When it comes to return on investment (ROI), you can’t beat email marketing. For every dollar you spend, you’ll get $36 back. Add that to the fact that email drives more sales than social media marketing and is used by half the population of the entire world, and it should be clear that you can’t keep this strategy on the backburner.
However, just sending a couple carefully crafted emails every once in awhile isn’t going to do the trick. To succeed with email marketing, you need an optimized email marketing strategy.
Put some of these best practices to the test to improve your odds.
8 Tips to Optimize Email Marketing
#1: Be Personal
Personalizing your email goes beyond addressing a customer by name. Pay attention to what they look at when they browse your website and send an email with similar products and services. Send abandoned shopping cart emails. Reach out on special dates such as birthdays or anniversaries.
#2: Keep It Short
The average person receives upward of 100 emails a day. And the longer those emails are, the less likely someone is to read them, let alone act on them. Say what you want to say but keep it brief. Get straight to the point. Experts say your emails should only be between 50 and 125 words long.
#3: Use a Catchy Headline
Your headline is the difference between someone opening your email or sending it straight to the trash. It’s arguably the most important part of your email. A tester like this one will score your headline and provide tips on how to improve it.
#4: Craft a Killer CTA
The entire point of sending an email is to get the recipient to act upon it in some fashion, whether it’s to buy a product or service, sign up for a free trial, or get access to a gated resource. Your call to action (CTA) needs to make it abundantly clear what it is that you want your customer to do.
#5: Practice Segmentation
All customers are not created equal. Say you own a pet store. Your exotic bird owners aren’t interested in receiving coupons for kitty treats and doggy toothbrushes and the people who spend thousands of dollars on saltwater fish have no interest in your BOGO deal on hedgehogs. Segmentation allows you to reach the right people with the right offers at the right time.
#6: Use A/B Testing
Not every email is going to be a hit. Things like subject lines, content, and even the time of day you send your email all matter. With A/B testing, you’ll be able to see what resonates best with your audience. (Pro tip: The easiest way to do this is to set up identical landing pages for different emails and see which perform the best.)
#7: Optimize for Mobile
Ever opened an email on a mobile device and immediately wanted to call corporate to complain about the sheer lack of readability? We have. We shouldn’t have to say this in 2022, but please, please, please make sure your emails look as nice on a smartphone or tablet as they do on your fancy laptop.
#8: Keep Your Email Lists Clean
Clean data is important in any aspect of marketing. If you’re working with garbage, you’re going to get garbage results. The same goes with email marketing. Periodically cleaning up your email lists is necessary to ensure you’re working with the most up-to-date information.
Ready, Set, Optimize!
Email marketing provides a fantastic ROI, but if you’re not continuously optimizing your email marketing strategy, you run the risk of falling flat on your digital face. Don’t settle for good enough – put practices in place that will make you the best of the best!
Need some help optimizing your email marketing strategy? Mischa Communications does that! Let’s make a plan.