10 Tips for Successful Email Marketing

How many people do you know without an email address? I’m guessing not many. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your clients directly, build customer relationships, brand awareness and generate leads and sales. However, with around 269 billion emails being sent each day, there’s a lot of competition fighting for your audience’s attention.

Here are 10 top tips to ensure you’re getting the most out of your email marketing efforts:

1. Build your subscriber list

With GDPR recently coming into place, the likelihood is that your subscriber list may have taken a hit. Or maybe you are just starting out? Even if you’ve already got a long list of subscribers, there’s no reason why you should take a step back from building this.

Featuring subscription forms on websites, integrating sign up forms to your Facebook page and even asking people to sign up to your email marketing list via social posts are all great ways that can increase your subscribers – and it doesn’t take a lot of hard work either!

2. Avoid your emails going into spam

If you’ve taken time and effort creating an email marketing campaign, you want to be sure that it’s going to reach your audience's inbox. To avoid emails being flagged as spam, start off by following these key rules:

• Make sure that everyone on your email list has double-opted in. If so, you have permission to send these people emails and this will reduce spam complaints
• Clean your email lists regularly from inactive emails
• Avoid misleading subject lines (i.e. tricking someone into opening your email)
• Avoid poorly formatted HTML emails
• It is vital you include an unsubscribe link when sending out emails

3. Use engaging subject lines

Subject lines are the first thing people see in their inbox, therefore they are the deciding factor of whether or not they are going to open your email. Like the headline of a blog post, you have to make a good impression and you only have a few words with which to do this. Avoiding spam trigger words, making your subject lines personal and telling people what they are going to see when they open your email are all good practice.

4. Include calls to action

For many email marketers, the main goal is to increase traffic to the site and get your audience to take action on a specific landing page. You need to provide clear calls to action in your email marketing campaigns to do this, whether this is in the format of a button, image, or text linking to relevant URLs.

5. Make emails mobile friendly

Around 2.53 billion people own a smartphone worldwide, so it comes as no surprise that your email campaigns need to be mobile friendly. It’s important to make sure they are optimized for viewing on mobile and tablet, just as much as desktop, else you’ll be missing out on a huge market!

6. Include UTM tracking

UTM codes (also known as UTM parameters) are a great way of keeping track of the success from your marketing efforts. From pages visited to purchases made, UTM codes can link to Google Analytics and allow you to see what action people have taken on your website, delivered from your email campaign.

7. Test your emails

Be sure to never send an email without testing it to make sure that everything is working and looks exactly how it’s meant to in different browsers and email clients. Check, double check and check again that your links, images and layout is correct. This will avoid you mistakenly sending out an email to your subscribers that isn’t quite right – there is no undo button once you've hit send!

8. Schedule your emails at appropriate times

Deciding what times to send your emails can be tricky and takes some analysis. It’s important to get to know your audience and schedule your campaigns for times you think will generate the largest open rate. For example, if your email list primarily consists of work emails, then a weekend probably wouldn’t be ideal. Other things to consider are what your audience's local time zone is, and when they are active online. You can take a look at your email history data for some clues. You may also want to use A/B testing campaigns to test delivery date and time.

9. Don’t overwhelm your subscribers

Be aware of how often you send your emails. Although you want to be at the front of your subscribers’ attention, you don’t want to spam their inbox with emails about everything you offer. This may annoy them, leading them to unsubscribe.

10. Create a content calendar

Creating a content calendar is a great way of staying organised and planning ahead. Noting down the frequency of your emails and deadline dates, topics, content you’d like to include, goals and which email lists you’re targeting, are all good starting points.

If you would like to know how SilverDisc can help with your email marketing, please get in touch with us.