Succeeding with inbound marketing means sending emails to people that will actually open them.
It’s not unusual for your email to get lost in the heaps of other emails users might receive, or worse still end up in their SPAM messages. At that point, someone may open your email, but they’ll never go any further. It’s not uncommon to feel like you’ll never win, but fear not, we’ve got your back with our ten email marketing tips that every business needs!
1. Never purchase email addresses.
This is a rookie mistake that many businesses make during the early stages of an email marketing campaign, you want eyeballs on your business, and you’ll do whatever it takes. Understandable. Regardless of how you run your campaign, try to avoid buying email addresses.
Because the owners of these addresses never gave consent for you to email them there’s no guarantee they’ll be interested in your offer, or whether they’re even a good fit!
Rather than buy email ids outright, it is best that you work with an agency, that can help in data collection. For example, the Top Email Marketing Agencies work with data experts that can sort and filter email ids and help you create the best cold outreach campaign. What’s more? They can also work on platforms like LinkedIn, use third-party software and help you generate a credible mailing list for your email marketing campaign.
2. CAN-SPAM rules CAN help
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CANSPAM) was passed as a 2013 act which governs the email messages sent commercially, enables recipients to stop emails from a business, and details the penalties for breaching the law.
In order to be CAN-SPAM compliant, your email messages must follow these rules, which are available on the FTC’s website.
You might want to include a valid postal address with each email you send, offer an easy to find solution for recipients to opt-out, and use a clear to and From address that details exactly who you are as the sender.
3. Ensure GDPR compliance with your opt-ins
Most businesses will of at least heard of GDPR by now, which was a law that landed in May 2018 to protect everyone’s personal data on the web.
Although there’s no need to memorize the entire law, we’d recommend anyone with European recipients to ensure that any page your users land on that collect their personal data has a checkbox with a statement asking users whether they would like to opt into your email list so they can legally receive your updates.
4. Contact new subscribers promptly.
There is a mere 24-hour opportunity for when you are top of mind of your customers, and you can get a feel for the type of customer you’ve subscribed by emailing them within 24 hours of them hitting the subscribe button. You should learn more about the types of e-mails you need to be sending to set those expectations, bearing in mind these emails could be set up within an automated workflow.
5. Send emails from you, not your business
Email open rates increase dramatically when they have a personal touch, and this is because users are more likely to trust a personalized sender than that of a business or brand name. Many users may hesitate to open emails from unfamiliar senders, meaning they are more likely to trust a personal name than a generic one.
6. Pre-set text used for previews.
Many email clients including Gmail, the iPhone mail app, Outlook and more will give a teaser of the first few lines of text from an email which appears beside the subject line. Essentially this is a text preview of what you can expect to read in the email. User and email client settings will determine the exact length of text that appears, but you should use this to offer a short and punchy introduction to what you have to offer and make it no more than 50 characters.
7. Subject lines should be clickable and easy to understand.
While on the subject of a subject line, there is a heap of competition for you to contend with in your recipient’s inboxes. If you want to stand out among the crowd you need to be writing crisp and catchy ”I need to click this!” subject lines. To aid in the likelihood of your reader opening your email, you should ensure the subject lines you write are less than 50 characters in length, and they’re easy to read and understand.
8. Keep to the point.
Many users we send emails to already have an inbox full of emails, so there’s no need to give them countless lines to read during their busy day. Users are much happier with short, to the point emails than long-winded ones as they have a much clearer objective. Also, when users are skim-reading through their emails quickly, there’s a better chance they’ll understand the overall gist of your email, which could potentially lead to an action.
9. Each email should have ONE call to action.
Remember us mentioning users will skim-read emails without actually reading the content? In that case, this is the reason why a single call to action button can be important as it can be easy to find for those email warriors who are quick to read. If you don’t have a clear call to action, there’s no further action for your readers to take once they finish reading your email.
10. Images should be hyperlinked.
The main goal of an email marketing campaign is to get people from point a (your email) to click through to point b (your website or sales channel). To improve these clickthrough rates, you should ensure the images within your emails are hyperlinked to direct users to the page that you desire, also ensuring the written content fits with the image. Imagine you are inviting readers to sign up for a webinar and you have a picture of the speaker attending the webinar, don’t just hyperlink the text beneath the image saying sign up here, add a hyperlink to the image too. Users are drawn to images more than they are plain text, so you want to provide as many opportunities as possible for them to follow through on your offer.
We hope these tips on email marketing have helped you find some quick wins, and please leave us a comment below if they’ve helped you in any way.
