Quick and Dirty Email Marketing Tips
Many email marketing campaigns simply follow the “something is better than nothing” approach. The fact is, something is not always better than nothing. There are a lot of email marketing tips and tricks when it comes to building a campaign. We’ve shared some of the email campaign tips we feel are easy to implement while still making an improvement.
Ineffective email campaigns can actually hurt your user base. Emails with poor design, irrelevant content or no a clear call to action can increase unsubscribe rates; and such your ability to communicate with your email recipients. We’ve put together a list of three simple tips that we feel are generally overlooked. Add these tactics to your next campaign and compare your old metrics to see what works best.
Email Campaign Scheduling
One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make when setting an email marketing strategy is not looking at when to send emails. They complete an email and fire it off whenever they can. This could be at 10 AM or 11 PM. What time you send an email is often more important than what is in it. The primary goal of an email blast is to get a user to open the message, the second is for them to read it. MailChimp has some great email marketing benchmarks for open rates based on industry.
When is just as important as what
When scheduling emails, consider your own personal email habits. You can also look at the email marketing strategies of huge brands that send tons of emails (Target, Starbucks, etc). Take note of when they are sending to email recipients. The average lifespan of an email blast is less than 24 hours; and usually, it’s closer to 12 hours. If you send an email at 11 PM when users check their email in the next morning, your email is going to be at the bottom of yesterday’s emails and they’ll likely miss it. Additionally, most people purge email blasts from their inbox first thing in the morning, so your email from 11 PM the night before gets lumped in with a mass deletion and they never open it.
Below are a few easy steps you can take to help zero in on the right time to send your email marketing campaigns.
- Determine what you’re asking users to do and how timely your email is. If you are promoting a special cocktail on Friday night, Monday morning isn’t the right time to send that email. Send that email when it will be relevant to the user; Thursday or Friday.
- Spend a month testing delivery days/times. See which emails are opened more frequently and move your emails to those time slots.
- Check your metrics 24 or more hours after you send an email. This way you will have relevant open rates for your campaign.
Create Compelling Call to Actions
Developing a clear and compelling Call to Action (CTA) can be the difference between generating revenue and having your email slowly fade into a user’s inbox. While it can be difficult to create a compelling CTA, it is extremely important to do so. This principle isn’t limited to email marketing tips but can be applied to copywriting across all platforms.
Compelling Call to Actions
A good call to action is short and includes a specific action that users are asked the take. Terms like Book Now, Buy Now, View Menu, Make a Reservation are all very obvious cues for the user. Click Here is not. You want the user to understand what you’re asking them to do and what action you want to be completed when they leave your email and visit your website.
Generally speaking, a CTA is going to pop out or be visually different from other elements on the page. These can be buttons, images or text of a different color. Remember, you want the user to see your CTA so don’t hide it in a tiny text link. Lead with an offer or supporting message. A subhead such as “All Shirts 25% Off” followed by an “Order Now” button is crystal clear for the user. They know you want them to buy a shirt and that they are all 25% off. The offer compels them to click the button and the button text compels them to place an order once they are on your site.
These are a few CTAs we’ve seen great click-through rates
- Download Our Guide
- Read This Article
- Send us an Email
- Sign Up Now
Next time you prepare an email marketing campaign, think long and hard to create a simple, easy to understand and compelling CTA.
Segment Your Recipients
The third mistake we often see is a lack of segmentation. Companies tend to dump all of their users into one big list, which is fine, however, they fail to segment those users when they send emails at a later date. In today’s market, companies collect a lot of information, leveraging that information can help drive home the right message to the right user. This is another one of our email marketing tips that really applied to all platforms in today’s digital landscape. Leverage the data you have available to create as custom of a message as possible.
For example, if your company has different promotions in different states, you’ll want to segment users so they only receive promotions relevant to them. Segmentation is another way to personalize an email. Personalization goes a long way towards increased open and click-through rates. It is better to split your list into multiple segments and send more (total) emails to your list but segment them by their interests, buying habits or demographics.
These email marketing tips should help the email marketing for beginners or small businesses. If you’re looking for more info on how to do email marketing there are many great resources out there to get you started. If you would like to optimize a campaign or need help getting started, contact us. We’ll get you set on the right track.
