Successful Email Marketing strategy in 2019
Ok, so it’s a new year and time to take a look at what are they key elements for successful email marketing in 2019. Email marketing has had a great few years, successful email marketers have developed a key set of proven techniques.
So let's share our pick of these, so that you can incorporate them into your email marketing this year.
Focus on Personalisation
Personalising your send is continued to grow and develop as being a key factor of successful email marketing. 2019 will see this move on from so much more than just adding your name to the solution section of the mailer.
The key is personalize everything, you can mention previous products that they have been interested in, or if they are men or women, or a certain age demographic.
If your viewer feels the you know them and have tailored your marketing based on their preference -0 then they are more likely to engage with your send.
Segment your data
Splitting your data based on a particular demographic - or product preference really helps to achieve the ultimate goal of sending the right marketing to the right people.
Segmenting your data works nicely with personalization, if your data is split into smaller qualified groups, then it makes it much more manageable.
The days of sending out one mailer to huge lists of people are long gone. Your viewer expects so much more nowadays, they want to buy from people that understand what they want.
Segmenting your data helps you manage personalised sends effectively. Segmenting will also help you to identify viewing trends - different groups of people may read emails at different times. So you could segment your data into groups of people who read during working hours and those outside of working hours.
Consistency
If your viewers are expecting to see an email from you at a certain time of day - or specific day, then they are much more likely to engage with it.
If email marketing is sent sporadically, then research shows that this type of marketing receives a much higher rate of people unsubscribing or marking as spam.
Split Testing
Testing your mailer to a small portion of your subscribers is vital. Before launching your campaign, you really do need to take the time to test different variants of it on smaller groups.
If you think about the old days when we actually went shopping instead of ordering online - how many times do you recall seeing people conducting market research?
Well, online is no different, it’s really important to gauge sample responses before committing to the best approach.
Don’t use purchased lists
Always avoid the temptation to top up the number of subscribers that you have buy purchasing data. Purchased data is typically full of dead email address, not qualified and the addresses will not have opted in to your communications.
These lists typically cause negative sender reputation and the percentage of people that engage positively is very low indeed.
Use compelling subject header lines
Email marketing really does live and die by subject header lines. It’s the first thing that your recipients will see and often their decision on whether to open the mail or delete it will be made purely on this.
Subject header lines also play a major part in the spam filter deciding whether to send your mailer to the inbox or junk.
Competition for your viewer’s inbox is fierce, a decent subject header line will give you a strong advantage.
Design for Mobile
With more and more of us reading email on our mobile device - designing for this platform really does need to play a major part in your design and content.
The golden rules are use large fonts and keep the text brief and punchy. It’s worth writing your text, then re-reading it and condensing it as much as possible.
It’s also important to have the main message of your mailer visible to the viewer without having to scroll down. Before sending your campaign, always check it on your mobile first.
Automate your sends
Automating your email marketing is a great way of letting your email marketing software do all of the heavy lifting for you.
If a new subscriber joins your mailing list, you can use that as a trigger point to send a timed chain of emails. These emails can also be decision based - so if they engage with a particular product, you can use automation to send them email based on their exact preferences.
Any decent email marketing software will have an automation app to take care of this for you.
Looks for trends in your stats
Your email marketing software will have campaign statistics, so you can see exactly how people are engaging with what you are sending.
You can use these stats to identify trends. These could be preferred time to receive and email, product choices, preference for sales or information based emails.
Spotting any trends will really help to fine tune your email marketing to achieve really great results.
Ok, so there we are. That’s a quick run down of the key principles for successful email marketing in 2019