary by message type to ensure a reasonable number of emails arrives in your recipients’ inboxes.
“We don’t usually send more than one of each a week unless it is a large holiday where there is competition for our customers’ inboxes,” noted Jennifer Neylon. “We also make sure that customers don’t accidentally receive multiple copies of similarly targeted emails by excluding certain email lists and segments while scheduling emails.”
Did You Know? The most popular email marketing campaign types include email newsletter campaigns, sales and promotional emails, retargeting emails, and lead nurturing emails.
2. Ensure your email marketing messages appeal to your subscribers.
Engaging email subscribers is crucial. Whether through targeted prose, thoughtful images, or a combination of elements, your emails must grab subscribers’ attention. If they don’t, your content could end up in the spam folder or the trash.
Understand who your audience is and tailor your marketing strategy to their preferences. For example, an appealing marketing strategy for teens may look different than a strategy that targets businesspeople.
3. Avoid weak subject lines. Finding the right subject line is a common email marketing challenge. It’s the first thing people see when they interact with your brand, so it should make sense and not seem like clickbait. According to Polly Kay failing to craft a good email subject line is akin to face-planting right as the race starts.
“There’s a fine line between incentivizing the opening of an email with a teaser and seeing your email and any subsequent offerings channeled immediately to the junk folder, as it comes across as clickbait,” Kay explained. “A subject line that is misleading, vague or weak won’t incentivize opening, and any subject that doesn’t make it clear what is inside and why your prospect should care is pointless — and annoying.”
FYI An excellent subject line can reduce your email bounce rate. In fact, 47 percent of email recipients open emails based on their subject lines, according to Invesp. 4. Don’t use too many graphics or stock photos.
Using straightforward text with only thoughtful and carefully chosen images or graphics in your email body is crucial. While you want to engage your subscribers, sometimes less is more. You may be tempted to create a flashy email design full of graphics, stock photos and call-to-action (CTA) buttons, but it’s best to keep things relatively simple in your message body.
5. Make sure your CTA is clear and easy to identify. Your readers must be able to easily identify your CTA. Consumers have very short attention spans — they want to know an email’s purpose within seconds of opening it. If the primary goal of your email marketing campaign is to have your audience follow through with your CTA, it must be clear and easy to find.
Tip To improve your click-through rate (CTR), use a “bulletproof” HTML button instead of a hyperlink for your CTA. Bulletproof buttons look great on all devices.6. Add a personal touch to your marketing emails.
Recipients may ignore or delete messages that seem like unwanted ads. According to Reese Spykerman try to make your messages more appealing and interesting by adding a personal touch. For example, send brand messages that explain your passion for the company as a small business owner or share customer stories about your product.
“No one wants to read an ad,” Spykerman advised. “Emails that look like ads immediately trigger a mental shutdown in the person reading it and either go into trash or are ignored. Good emails are like successful dating: You need to woo the reader, care about them as a human, and spend as much time giving value to them as you do trying to sell something.”
7. Be genuine and avoid cliched messages. While adding personal touches like sincere messages is great, you must carefully consider your tone. Attempts at adding a personal touch can easily miss the mark and sound fake and stilted. This was particularly apparent during the past several years when many marketing messages directly referenced the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on people’s lives.
8. Provide value to each reader without being pushy. If your message doesn’t offer something your readers don’t already have or promise to make things better for them, then they have little incentive to keep opening your messages. This becomes even worse if your tone comes off as forceful.
“I think that it’s important for every email to provide value to each recipient so that it’s less likely to be considered annoying,” explained Michael Anderson. “Additionally, the verbiage can usually be framed in a certain way to avoid sounding too pushy.”
Instead of asking people to buy your product, Anderson advises that you explain its benefits before offering a discount code. “Ideally, you want the user to think that they came to the decision to purchase something from the business as opposed to the other way around.”
9. Ensure your email lists are clean and segmented. Your email subscriber list is a significant element in your marketing campaigns. Whether you buy one from one of the best list broker services or build a quality email marketing list organically, you must ensure your data remains clean, consistent and segmented.
You need a well-maintained email list to reach your target audience consistently. Sending messages to old or inactive email lists is pointless, and reaching the wrong people is an exercise in futility.
“One of the main reasons why people don’t even open your emails, let alone bother to click on your links, is the fact that the offer is not made for them,” explained Jane Kovalkova. “If you market to everyone, you’re targeting no one.”
To ensure your messages get to the right people, consider the following strategies.
Segmentation: Email list segmentation splits your contacts into market segments based on predetermined conditions. For example, your welcome email goes to new subscribers, while a discount promotion goes to a specific group of current customers. Segmenting your list can help improve your email open rate, deliverability and responses.
Drip campaigns: After you collect and segment your list, harness the power of drip campaigns — pre-written messages that go out automatically based on specific triggers. And the sooner you hit your segmented mailing list at a measured rhythm, the better response you’ll get.
“For some reason, many business owners don’t send out any campaigns at all or even segment their lists,” noted Malte Scholz. “Then a time comes up when they want to sell something, and they send a sudden email blast out of nowhere, and they wonder why the campaign flopped. If people subscribe and then they get the first email from you asking to buy something six months later, that just won’t work.”
Scholz stressed the importance of building a relationship with your recipients. “Send an email every now and then, and make sure that every new subscriber gets a welcome email first,” Scholz advised. “You wouldn’t ask someone you’re interested in to marry you on the first date, would you?”
Did You Know? Email blasts can be easily confused with spam, so executing them correctly is crucial. Make them concise, appealing and thoughtful, with a clear and on-point CTA.10. Don’t use a no-reply email address.
Email is a powerful way to connect with people, and you should think of it as a two-way street. When you send marketing emails to your customers, avoid using a no-reply email address. While it may be tempting, a no-reply address can hurt your marketing efforts in two ways: reduced deliverability and poor user experience.
Reduced deliverability: Some users have security settings that automatically send no-reply emails straight to their junk folder. This means your carefully curated marketing email may not even reach your customers’ inboxes if you use a no-reply email address.
Poor user experience: A no-reply address can diminish the overall customer experience with your brand. It can be frustrating if a customer wants to reply to one of your emails with feedback (or possibly to opt out of further messages) and receives an auto-response saying their message could not be delivered.
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