Think email marketing isn’t lucrative anymore?
Think again.
In fact, for every $1 that you put into emailing customers, you get an average of $38 in return.
Plus, with the average person checking their email about 15 times a day, there’s an incredibly good chance that your target market will see the many promotional emails that your brand sends — and act accordingly.
The only drawback?
It seems that fewer and fewer brands really know how to email people.
Are you making costly mistakes that are messing with your marketing campaigns?
Read on to learn what you should avoid before hitting “send.”
1. Writing Terrible Subject Lines
When you’re emailing customers to let them know about a new product, an upcoming sale, or pretty much anything at all, you need to rely on your subject line to lure them in.
However, a huge portion of your campaign emails likely aren’t being read at all — because of problematic and unengaging subject lines.
When you write a subject line, it’s important to put the most important information up front. This doesn’t just encourage customers to actually read the emails. It also ensures that the essential point of the email doesn’t get cut off in their email browsers.
For example, look at a lengthy subject line like, “Would you like to impress people by updating your closet with our one-day 25% off sale?”
Not only is the most important piece of information — the one-day 25% off sale — at the end of the subject line. It’s also completely boring, and doesn’t make the timeline of the sale clear at all.
Instead, re-write it to something like, “TODAY ONLY: Take 25% off your entire order!”
Keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
2. Bad Timing
When you want to learn how to email people, you don’t only want to think about creating an engaging and informative subject line.
You also want to think about the time of day that you’re emailing customers.
This is where your analytics come into play.
Take a quick look at the average activity and engagement with your email campaigns. From there, you can understand when the biggest portion of your target market actually checks — and opens — emails from your brand.
Maybe they always read your emails on their commute to work. Maybe they seem to check their emails during their lunch hour. Maybe they’re obsessed with Sunday night shopping, and check their emails for coupons them.
Make sure this is information that you know, and send out your emails when you know they have the highest chance of actually being opened. If not, all your hard work will end up going to waste!
Remember too, that you can always segment your market, so that your customers are sent the emails at times that work best for them.
3. Not Letting Customers Opt-In
So, a new customer has just made a first-time purchase on your website. Maybe you’ve even gotten a referral and an email address from a past client. Perhaps you’ve even used a few marketing tools or databases to provide you with an arsenal of addresses.
Whatever the case may be, what you say in that initial contact email can make all the difference.
After all, no consumer wants to feel like they’re being spammed by emails from a company they either don’t know or didn’t understand would place them on a subscriber list.
Always include an emailing opt-in when you reach out to new customers after they’ve made a purchase. Ask them if they’d like to subscribe to your newsletter so that they can stay up-to-date about new products and upcoming sales.
If you’re emailing an individual lead for the first time, make sure that you explain where you got their contact information, and take the time to introduce yourself.
Above all, make sure you have a clear privacy policy in place to protect your customers. Make unsubscribing easy, and include a link on your website where customers can quickly enter in their email address if they want to sign up for newsletters from your brand.
4. Not Monitoring Ongoing Campaigns
One of the most frustrating things that we’ve noticed when we evaluate companies who are emailing customers through an automated campaign strategy?
The complete lack of follow-through when it comes to how they evaluate the success of these campaigns.
In a sense, this is akin to throwing money away.
If you don’t take the time to look at the data behind your campaigns, you’re not going to learn anything useful about your customer base.
You won’t understand your demographics, you won’t figure out which images speak to them the most, and you won’t be able to find out which segment of your market prefers which products.
When you begin to learn how to email people, it’s essential that you also take the time to study email analytics and how to monitor your campaigns in real time.
This way, you’ll always get the most out of your email marketing strategies. Don’t just send and disappear.
You Now Know How to Email People Effectively
We hope that this post has helped you to understand not only how to email people in the best ways, but also how to refine and monitor your email marketing campaigns in the future.
Of course, we understand that the normal course of business can sometimes make it hard to find the time to devote to thorough and proper email analytics.
That’s where we come in.
Spend some time on our website and blog to access email marketing tools that will make things a lot easier.
Then, be sure to keep on reading our blog to learn how to build the best possible email campaigns.