Email Marketing Tips From Experts, Part 2

This is the second part of a round-up with email marketers and online brand owners to collect the latest trends, useful recommendations, and words of wisdom on crafting emails. We asked experts to answer the following issues:

• What are the actual trends? 
• What is the most effective way in terms of the conversion rate for emails?
• How to craft emails to get more click-through rates? 

Let’s explore the actionable and proven pieces of advice from practitioners of email marketing.

1 Build trust with emails

Email marketing is one of the best marketing channels for an eCommerce business. From email, eCommerce businesses can generate sales, automate marketing, and stay in contact with customers. eCommerce email marketing is the process of using email to generate sales for your store.

GOALS

As with any marketing campaign, you need to set goals to achieve results. In eCommerce email marketing, your goals are building relationships and generating sales.

PROCESS

You need a successful email process that guides the customer through your funnel. Your process should cover from the first time a customer visits your store to when they convert.

RELATIONSHIP

Invest the time to develop a trusting relationship with your customer. Email allows you to be personal. Nurture your leads and convert them to loyal customers.

An eCommerce business has many opportunities to grow an email list. From the time a customer visits your website to the time they check out, there’s a chance to collect email. Even if they are about to leave your website, you still get a chance to engage them for their email address. Setting up email autoresponders and email campaigns drives traffic and sales for your store.

2 Unleash the power of AMP

An eCommerce strategy trend that we have found effective is interactive emails. This includes AMP (accelerated mobile pages) that we use to display product or image carousels. And our customers can shop right from their email. We also implement other interactive elements like simple quizzes, polls, and short videos that they can watch from their email. This has increased open rates and overall user engagement.

Kathryn Schwab, the Head of Content for Bobbie, a new organic, European Style Recipe infant formula. 

3 Find your best time

Find the best time to send your emails based on your audience. Most people look for what the industry accepted best send time is (e.g. 8am on a Friday) but that’s always an average, and rarely fits exactly with what your audience wants (if you’re B2B for example, and the times are based mainly on B2C research, the two are going to be different!). How do you find it? Test. With a larger audience (2,000+) you can probably send to different parts of the list at different times. With smaller lists, you’ll need to send out to all of them at different times to find that sweet spot. Tools like MailChimp offer great tools for you to see how send time affects your open rates.

Rich Mehta, Founder Rigorous Digital

4 Amuze, personalize, go mobile

Email marketing is an effective marketing channel for digital marketing professionals like me. Email marketing is my way of handling business and communicating with customers around the world. That’s why we need to focus on this one and value its marketing strategy and trends in promoting our services.

For more information about email marketing, here are some recommendations you need to know:

• Mobile experience – increasing long-read approaches. It creates a solution in gaining email marketing popularity.
• Amusing user experience features– has upgraded user’s expectations of digital brand abilities replacing the traditional physical experience. It is a good option for increasing digital brand design in gaining the brand’s reputation for higher email conversion rates.
• Personalized emails – connects more people to the brand. It draws the audience’s attention that makes your email content better.

5 Check, tailor messages, and offer discounts

As a founder, I firmly believe that email marketing is one of the strategies to boost your brand presence online that has a high conversion rate. Email marketing is exceptionally effective because at this point the purchasing behavior and lifestyle of consumers significantly changed.  Take note of this trend and capitalize from this.

Michelle Devani, the Founder of Lovedevani

Here are some of the tips to use in 2021: 

• Check your data and take it from there. You should be able to segment your audience according to their demographics or behavior for you to come up with a piece of useful information for them. 
• Always personalize your messages. Tailored messages will likely be read than a generic email that looks like spam. 
• Offer irresistible discounts, free vouchers, free trials, or free samples that will surely lead to purchase.

6 Know your subject and audience

Email marketing enables us to introduce the brand and the products it can offer. Since it has a more extensive reach, e-commerce companies can increase their online presence through this marketing strategy. It gives a countless number of benefits to a brand, so let me help you take advantage of this by giving you these tips:

1. Create a killer subject line. It is an integral part of email marketing. The chances of the recipient opening the email are based on the subject line. If the subject line creates interest in the recipient, it will indeed be opened; if not, it will most likely go to spam or, worse, trash bin.
2. Know your target market. If people can’t relate to the email you sent, chances are they won’t open and just delete it. Sometimes they even unsubscribe to your mailing list, so it is important to know who the messages’ recipients are to create a more compelling topic that will surely make the customer open and read your emails.

Your goal when doing email marketing is to generate leads that can be converted to sales, so make sure to create an excellent first impression so that recipients will find your email worthy of their time.

Samantha Moss, Editor & Content Ambassador at Romantific. She has been sharing her insights on topics such as dating, relationships, digital marketing, social media and more. 

7 Automate and keep to the point

As a businessman, I make sure to market my company with the most effective ways possible. Which email marketing is one of the ways that shows successful results. Email marketing is continuously making  trends that makes people live easier. Automation is the most popular trend right now even though it has been around for years now.  This boosts your revenue with transactional emails. That being the case, you should keep it consistent with your content and straight to the point to increase your email click-through rates which also improves the effectiveness of the strategy.

Chris Muktar, the Founder of WikiJob.co.uk

8 Promote with new arrivals, testimonials, and blog

Being an eCommerce business owner or marketing manager you can run your permission based email marketing campaign in 3 ways.

1. Product Base: You can promote your new launch products, or monthly sale products, or you can create some discount on a particular product and share with your audience. This will help your audience to understand about your new product, existing product, sales and discount on a particular product and it will drive more sales to your eCommerce business.
2. Reviews & Testimonials: To build more trust in your audience it’s great to share your existing client’s reviews or testimonials. It will help your users to increase more trust in your brand. This will create a positive impact on your audience.
3. Blogs/Newsletter: Content marketing is the most important marketing strategy for any business. You can create your informative blogs, blogs which help your users to understand about your product or service, blogs which help users to understand how your product/service is beneficial for them. You can add videos, images in your blog/newsletter. Generally people love to read blogs/newsletter which contain graphics or video instead of plain texts. 

When you’re building your email marketing campaign, make sure your email subject line is pretty actionable, generally users open their email based on the subject line. If your subject line is not attractive or actionable then chances are there that your audience may not open your email. Now if your subject line is attractive and actionable, and users have opened your email then you have to make sure that your email body content is completely relevant to the subject line. If it doesn’t match then users may leave your email.

Ashish Goswami, Digital Marketing Manager at 21Twelve Interactive

9 Write well, optimize frequency, address with a CTA

With the absence of physical interactions during the pandemic, more and more companies are looking towards email marketing as a way to stay connected with their consumers, making the inbox a very competitive space to win attention. As a result, crafting effective emails has become very important in getting higher click-through rates. 

Here are actionable pieces of advice to consider:

• Ensure the email is well written. Starting with the subject line and preview text, make sure the message is effective by leveraging A/B testing and design principles to improve on-page conversions. 
• Find the optimal time and frequency to send emails. Use logic based email and SMS campaigns to nurture and convert high-value users.
• Personalize the message. Address the recipient and include content with a call to action that is relevant for the reader. 

 

10 Engage your Audience Regularly and Timely

One of the best business tactics in nurturing and converting leads into sales through email marketing is engaging them regularly and timely. It includes writing relevant content on a daily basis, sending industry information and other relevant data, and promoting your products and services on a set of intervals and according to the current events. You also have to make sure that you maintain your prospect’s permission to do so. Educate them with engaging, relevant, and key ideas and thoughts like the latest industry trends and activities. And remember not to miss the signs of progress you make through the buying cycle.

Tal Shelef, Realtor and Co-Founder of CondoWizard, a winner of the prestigious Blue Diamond Award  for sales excellence.

11 Use automation tools

We’re on a mission to reimagine children’s health and end our collective addiction to sugar by creating a sugar-free, junk-free multivitamin delivered on a pediatrician approved schedule. There are many email marketing platforms, but Klaviyo is our choice in 2021. It is simply the best solution for our eCommerce business. The features we find most valuable are audience segmentation tools,  pre-built automation and campaigns, a/b testing. I recommend Klaviyo to other business owners because it works well for companies of all sizes and is comparatively inexpensive. While Mailchimp is one of the more popular email marketing platforms out there, we still prefer Klaviyo because it is optimized for upselling and generating more revenue.    

12 Fit it with the new areas of interest

We are a 100% female run e-commerce company in the health and wellness space and have several years of experience with email marketing. Email marketing has been a very effective tool for our company and we have essentially become self-taught experts on the subject. Our biggest tip to increasing email open rates and engagement is to ensure that your email marketing adds value to your readership rather than simply promoting your products or services. Currently, most users have developed interests in new things as a result of the pandemic. This might include working out at home, gardening, or health and wellness. If your brand does not already fit neatly into one of these categories, then try to develop content that links your product to one of these areas of significant interest. If your email marketing campaign provides real added value to your customers during this strange time, then the recipients of your email marketing will be much more likely to open your emails and engage with your content, and the benefits to your business will follow. 

13 Email regularly

Emails will always be one of the most important KPIs, but without a solid email marketing campaign, they’re worthless. Email results have slowly trended down, but this is only because of the mass amounts of emails consumers receive. The key is to take the A/B test as much as possible to make sure you’re always improving, but more importantly, remain consistent. If your campaigns are sporadic, consumers can forget they subscribed and may end up unsubscribing. If you’re going to do a weekly newsletter, make sure it goes out every week at the same time.

Andrew Maff, Founder of BlueTuskr, a full-service marketing company for e-commerce sellers.

14 Provide value at the right time with the right offer

We have been in business about 4 years and an email list of about 60,000 which includes retail and business customers/prospects. We send emails to this list twice per week. It is a highly engaged list with most of these subscribing to weekly content from us about kettlebell movements, workouts and exercises. We send email at this frequency because the main way people get in our pipeline is by them signing up for free kettlebell workouts, they expect to get a new workout in their inbox each week and this is a great way to provide value and stay in prospects minds each week as having great equipment and helpful content. We run sales 3-4 times a year that go out to the entire email list. When we run sales they typically generate low six figure revenue numbers over a 30 day period. 

Jay Perkins, co-founder of Kettlebells

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