8 Must-Have Tips to Create a Successful Email Marketing Strategy

Do you have clarity on the core objectives of your email marketing strategy? Creating successful campaigns takes a thorough understanding of your audience as well as a program of best practices to execute email marketing that is effective and cohesive with your brand. A proven communication tool that helps businesses around the globe achieve their company goals, it is a perfect complement to your social media and more traditional marketing efforts.

As part of your overall digital marketing platform, email is a tool that takes forethought, preparation, and specific tactics to serve you and your customers well. Here are eight must-have tips to create a successful email marketing strategy.

8 Email Marketing Tips to Set You Up for Success

1. 1. Carefully Construct Your Email Subject Lines

Subject lines are the first impressions of email marketing. Their construction should always be twofold:

1. 1. 1. Creative while true to your brand
      2. Straight to the point

One of the worst things you can do is use a clickbait subject line that is unrelated to the body of your email. Your audience needs to always trust you. It doesn’t take much to lose a customer and get automatically sent to the trash bin.

1. 1. Be Mindful of When You Send Them

Timing, as in many things in life, is a critical component of your email marketing strategy. Time zones, nationally and globally, should be considered for maximum open rate and click-through rate. Where is your target demographic located? It is best to organize your contact list via time zones for optimum effectiveness. The three core timeframes for sending emails are in the morning (arriving at work /commuting), mid-day (during lunch breaks), and evening (when people arrive home).

1. 1. Design Emails That Work With Multiple Devices

In an increasingly mobile world with many devices, you need to use a responsive design to connect with your full audience. Not everyone opens up emails in the same way. From smartphones to laptops to iPads, an email needs to be able to be present to your customer in an easily readable, clickable, and dynamic format. Accessibility is key. If you are not using responsive design, you need to at least get the data on your target audience and use a format that is catered to the most prevalent device.

1. 1. Favor Visuals Over Copy

Certainly, what you do have in your text should be top quality and very clear. But images are more valuable and preferred in email marketing — so you don’t want to give your audience too much to read. Make sure your user experience is easy, and images upload correctly and efficiently too. If you do have something important to convey to users that would need to be in a longer form, add in a call to action (CTA) button to a landing page or other area of your site. You include a CTA in every email, aren’t you?

Want to learn more about creating click-worthy emails, check out this cheat sheet!

1. 1. Personalize Your Emails

How did you get your customer’s email? Did they sign up for your communications after viewing a particular blog? This is the kind of data that can be very useful for personalizing emails to a particular group of people. Known as an email funnel, you can send personalized content in alignment with the user’s particular behavior, and keep fine-tuning to transform them from user to customer. This funneling not only increases open rate but also is a strategic way to fulfill their specific needs with certain products and services.

1. 1. Don’t Bombard Your Audience

No matter how high-quality your email marketing campaign is — you can wear out your welcome. Yes, it is important to have a strong connection with your customers (and potential customers), but sending promotional emails to them every day will grow old quickly. Create a primary schedule and let them know when they sign up how frequently the emails will be sent. You can also give them options in your introductory email for the preferred amount of contact (weekly, bi-weekly, etc.). This way, you won’t end up the “pesky fly” that receives eye rolls and a quick reach for the delete button.

1. 1. Regularly Optimize Strategy & Retest

If you’re not aware of how you are doing, how can you improve? As part of your best practices, regularly gather and analyze your data to see what is working and what is not working. You can do this through A/B Testing campaigns. This shows you how small changes can make a big impact. An incredibly useful tool, A/B Testing campaigns cover four variables: Subject line, From name, Content, and Send time, and give you actionable insights to create a “Winning Combination” of click rate, open rate, or total revenue, as well as independent data that you can manually choose.

1. 1. Wrap It Up With a Bow— and a CTA

Be mindful of how you end your emails. Frequently give them the incentive to read until the end and be purposeful with your closing statements. Little tidbits of information like release dates of exciting new products or a mention of a social media post that was really successful (humorous or otherwise) are examples of added value for your users. Showing your enthusiasm, and desire to make the opening up of the email worth their time, is important to garnering loyalty. And make sure to include some kind of call to action toward the end as well.

Are you ready to drive website traffic and nurture leads with effective email marketing? Save these tips as you create a new campaign (or retool an existing one). They are an excellent beginning.

In this guide, you will receive detailed information to develop and refine your game plan and understand your audience and their journey. As a critical component of your overall digital marketing program, effective email marketing sets you up for success.