Gain New Signups & Keep Subscribers Engaged
How to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Sending emails to customers and prospects is a highly potent marketing strategy. Being able to have a relationship between customer and brand is something well sought after and obtainable with email marketing. Turning prospects into customers, one time buyers into loyal patrons, and keeping an ongoing relationship with your contacts can be simple to do with the right platform.
Creating an email campaign will assure contact with you consumer base. Regardless of what type of business you have, being able to communicate on a timeline will ensure constant engagement with your clients. By staying one step ahead of the client, users can also create emails with future content in mind to best continue communication.
On top of constant engagement, email marketing has proven to provide the best return on investment in the many ways outlined below.
- Estimated $38 for every $1 spent.
- An email is approximately 5x morel likely to be seen then a Facebook message
- You’re about 10x more likely to have a click-through in an email campaign then from a tweet
- Retaining customers through email is more effective then Facebook or Twitter
- More customer interactions are driven through email marketing than any other marketing channel including social and search
Email marketing continues to be one of the most affordable and personal ways to reach new clients, but it can be exhausting trying to track subscriber trends. Win each inbox (without the stress) by following our top 2018 email trends. We analyzed the metrics and did the research for you, so you can focus on gaining new subscribers, improving your engagement rates, and watching your ROI increase. Keep in mind that these will be only some of the things you can do and there will always be room to do more to increase opens and clicks.
Boost Your Brand
Use Your Social Media to Gain More Subscribers
Using social MediaSocial media has come a long way to become what it is in 2018. With that sphere of influence at your disposal tweeting, posting, or sharing your email marketing signup link in those places will help you increase your subscribers. Using your own brand is a great way to show your followers that you have other ways to communicate with them.
Think of it this way. Creating your sphere of influence requires patience, perseverance, and persistence but once you’ve created it you’ll be able to cross promote yourself in your marketing circles. Cross promoting your signup link can have great results by naturally increasing contacts in your lists.
Coincide social media campaigns with email marketing by cross promoting your other channels. Write an email with reasons why subscribers are missing out if they don’t follow your social media pages. Create a series of social media posts explaining why followers should subscribe.
For a little more information on how to use social media, you can head here:
Sharing on social media can also have the great benefits of helping you segment your list in ways that can be utilized? Letting a subscriber fill out a contact form can give you their email address among anything else they choose to fill in. We’ll talk about how you can utilize this in the next section.
Easy on the Eyes
Mobile Friendly Email Designs to Increase Clicks
We live in an entirely mobile world. Mobile responsive designs adapt to the screen the email is being viewed on. With more people checking their phones instead of computers mobile responsiveness is more important now than ever before.
To be able to do this in a way that can be mobile friendly, you’ll need a couple of things included with your emails:
- Easy to read font
- Mobile responsive email
- Larger call to action button
Making your emails easier to engage with promotes adaptability to your audience. This can also help to send direct notifications to your consumer base. Applications such as Outlook and Gmail will send pings to your users when you’ve emailed them. Having an immediate open with the notification helps your reputation as a sender and for that specific subscriber’s inbox.
With the ability to directly interact with a subscriber and the power to make it personal this trend might be the most pertinent one on the list. Formatting your email to fit into a mobile world can seem like a tough change, but it’s worth it to reach out to your audience.
If you’d like to read more about designing mobile friendly emails, you can head here.
Modern Segmentation
Improving User Engagement
A segmented list is a happy list. Assure that your lists are segmented in ways that are relevant to your client base. Sending content to specific lists will increase opens and clicks. This will also personalize your sends to help come across as a trusted sender.
Let’s imagine that we’re a small haircutting business from Seattle. We can segment this into customers that live in Seattle that could return for a coupon and people that have never come in to also receive a coupon.
Sending actionable content to subscribers can be a good way to feel accomplished in your segmented lists. Being able to have a specific call to action for a list can come across genuine to the reader.
Check out our blog on segmenting your lists here:
Easing the Introduction
Automating the Welcome Process to Keep New Subscribers Engaged
Deliverability has a lot to do with your history of engagement with your subscribers. The best time to start your record of good engagement with a new subscriber is immediately after they have opted in to receive your messages. New subscribers are much more likely to open your emails right after subscribing and this is especially true if you give them an incentive to open, and click on links in your first welcome email. The easiest way to do this is to have a welcome email that is automatically sent right after the subscription occurs. Within this email should be something highly clickable, like a coupon code link. It's also your opportunity to ask them to add your email address to their contacts list which could keep you from going into a spam folder down the road.
Being able to make new subscribers feel welcomed into an email campaign is pertinent to promote growth. Starting with an automated welcome email campaign is a great step to making the email subscription feel personal.
Subscribers should also receive a time frame of how often they should expect to hear from you. Letting them know this in the first couple of emails can be good both to assure that they won’t be spammed, but also
This can also help you create reputation as a sender. If you send a confirmation email, or one that the new sign up will open, the provider will make your from address more pertinent in the inbox. Not only does this increase deliverability but it also can help the open rate. Try giving an incentive with the first email such as a coupon or something free with the first open.
With personalization taking the stage, it’s vital to customize each newsletter to nurture your list segments to show that you want to build a connection with them. The following segments are good starting points to segment your list.
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Purchase interests
- Sending preference
- Interests
- Open rate
Creating a welcome campaign can be started in a couple different ways. You can make a welcome series, a nurturing campaign, or even an educational campaign. These all have their own place and application that can be utilized well to keep your subscribers engaged.
A welcome series mainly consists of emails designed to thank the new subscriber for signing up. This type of campaign includes emails such as a thank you for subscribing, take 10% off your next purchase, etc. Nurturing campaigns or behavior based emails are a little bit different in what they supply to new subscribers. Emails such as these are aimed towards sending to subscribers based off of how they interact with your website. For example if your customer loaded up a cart and abandoned it, there could be a behavior based email telling them that their cart is waiting for them. Educational campaigns consist of teaching your subscriber something they didn’t know, this should be something related to your website to deliver best results.
If you’d like to learn more about the types of auto send campaigns, you can head here.
Make Clients Feel Unique
Dynamic Content in the Subject Lines for Increased Personalization
Keep email subjects personalized to maximize opens and clicks. This can also help target certain clients within your list segments to have the best opens. Short, sweet, and to the point subject lines have a strong impact on a specific group of people. Keeping it to the point will inform the reader that they should click to see more of the content. This can also be utilized with the conjunction of list segmenting that we touched upon earlier.
The most important part of an email is the company name, but the second most important part of an email is the subject line. Adding a personalized merge tag besides a first name is something extremely unique that not many people do. Cutting through your competitors and the constant dullness of subject lines with a merge tag that isn’t a first name can inspire an open.
Keep email subjects personalized to maximize opens and clicks. This can also help target certain clients within your list segments to have the best opens. Short, sweet, and to the point subject lines have a strong impact on a specific group of people. Keeping it to the point will inform the reader that they should click to see more of the content. This can also be utilized with the conjunction of list segmenting that we touched upon earlier.
The most important part of an email is the company name, but the second most important part of an email is the subject line. Adding a personalized merge tag besides a first name is something extremely unique that not many people do. Cutting through your competitors and the constant dullness of subject lines with a merge tag that isn’t a first name can inspire an open.
Under the subject line resides the preheader, think if it like a preview of what the email has to offer. Being able to customize this for the specific subscriber is another level of personalization emails can offer to incite a response. Lots of people use a first name to promote personalization but there are so many more data points that could be used, try to spice it up with their pets name, hometown, or even their next travel destination.
If you’d like to read more about the preheader you can go here.
These trends are something you can always take into consideration when creating an email campaign. Being able to segment lists, creating automated welcome campaigns, and including your social can be easy with the tools FireDrum provides. Want to reach out? Need help getting started? We’re here to help. Contact a specialist today!
