It may seem old-fashioned, but sending emails to promote your brand is now more effective than ever in growing businesses and driving leads. Emails have now become the third most popular marketing channel in 2022. As such, they have become instrumental for brands to reach an even wider audience.
Creating and sending out emails may be easy. However, producing ones that drive sustainable results and meet your goals will require effective strategies and some elbow grease. Here are some of the most underrated email marketing practices you can implement to achieve your business objectives.
7 Most Underrated Email Marketing Tactics
Personalize email campaigns
Competing with hundreds of emails in each customer’s inbox can feel daunting. However, McKinsey & Company says, “Seventy-one percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions.” This fact stresses the importance of implementing personalization strategies to make you stand out and capture your readers’ attention.
Addressing your audience by their names in the email or subject line is a great start. However, you can also utilize dynamic content. For example, you can display different information to individual users according to their demographics, web behavior, and search history.
The dynamic content can adapt and transform the email content into what the reader may want or need during that point in time.
Test subject lines and email body
Subject lines are the first thing recipients see once they receive your email. Hence, giving special attention to constructing effective and engaging subject lines is essential. They can determine whether your customers click on or ignore your email.
A great way to formulate the perfect subject line is through A/B testing. This method involves halving your audience into two groups, producing slightly different subject lines, and sending each one to a group. You can then determine which version generates the most open rates and conversions. The results can help you pattern your following email subjects accordingly.
Time your emails
Your email marketing approach shouldn’t simply address your audience’s needs and when they prefer to receive them. Instead, identifying when your readers can peruse your messages can help maximize their engagement. This approach can be a significant undertaking. But thankfully, you won’t have to start from scratch.
According to 2022 research by HubSpot, the best time to send emails is around 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM from Monday to Wednesday. Therefore, scheduling your messages according to this timeframe can improve your open rates. This way, you can maximize your marketing efforts and prevent customers from ignoring your emails.
Measure read rates
Open rates are a helpful metric in determining if your email campaign successfully captures your audience’s attention. However, what’s arguably more important is how effectively your campaign maintains it.
A great way to measure how well your email engrosses readers is by tracking read rates instead. This metric accounts for how long your email stays on the audience’s screen, signifying that your content is engaging.
Identifying your read rates minimizes the inclusion of accidental opens in your email campaign’s metrics. Moreover, it can give you a better picture of what works in your campaign and what doesn’t. That way, you can adjust your approach and strategies accordingly.
Make emails mobile-friendly
There’s arguably nothing worse than reading an email on mobile and having to scroll horizontally to see everything. As a result, mobile phones have become crucial to digital marketing efforts. Your email’s mobile-friendliness can nudge your audience’s decision on whether to ignore or read your message.
Some adjustments you can implement to optimize emails for mobile devices include:
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- Aligning content at the center in a single column
- Using image sizes that can accommodate phone screens
- Choosing different font sizes to aid reading
- Adding call-to-action buttons to make navigation seamless
Attract inactive readers
Losing your readers’ interest is an inevitable part of email marketing campaigns. Fortunately, emails are also an effective way to win them back.
Try to identify why you lost your readers’ engagement to start you off. It may be because you send emails too often, or perhaps you haven’t personalized or optimized your content enough. Then, address your readers’ pain points by adjusting your campaign according to their preferences.
Afterward, you can incentivize readers to return by offering discount vouchers and promo codes. Doing so can encourage inactive readers to return and even increase brand awareness.
Allow email replies
Businesses often utilize no-reply email accounts to send messages that don’t require feedback. Although they may be convenient in avoiding unnecessary replies, these may negatively affect your customer engagement.
No-reply emails impose one-way communication between your brand and audience. Remember that an open feedback system is crucial to attracting and maintaining customers. Moreover, avoiding no-reply emails decreases the chance of your messages getting dumped in the spam folder.
Choose the Strategy that Works for You
Email marketing is a very competitive approach to promoting your brand. As such, this approach can be worthwhile to pursue. You can effectively reach a wider audience with the right email marketing tactics, driving better leads and conversions.
Optimizing your messages for mobile reading, adjusting your strategy to read rates, and establishing customer feedback channels can aid your marketing efforts. The challenge is how you approach implementing these strategies. Some methods may work better than others.
In that case, you can know which tactic works for you by not relying on data you’ve gathered from other brands alone. Instead, be sure to test them out in your niche. Moreover, different brands have different audiences. So knowing which strategy works with yours is crucial.
Before you know it, the traditional email can be one of the most effective marketing tools you’ve ever deployed for your business.
