Growing your business and staying visible on the internet isn’t easy especially when there are millions of other companies competing for your customer’s attention. Traditionally, email marketing can be a fast and cost-effective way to reach your customers and advertise your products and services. However, since many companies are also using similar email marketing tactics, consumers often receive thousands of emails resulting in poor click through rates.
Customers can’t no longer tell which emails contain useful information or just another spam email; therefore, many valuable email marketing offers often end of in the trash bin. As a result, it’s important for your company not to overuse email marketing. According to statistics, over 269 billion emails were sent in 2017. While that number is staggering, it is expected to climb even more to 319.6 billion emails by 2021.
As you implement a strategy, make sure your emails comply with privacy and data protection laws. Depending on where your customer is located, they might have a different privacy law applied to them; therefore, make sure that your company comply with all necessary privacy and data protection rules.
For example, in the U.S, the CAN-SPAM Act was passed in 2003 to sets rules and guidelines for commercial business emails. Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM is subjected to penalties up to $41,484. The Act covers “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service”. Businesses must make sure that their emails comply with this law whether it’s B2B or B2C emails.
The requirements are as followed:
- Don’t use false or misleading header information.
- Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
- Identify the message as an ad.
- Tell recipients where you’re located.
- Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.
- Honor opt-out requests promptly.
- Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
You can learn more about these rules and other consumer protection regulations at the Federal Trade Commission.
While these rules might sound scary for new email marketers, they are not too difficult to follow. When using email marketing, just make sure to have common sense and ask yourself if these emails are bringing any values to your customers. Many email marketers often use the concept of “spray and pray” which doesn’t work because these emails often end up in the spam folder or the promotions tab in Gmail. However, 78 percent of consumers unsubscribe from emails because they received too many. Therefore, all your efforts of designing a beautiful email template and writing relevant content would go to waste.
While there are benefits to using email marketing, the days of simply blasting emails to your customers without thinking of consequences are over. Follow these email marketing techniques to help you gain more visibility by reaching the right targeted audience:
- Use Visually Stunning Design and Relevant Content In Email Marketing to Capture Customers Attention
Stay consistent with your brand and value proposition by using email templates. This method will make your life as an email marketer much easier. Having a template allow you to switch out content and images while using a beautifully designed layout. You can be sure that all the necessary criteria and important links are included.
This method is fast and reliable. If possible, you can segment your content to ensure that you are delivering materials to the right target audience. By improving content, businesses often improve their opening rate. A good opening rate is between 20 to 30 percent, and interactive email content such as videos often improve click rates up to 300 percent and click-to-open rate by 73 percent.
- Improve User Experience
While user experience is a concept often reserved when talking about a website or a mobile app, you can use this concept to improve your email marketing strategy, ensuring that your emails are well perceived by you targeted audience and have clear call to action.
By focusing on improving user experience, you can benefit your customers as well as drive results to your business. Monitor and improve user experience by implementing google analytics and machine learning. Provide valuable information and create organic relationships with your customers. Even when using templates, make sure you always do a final check to ensure that your content display correctly across all mobile devices. Emails that are not optimized for mobile devices get deleted by 80.3 percent of users and 3 out of 10 will unsubscribe from the email list.
- Have A Good Sales Funnel Within Your Email Marketing Strategy
Understand why your customer is using your products and services and guide them through a sales funnel. Often time, customers come to you because they need to solve a problem. According to statistics, 70 percent of purchasing decisions are made to solve a specific problem and 95 percent of buyers chose a vendor that can help them navigate each stage of the buying process. By offering the right products and services, customers will often leave with a positive buying experience.
It’s important to understand where your customer is located within that customer experience journey, too. Segment your target market and test email responses and click rates. Be authentic and transparent to your customers as 94 percent of consumers surveyed prefer to interact with a brand that offers transparency.
- Use Appropriate Amount of Email Automation
Depending on where users clicked on your website, you can automate email responses appropriate to their clicks. For small businesses that do not have time to send individualized emails, automation saves time and energy. For example, when a user signs up for a new username or subscribe monthly newsletters, there should be a prompt for welcome email.
While automation might sound robotic, it’s effective when combined with machine learning and analytics. Business owners can continue to maintain close relationships with their customers, spread brand awareness, and market their services and products. Automated emails often get 119 percent higher click rates than broadcast emails. Therefore, it’s important to welcome customers to your website because welcome emails often have 4 times the open rates and 5 times the click through rates of other types of emails.
With automated emails you can go so much further than simple welcome emails though. You can personalize them based on data you have about your customers, their shopping behavior and their campaign behavior.
Email Marketing Techniques To Avoid
While there are many challenges facing email marketers today, pay attention to these don’ts and avoid overcome these issues.
- Send from “donotreply@yourwebsite.com”
Unless you are a big corporation that receives thousands of unwanted replies from your customers, make sure that the email address you are using is personal and not generic. Even though we are living in a digital age, customers often want to be able to respond to an email if they have concerns and inquiries.
By having a do not reply email, it shows that you do not care about your customers by making it difficult for them to reach you. The email address should be professional such as customerinquiries@yourwebsite.com. This approach will allow customers to easily reply to your email if needed and avoid your emails from going into the spam folder.
- Use One Size Fit All Approach
Your customer is as unique as your company; therefore, make sure that email has relevant information relating to their purchasing behavior. Using machine learning and Google analytics, you can ensure that you are targeting the right audience.
Have a personal message to show your customer that you understand who they are and their purchasing behaviors. Personalized emails often generate up to 6 times higher revenue than non-personalized emails. Make sure that your customer understand that this email is targeted towards them instead of hundreds of generic emails that they receive every day. By not using a one size fit all approach, you can ensure that your customers will click on the email to see the promotions and offers that are tailored for them.
- Include Large Files
Undelivered emails are often the result of files being too large. While it might be a good idea to include visually stunning images to capture your audience’s attention, make sure that your emails can load fast to avoid wasting your customer’s time. Ensure that your file size is not to large so your content can reach your audience no matter what their mailbox size is.
- Spam Your Customers
Many customers often receive newsletters from companies that they have never interacted. Often, companies would buy an email list and began to spam their potential customers in hope that a small amount would click on their links. This method of “spray and pray” can be very harmful to your business because potential customers can see right through it. People often spend on average 51 seconds scanning through the content of their emails; therefore, make sure that your content is engaging and relevant.
Conclusion
In order to stand out when using email marketing, you need to ensure that your email is relevant to your customers. Customers often get irritated when they receive unwanted and frequent emails. If your emails are unsolicited, the recipients might delete and unsubscribe to your business as 49.7 percent of emails are often considered spam. You have put a lot of hard work into creating relevant content for your emails; therefore, make sure that you follow these do’s and don’ts in order to have the best email marketing campaign.
Follow the latest marketing trends to see what’s new with email marketing and stay ahead of your competition. Still need more tips about email marketing you can visit this article on the “Top 5 Email Marketing Automation Triggers You Should Know” or this article on “7 Methods to Increase the Effectivity of Your Email Campaigns Up to 15 percent.