You’ve been busy creating content and building your audience through social media marketing. Maybe you’ve even gotten yourself some followers and subscribers.
Now, it’s time to connect with them on a much more personal level by using email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to marketers today, and if used effectively, it can be really effective in growing your business.
Let’s look at 7 easy ways we can leverage email marketing to help us reach our audience and ultimately our business goals.
1. Explore your customers’ journey
Before you’re getting people to subscribe to your email, map out their journey.
How do they find you?
What makes them shop at your business?
How to make them share about your business with others?
A lot of businesses overlook it because they think email marketing only happens at the beginning of the journey, but it’s NOT!
When you recognize the key customer touchpoints, you can leverage email automation;
- Welcome flows
- Purchase flows
- Abandonment flows
2. Know your ideal customers to improve email marketing
It’s easy to write an email. What’s not easy is how to write an email that is engaging and relevant to your subscribers.
One way to do this is to create your customer avatar or marketing persona.
Without it, how do you know then if your message will appeal to your target market’s needs?
The best example of this is Stacked Marketers. They know that marketing people like us are busy – busy scrolling social media, and browsing websites for creative ideas. Plus as we all know, marketing moves quickly.
Their solution?
Provide a free daily newsletter of news, trends, tech, and actionable advice on anything related to digital marketing.
If you already have your personas, that’s great! Just make sure that the data are up-to-date.
If you haven’t, you can check out this complete guide + TEMPLATE from Buffer.
3. Focus on Segmentation
One of the hardest reasons why we think email marketing is dead is because every time we send out an email, not many people open the email & read it. Thus we see our opening rate & click-through rate quite low.
Well, according to Chase Dimond (Email Marketing Nerd), it’s most probably because that email might end in your subscriber’s spam. So one of the ways to save your emails from going to the spam folder is to segment the list & engage with them. Here’s one incredible hack from Chase himself.
4. Personalize Your Emails
Nothing makes an email feel more personal than addressing the recipient by their name and is also proven to increase email click-through rates by up to 139%!
Inserting personalization such as First Name or Company Name into the subject line or body of your email as this will help you stand out from the crowd and reduce unsubscribe rates at the same time.
5. Choose the right sending time
Choosing the right day and time to send your emails might be depending on your business and industry. You can start sending emails during these best times, according to Chase Dimond.
You can try to send the email between Tuesday to Thursday. Sending an email on Monday morning or Friday afternoon can dramatically impact open rates.
Experiment with sending your emails on different days and times of the day to see what works best for your audience and track the results so you can continue to improve them over time.
6. Optimize Your Emails for Mobile
At least 50% of your traffic will come from mobile devices. So, make your emails mobile-friendly:
- Watch your subject line length
Make sure you have a basic understanding of what percentage of your subscribers will open your email on a mobile phone vs. tablet vs. desktop. From there you can determine the best subject line length.
A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters of an email’s subject line, while mobile devices show just 25-30 characters, according to a post by Return Path.
Here’s a pro tip: make sure you get the point across with the first 5-10 words. - Use pre-header text
Don’t ignore this part as it can be very useful when it comes to mobile-friendly emails.
If you’re unsure what it is, it’s the first line of copy in your email and serves as a support to your subject line, providing more context and attracting your reader to open your email.
Here’s an example:
- Keep your copy concise
Create short, scannable, and consumable chunks of content (i.e., bulleted lists, short paragraphs) that make it easy for your reader to digest your copy and understand the action they should take with your message. For example:
There are many more tips on how you can optimize your mobile-friendly email, you can check out this article here.
7. Lastly, Leverage Email Automation
Email automation is very crucial to your marketing strategy.
It allows us to send emails to our subscribers without actually having to send the emails manually. Meaning the emails will be sent to the right audience at the right moment.
Now you might be asking, which email automation software is easy to use?
Nowadays, there are a lot more options for small businesses or even content creators. It has become increasingly easy to use and even comes with templates now.
How do I fully utilize email automation software?
You can make automation for:
- Welcome emails for new subscribers
- Email courses for anyone interested in your digital products
- Sales pitches for specific products
What’s even better? You can put in specific triggers for those emails to send to different people at different times.
What Are Triggers?
When it comes to email marketing, you don’t want to send the same email to every customer, especially if your company has many different SKUs. By segmenting your audience, you can send newsletters, email courses, & product pitches to the customers that are actually interested. This leads to more opens, clicks, & conversions.
How Are Triggers Used?
To segment your audience, you change the triggers on each email to be specific to where the relevant action. If a subscription came from a landing page for an email course, then the email course should be the emails that are sent.
If you are wanting to pitch a specific product, then the subscribers that should be targeted are ones that have bought or shown interest in similar products.
When launching a new product, the same technique should be used. Generic newsletters can be sent to all subscribers, but if the newsletter is about something specific, it should be sent to a target audience that is interested in that topic as well.
This also reduces the chance of customers flagging your emails as spam or unsubscribing because the email topics are things that they care about.
Here are some of the triggered email ideas that you can use:
How Do I Find The Right Email Automation Platform For My Brand?
There are tons of email automation software available out there for any level of business; start-up, small business, large corporation, or content creators.
Finding the best one for your needs is a different story.
Here are a few of the top email automation companies and a little bit about what makes each one unique.
1. Klaviyo
- If you sell direct to consumers (DTC) and use Shopify as your main e-commerce platform, you should seriously consider using Klaviyo.
- From automation to campaigns, reporting, and integrations, this is a leading platform for email marketing.
- Starting price: FREE for up to 250 contacts and 500 email sends.
2. Active Campaign
- Their greatest strengths is the level of flexibility you can get when setting up your marketing automation funnels.
- Pair email with text messages, as well as a multitude of other integrations available to really build out a full-fledged set of funnels.
- The reporting is a bit confusing, but asides from that, it is a very powerful tool, with solid deliverability across most of their server IPs.
- Starting price: $9/per month (paid yearly) for 500 contacts
3. ConvertKit
- Has the most appeal of being simple and easy to use.
- Aimed at creators, like YouTubers, Instagram influencers, and bloggers.
- The main attraction of ConvertKit is the ability to create email automation workflows easily so you can have a visual of how the email campaign will play out before it is ever sent.
- Starting price: FREE for the first 300 subscribers
Final words.
Getting the most from your email marketing efforts is all about knowing your audience. Think about who will be reading your emails, and try to pinpoint what they like and what will appeal to them. It may take multiple tries to find the right balance, but once you do, your hard work should pay off in no time.
Good luck on your email marketing journey!
I hope you find this article helpful.
My name is Arinah, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I’ve been involved in marketing since 2013 at IMAN Media Group Sdn. Bhd.
Throughout the years, I have collected many tips and errors along the way. I also lead a multi-talented team and help turn a start-up company (5 figures a month) into a hyper-growth company (7 figures a month) in less than 5 years.
Now, I want to share this journey with you.
GREAT NEWS!
If you need a consultation on email or content marketing, you can learn more about it here.
Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter where I’ll share on monthly basis about marketing & branding hacks.
p/s: Newsletter are written in Bahasa Melayu.
Hi, my name is Arinah. 