8 Tips To Supercharge Your Marketing Emails

Email marketing is very cost-effective, because the rise of automated emailing tools has simplified and accelerated much of the work involved. The ROI for email marketing is, for most businesses, the highest out of any form of digital marketing. In this post, we will run down eight big ways to take your email marketing to the next level.

1. Get More Subscribers

The more subscribers you have, the greater your audience. That's straightforward- more subscribers opening the emails means more clicks and more revenue. Do anything you can to get more subscribers, because they are the lifeblood of email marketing. Add lightboxes, be aggressive with subscription offers, and do your best to keep subscribers interested. There will be some natural shrinkage as a result of unsubscribe requests over time, so you need to keep growing to overcome this negative trend. That is how you maintain a strong ROI from quarter to quarter.

2. Automate Heavily

There are so many good automation tools out there now that there is no excuse for not using one. Automating your emails saves you an incredible amount of time, and skilled use helps you segment your list better and boost your ROI further (see below). For example, you can have emails automatically go out to remind visitors who did not submit a form which they started filling in. Try your best to incorporate automation into your workflow. It will significantly improve the ROI of your email marketing efforts.

3. Clarify Your Mailing Address

Many email clients default to using personal names for the sender of any email. That means recipients will see "John Smith" instead of "John's Bakery" as the sender. It seems like a personal way to build a connection, but it actually discourages readers from opening the emails. That's because the personal style looks like a scam or spam email. Instead, be very clear by using your company name for the sender's name. That way, the reader will know exactly what they are getting.

4. Segment By Behavior

We touched on this earlier, but segmenting your subscriber list for different content is extremely powerful. You can make major ROI gains by offering different content to different visitors, and one of the best ways to segment is by behavior and brand engagement. You can segment by past purchases to give customized deals, for example, or send out reminder emails to subscribers who open less frequently. Automation tools make this task fairly simple, and that's part of why we recommend automating whenever possible.

5. Remember Mobile Readers

By now, up to half or more of all your readers might see your email on a smartphone. If your emails are full of images that are too big for small screens, you will start to lose that audience very quickly. Always test your emails to ensure that they look good on smartphones and tablets. Usually, your emails contain links that direct the reader to one of your landing pages. To make sure that your page displays well, the use of responsive design is recommended. Responsive design allows the screen to automatically adapt to the device's screen size. Furthermore, mobile users should have no trouble with loading time for emails or websites.

6. Add Video Content

As Internet connections have gotten faster, it has become possible to use video content more and more. That's a good thing, because customers love videos. Video content can boost both click rates and conversion rates, because it is more immersive and engaging than text. A useful video doesn't need to be much more than a voiceover and an engaging infographic presented as a slideshow. Be careful, though. If you have a lot of mobile users, video could chew into their data cap, so don't use video content too often.

7. Test Every Change

Doing email marketing well is a continual process of learning what works. The best way to determine that is through testing. Split your subscribers into random groups for every test to ensure rigor, and test as often as you can. For example, test different subject lines with the same body content, or test two different designs for your button CTA. The faster you learn, the quicker you can start using the techniques that work and ditching the ones that don't.

8. Focus On Loyal Customers

The core focus should be on the customers you have already acquired, not new ones. Old customers have already shown that they value your brand, so they are likely to buy again with the right marketing effort. You can get a big ROI boost doing this, because you avoid customer acquisition costs and the time to bring in new customers. In addition, loyal customers tend to generate new leads via organic word of mouth.