In this section of the email marketing guide, we are going to take a look at the top ten email marketing hacks for 2021. Each of these are really easy to follow and implement, which if followed can really bring some big wins to you email marketing.
Big buttons really work - if you want your recipients to do something after having received your mailer, a big button is the best possible way to do this. It could be a click through to your online shop, or a link to phone or email you - whatever it is, wrap it in a big button and more people will see, leading to more people acting on it.
As we are all mainly using mobile devices to view emails now, these large buttons really work on a small screen. If people can easily see it and select with their finger, this really helps to give your interactions a real boost.
Again, this is linked to the first point. Always make sure that your email is designed to work on mobile devices. Nothing is more frustrating than having to outward pinch small text on your phone to try and expand it to make it readable. In most instances, people just won’t do that.
If your email looks like it is difficult to read or there is too much text, people will just skip it or delete it. So, as part of the proofing process before you send, take a good look at your text and work out how you can cut out anything that isn’t completely necessary, then, when you’ve slimmed it down’ increase the font size to at least 16px. Anything smaller than 16 is just too small for little screens.
The aim of email marketing is to send the right email to the right people at the right time. Once you’ve hit this holy grail that’s when your marketing really starts paying off in a big way. Data segmentation is how you do that.
Look to see how different groups of people are interacting with your mailer, this could be different times or days that people prefer to open an email - or different subject matter or different content. By looking at these stats, you’ll start to see groups of people that fit into each group.
You can then segment your mailing list into smaller sets and send out different email marketing campaigns to these people - based on their previous viewing characteristics. Segmentation really pays off, big time.
Automation is a really big deal with email marketing - it does all of the heavy lifting for you and makes sure that you have a regular timed flow of messages going out to your target audience. With automation, you can create a flow of timed campaigns that start sending when a new subscriber joins your list. This means that right from the word go - they are getting your messages.
Automation can also include dynamic content - so different mailers can be sent out depending on how people interact differently with each send. This means that people who stress an interest in product ‘A’ can then be sent campaigns that are geared towards their exact requirements. With Automation, you can cope with send volumes and campaign variants that don’t require a whole marketing team to administer.
Big lists of email addresses can be more trouble than they are worth, all of the really successful email marketers know that digital marketing is not about shotgun blasts to a large number of people. This is why you should delete the sleepers - these are people who are not interacting with your sends if you have a list of email addresses where a percentage of them are not reading your emails, then delete them.
These addresses serve no purpose other than bulking your count of data. Low interactions mean that your sender score can go down, affecting future deliveries and real conversations can often get lost in the mix.
Social Media and email marketing complement each other so well. When you send out your email marketing - always share a copy to your social media feeds, this really increases the reach of your message. It also really helps to grow your list of new subscribers.
By quite simply posting a copy to your social media, you can really achieve some big wins. This is a great hack for 2021.
Let’s go one further than that, don’t just optimise your current design for mobiles, let’s create a design that is primarily built for mobiles. Most of us are using mobiles now as the default and sometimes the only device for viewing emails. This means that we should be thinking about making sure that our email looks great, is easy to read and has a clear call to action on a small screen. Putting a bit of time into making your design work for small screens really does help to bring some big gains.
Email marketing is all about drip drip pressure, if people see your emails at regular intervals then it helps to establish you as a trusted source and increase the chance of your email being viewed at the right time.
By maintaining a steady presence in the inbox, your email marketing really helps to establish consistently business and customer loyalty. You can establish what are the right intervals for your marketing by keeping a close eye on your stats and viewing how opens and clicks fluctuate over different intervals. This will help to identify the best performing frequency for your marketing.
A/B testing really takes the guesswork out of your marketing. You can try out different elements, wording or design with small samples of your subscriber database - yo can then see which version got the best opens or clicks.
With this super powerful information, you can then send the best performing variant to the main bulk of your database. Taking the time to A/B test before hitting the ‘send’ button really helps to keep you in front of the competition. I gives you a level of visibility that has never before been available.
This one has been in the email marketing charts for a while now - and it continues to grow in significance year after year. In this digital age, email marketing is the most popular method for companies to use to contact us to try and sell a product or service.
As we all receive quite a bit of digital marketing, we are used to receiving large scale blanket campaigns - this makes us feel undervalued as a customer. As a digital marketer, the fix for this is to personalise at every opportunity - import your email list into your software with people’s names, details of a previous purchase, company names and any other information unique to them.
This means that when you design your email, by using mail merge you can recall this personalised information inside an email. When your recipients receive your email marketing - their message will have been personalised to them. This will really help to make your recipients feel valued.