If I had a penny for every time I read that email is dead, I would probably be rich now… And I’d invest some of that money into email marketing. By the end of 2019, it is expected that over 246 billion emails will be sent, every day. That alone tells you that email is very much alive, and will live long and prosper.
We’ve been huge proponents of growing and nurturing your mailing lists at LeadQuizzes. In fact, we have an entire series on growing your list to 100,000 subscribers, explaining why your mailing list is one of your strongest business assets.
Just like anyone else, we get a lot of emails daily at LeadQuizzes. Unfortunately, not everyone is treating their mailing lists as a treasure trove they are, blindly blasting their recipients with spam. For this reason, we’ve prepared some of the best email marketing practices to adhere to in 2020. Here are some ways to get better at email, increase your conversions and get better ROI for the mails you send out.
Email marketing 101 – Use segmentation
Email segmentation is a bit of a buzzword these days. Each piece of marketing software promises segmentation, with giants such as MailChimp, Aweber, ConstantContact, and others in tight competition for the email marketing software crown.
However, having the ability means nothing if you don’t know how to make the most out of it. Think of segmentation as personalization. Instead of blasting thousands of your contacts with one and the same message, you can now get up close and personal with them. You can divide your lists according to location, activities, interests, language, time zones, what they bought and when, and so on.
What is the value of segmentation? If you send the same email to everyone on your list, you’re shooting plenty of blanks. These are people interested in different products, at different points of the buyer’s journey, and they all signed up for your mailing list for different reasons.
If you cater your emails according to different groups of users, you will start seeing immediate results. According to Salesforce, segmented personalized emails have 29% higher open rates in comparison to run-of-the-mill emails. What’s more, they have 41% higher unique click rates.
Don’t forget the welcome email
Manually sending out an email to each new subscriber would be a pretty daunting task, especially if you’re lucky enough to get new subscribers by the thousands.
This is why you need to make the most out of email marketing automation and let apps do the hard work for you. Don’t take our word for it – companies that use automation have a 53% higher conversion rate compared to those taking care of email manually.
Take care of automation right from the start and onboard your users with a welcome email. These are incredibly easy to set up and they provide value to your mailing list right off the bat.
Once a new user subscribes, they will get an automated email welcoming them to the list. Sounds too simple? It works very well. Using just a welcome email, Aweber has managed to get a 90% open rate and 45% click through rate.
You can absolutely have more than one welcome email – in fact, it is recommended. Just make sure to keep the number under 3. With more than one welcome email, you’re doing yourself a favor. Once the first one goes through, you can prune your list and remove all addresses that bounced. After that point, your list will only have those people who really want to be on your mailing list.
If you need additional help writing your email copy, check out these welcome email ideas to get inspired.
Triggered emails are your new best friend
The welcome email is just the first part of the journey for your next email marketing campaign. At this step, your leads are at the very top of the sales funnel, and you want to drive them further down. Luckily, this is another thing that can be completely automated.
Trigger-based email campaigns are the easiest way to secure new leads and maximize conversions. Don’t just leave your leads hanging – nurture them. For example – a user clicks on your call to action in a newsletter regarding your latest product. They are now on your website’s landing page, checking out the product features.
Since they arrived from email, you can set up a sequence regarding this specific product. For example, within 48 hours they can receive an email about this product’s best features and uses. Another 48 hours away, you can give them a coupon for a discount on this product.
This is a rather simplified example, but the point is the same – you can create an automated sequence with triggered emails, guiding your users down the sales funnel. The best part – you can customize sequence to minute details, ensuring your leads land exactly where you want them to.
Make sure your emails look great on mobile
Depending on your product, audience and the type of email you’re sending out, 22 to 77% of all emails sent out will be opened on mobile. That is a huge chunk of your mailing list and it’s worth taking time to make sure your emails are optimized to be viewed on mobile devices.
Source: emailmonday.com
If you’re still not convinced, here are a few stats from HubSpot. A whopping 69% of mobile users will delete your email if it isn’t optimized for mobile. What’s more, 89% of marketers are missing out on valuable leads because they aren’t paying enough attention to optimization. Every year, the numbers go up for mobile compared to other platforms, so it’s worth taking the time to optimize all of your future email correspondence.
Use calls to action
Sending out an email for the sake of sending an email is a waste of time – for you and your recipients. In order to make your emails effective, make sure to include a call to action (CTA). Calls to action are the single most important element to an email as they will drive your contacts to click and move to your landing page, driving them down the sales funnel.
How do you go about creating a call to action? Make it engaging, insightful and in line with the rest of the email body. Primarily, make it actionable, so that the reader really wants to click on it. If you’re not sure what kind of CTA to use in your email, you can reverse-engineer the process.
This means creating a CTA first and then writing an email around it. Depending on the purpose of your email, you can have a single or multiple CTAs. For example, if you’re promoting an ebook, a single CTA with a link to download it will suffice.
No more no-reply
If you’re online for longer than a minute, you probably received an email from an address such as [email protected]. Unless you’re the rebellious type, you listened to the instructions and never replied to those messages. Email is an immensely powerful communication tool, and if you’re not allowing your recipients to reply, you’re having a lopsided conversation.
No matter how general your email newsletter is, always allow the option to reply. Any feedback is good feedback, so keep this channel of communication open. With email marketing automation, you can set up autoresponders so you don’t have to personally address all incoming mail, although we would strongly suggest this.
Whether you choose to reply to mass emails or not, there’s one thing to take care of first. Ditch your sender name and never use “No Reply” again. Try using your company’s name, or even better, the name of an actual person.
Track and A/B split test everything
How do you know if an email marketing campaign is working? There’s no sure way to tell unless you’re tracking key performance indicators. These include open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates and unsubscribes.
When it comes to A/B split testing, you can (and should) test for all aspects of your emails. This includes subject lines, sender name, email body, calls to action, email sign-offs, and much more.
There are a few things to note when it comes to split testing. First, your work is never done. Your list and your demographics will keep changing, so you have to keep testing and improving your emails.
Second, you need to have an adequate sample to test on. Doing a test on 200 and 20,000 email addresses will not yield the same results – at least not of the same significance.
Finally and most importantly, you should only test a single element at a time. If you test for more than one (i.e. subject line and CTA), and you see a difference in your email performance, you won’t know what to attribute the change to. Test for a single element at a time until you know that what you’re doing is working. Then move on to the next piece of the puzzle.
Email marketing is the easy part of the marketing equation. Getting those precious emails in the first place – that’s the hardest part of the process. What if we told you that lead generation could be made super easy? With LeadQuizzes, you can generate leads by the thousands – using quizzes!
