Article by: Keran Smith

5 Proven Effective Email Marketing Tips

  1. Email New Subscribers Immediately
  2. Use Email Automations
  3. Use Text-Based Emails
  4. Replace Generic CTA Copy
  5. Re-Engage Or Remove

Email Marketing Tip #1: Email New Subscribers Immediately

There is a window of peak engagement when someone signs up for your email list. It is best to instantly deliver on the promise you made when they opted in for your newsletter or offer. Doing this will set expectations that your company will follow through on its promises quickly. This ultimately builds trust and brand loyalty. Think of emailing your new subscribers like you would with shipping times.

Email Marketing Tip #2: Use Email Automations

Email automation sends automatic, time or action-triggered emails to your subscribers. The most common trigger being someone subscribing to a list such as a newsletter, but there are a ton of other triggers as well. You can use email automations to create a series of emails, also known as a drip campaign or email sequence. All of this can happen with no involvement needed from you. The best part about email marketing automation is that you can create a series of emails to go out over time. Doing so can help move people from a simple subscriber to a paying customer.

Our three favorite automations to use are:

  • Welcome email automation

This automation includes the first email that someone receives when they join your email list and a series of other emails that help nurture them over time.

  • Abandon cart automation

This automation aims to recover the 81% of online shopping carts that were abandoned by sending emails that overcome objections to purchasing.

  • Repeat customer automation

This automation focuses on driving repeat purchases from previous customers by sending new offers and products that solve their problems.

Email Marketing Tip #3: Use Text-Based Emails

We’ve all seen those emails that are beautifully designed with a ton of nice images and color. You know, the ones you get from Wayfair or Chewy. While they look great, they don’t necessarily send the right signals to your audience. Emails that are typically designed tend to look like advertisements. Most heavily designed emails are viewed as advertisements or promotions that actually land in the promotions tab on Gmail. In comparison, the emails we receive from friends, family, and colleagues don’t have any design at all and are simply text-based. If you want your emails to feel more personal and authentic, opt for a mostly text-based email.

Email Marketing Tip #4: Replace Generic CTA Copy

  • Read more.
  • Learn more.
  • Buy now.
  • Shop now.

They are seen so often, they don’t do a good job at enticing action from subscribers. By using cliché CTA copy, you miss out on potential clicks and increasing your email open rate. So here are three high-impact email marketing tips to create CTAs for your emails that your subscribers can’t help but click on.

Alternatively, by including an audience goal or pain point, it makes your CTA low-risk. By providing a peek into the future your CTA buttons will be more clear, engaging, and result in much better performance.

  • Include an Audience Goal or Pain Point

The thing your audience cares about most is finding the solution to their problems or the path to their goals. 

Thus, incorporating them into your CTA copy can have amazing results. Casper knows that one major goal of their audience is to keep their bed clean from dirt and spill. So instead of opting for a generic CTA message like “Shop Now”, they used “Stay Clean”. This appeals to their audience’s goal and provides them a path to accomplish it. Just don’t overdo it and make sure the CTA copy you use actually supports the overall message of your email.

  • Make Your CTA Low-risk

Words like “Buy Now” require a lot from your subscribers.

It asks them to commit to grabbing their credit card and spending money before they even click to make it to your sales page, which is a lot to ask. Instead, try something more low-risk such as “View Products”. Even a simple change from “Sign Up” to “Sign Up For Free” can appear less risky. Remember this, readers are more likely to take action on your CTA when it is low-risk.

  • Provide A Peek Into The Future

Most people prefer to know what is behind a door before they walk through it. For this reason, CTA copy such as “Click Here” is not the best way to get someone to your website. This is because it provides no indication of what happens next.

Instead, use action-oriented verbs and descriptive copy to foreshadow what the reader can expect.

  1. Instead of “Get A Discount”, try “Get 30% Off”
  2. Instead of “Click Here”, try “See All Services”
  3. Instead of “Learn More”, try “Learn About Email Marketing”

A company that does a great job at giving their email subscribers a peek into the future with their CTA buttons is Handy. Notice how every CTA is extremely descriptive and action-oriented. Here’s an interesting spin on the common “Buy Now” CTA that is descriptive and action-oriented. Give these three tips a try and see how you can transform your CTA copy and your results for higher click-through rates.

Email Marketing Tip #5: Re-Engage Or Remove

In email list building, the belief that having a large list equates to success with email marketing is an age-old myth. In reality, having an engaged list is more profitable than simply having a large one. But what do you do with the subscribers who have checked out and simply don’t open your emails anymore?

You send them re-engagement emails or most often known as a win-back campaign.

Why?

After receiving a re-engagement email, 45% of subscribers read future emails, according to Email Monks. The best thing that can happen is that you extract those who are still interested and you even have the opportunity to generate a few sales while you’re at it. The absolute worst thing that can happen – you get to clean your list of inactive subscribers.

Cleaning your list leads to four massive benefits:

  1. Higher open rates
  2. Higher click-through rates
  3. Fewer spam reports
  4. Reduced email platform costs due to the size of your list

Here’s how to re-engage or remove your subscribers.

Step 1: Create a segment of inactive subscribers who have not opened your emails

This may look different depending on the sales cycle of your product or service. But for most businesses, if someone has not opened your emails in the last 60 days, it’s likely time to send a re-engagement email.

Step 2: Create a win-back email automation

This will be an automation series of emails that nudge your inactive subscribers to open your emails. We recommend the following sequence for a win-back campaign: an incentive email, then a reminder email, and lastly, a “Before I Go” email.

Common subject lines include:

  1. [First Name], We Miss You
  2. Before I Go [First Name]
  3. Did You Forget About Us?

Step 3: Remove those subscribers who did not engage with your win-back campaign.

Remember, it’s much cheaper to keep subscribers than to acquire a new one. We know we said that this is a post of 5 email marketing tips, but we have a bonus tip for you.

Bonus Tip: Create Unique Email Segments

Subscribers are not one size fits all. They each have specific interests and attributes that make them unique. So how do you send emails to every subscriber that is personal to their particular needs and interests? The answer is through proper email segmentation. Segmentation is the act of grouping subscribers by similar attributes, interests, or needs based on customer data.

By sending emails to particular “segments” of your list, you can make sure the emails are valuable to them.

Here are a few segmentation categories and examples to get the creativity flowing:

  • Budget: Subscribers whose budget is over $2,000
  • Products or Service Interest: Subscribers who indicated an interest in email marketing
  • Engagement Level: Subscribers who opened any of your last 5 emails
  • Location: Subscribers who live in Atlanta
  • Purchase History: Subscribers who have not purchased in the last 60 days
  • Order Value: Subscribers who spent more than $300
  • Gender: Subscribers who indicated they were male or female

The key to proper segmentation is to decide which metrics are essential for your business and to collect that information. For example, if you are a service company, knowing how soon someone will move forward, is likely a metric you would want to know and segment your list by.

Or if you are an eCommerce company that has multiple products, knowing the category of products that your subscribers are interested in is definitely a metric you would want to know and segment your email list by. Segment your email list to ensure that the right messages are sent to the right people at the right time.