7 best email marketing strategies to increase conversions

Email marketing is at the forefront of modern marketing and it’s one of the most profitable and easy-to-start forms of marketing for businesses. It has an incredible?ROI; for every $1 that is spent on email marketing, the ROI can be as high as $42. Although email marketing has a great ROI on average, you must use the best email marketing strategies to maximize your conversions. In this post, we’ll explore the 7 best email marketing strategies to increase your conversions. Read through the strategies and implement a few of them to see how much your conversion rates can increase.

The best marketing strategies for email to increase conversions:

1. Personalize
2. A killer subject line
3. Compelling Call to Action
4. Urgency
5. A/B Testing
6. The correct length
7. Using visuals the right way

1. Personalization:

Personalization is one of the most crucial components in increasing conversions. In fact,?74%?of marketers state that the personalization of emails increases customer engagement rates and it increases several other KPIs. The modern consumer gets hundreds of promotional emails per day. In order for your email campaign to stand out, it must have a personalized subject line and email body.

Companies can do this through a variety of means. When a user signs up for your email list, they share generic data like their name, email address and any other relevant information. Your team can utilize this data to craft very personalized emails that get opened and interacted with. Many email software tools and programs allow you to send automated and personalized messages to your customer.

For example, companies have leveraged specific holidays and dates to personalize emails to their customers. One of the highest ROI dates that companies exploit are birthdays. Sending an email to your customer on their birthday with a promotion is a great strategy to increase sales and build a relationship with your customer. Experian found that birthday emails generate?342%?more revenue than normal promotional emails.

Another way is to go further into the toolbox of virtual selling and include a personalized?sales engagement video?in the email. By using a short, personal video message, you add a friendly face to your message and lift your email to become interactive. This establishes trust and increases the reply rate of your emails.

2. Subject line:

The subject line is extremely crucial to increase conversions because it’s closely tied to open rates. In fact,?64%?of all email recipients make a decision to open emails solely based on the subject line of the email. Regardless of how great your email content and offer is, your customers will not see it if you have a poor subject line for your email. If you can’t write subject lines, you can?hire a writer?who can craft compelling subject lines for you.

There are several strategies that marketers use to improve their subject lines. Some of the best strategies include:

• Conciseness:?A vast majority of emails are opened on mobile devices. This means that customers will only see your subject line for a few seconds before making a decision. Keeping a subject line short and sweet is a great strategy to let your customer know what the email is about before they delete it.
• Personalization:?Personalizing the subject line can increase conversions dramatically. Companies often use the customer’s first name as a way to grab attention and open an email. A sample personalized subject line is “Hey Amber, get 20% off your next order with us”.
• Scarcity:?Using fear of missing out (FOMO) and scarcity language in the subject line is a good strategy to increase conversions. Examples of this include “offer ends today” and “2 hours left”. These subject lines indicate that the customer will lose out on an important discount and entices them to open the email.

3. A compelling call to action:

Having a compelling call to action is vital to increase conversions. After you’ve done all the hard work of having a strong subject line and email body, the customer finally gets to see your call to action. Depending on how well crafted the call to action is, the conversion rate for your email may vary.

There are several ways you can optimize your call to action. First, you can use action-oriented text in your call to action. This lets the customer know exactly what they need to do to get your offer. Examples of this include “demo here”, “order now” and “reserve your seat”.

In addition to using action-oriented text, you can make the call to action large and easily clickable. The call to action is just a button or a link to your offer. This can be distracted by images or other text you may use in your email. Ensuring the CTA is easily seen and clickable will greatly increase conversion rates.

4. Urgency:

Urgency is one of the oldest marketing tactics to increase conversions and it’s a popular strategy in email marketing as well. Urgency creates an impulse in your customers and entices them to take action on what you are offering. There are different types of urgency tactics you can use in your email. They include:

• Loss aversion:?Loss aversion is very common in urgency emails. Companies will email their subscribers and use subject lines that indicate that the customer will lose something if they don’t take action. This can trigger a response and increase conversion rates.
• Time-sensitive keywords:?Using time-sensitive keywords is a great way to incorporate urgency in your emails. Using keywords like “hurry”, “ending soon” and “while supplies last” show customers that a product or offer is limited. This will help entice them to take advantage of the offer while it lasts.

5. A/B testing:

A/B testing is a great practice to improve conversion rates. All of the recommendations for conversion rate optimizations are just recommendations. They might work on average in your industry, but there’s no guarantee for results. This is why A/B testing is so important to improve conversion rates. If you run an?online business, there are a variety of tools that can help you start experimenting with A/B testing.

A/B testing is sending one variation of an email to some of your email subscribers and sending another variation to another group of your email subscribers. This testing enables you to see how different email subjects, email bodies, lengths, call to action and other factors impact actual conversion rates.

By doing A/B testing multiple times, you will start seeing which practices actually help convert your email subscribers. You can start implementing those changes and improving your conversion rates immediately. You can basically test any variable in your email and see which variation of your variable works on your audience.

6. Length of email:

The length of an email can impact conversion rates dramatically. Unless your company has a newsletter or a longer format email, your emails should generally be concise.?Campaign Monitor?did a study and found that the ideal length of an email is anywhere from 50 to 125 words. This is enough text to address a pain point that the customer has and introduce your offer.

Emails that are too short will not provide any context and may appear spammy. Emails that are too long will decrease conversion rates because the customer will likely bounce from the email due to length. Having a concise and moderate email length ensures your offer is the optimal length to convert your customer.

7. Visuals:

Visuals help add imagery into your emails and can increase your conversion rates. Many studies have shown that visual content marketing works in emails. In fact, emails that include images have?650%?more engagement than text only emails.

Some ways you can use visuals in your email marketing include:

• Adding images to your CTA:?Image based CTAs tend to have a higher conversion rate than normal text based CTAs. You can experiment with adding certain images to your CTA and see the impact that has on your conversion rates.
• Using infographics:?Infographics are very appealing and can be a nice touch to add in your emails. You can use infographics to display a concept to your subscribers and to grab their attention as soon as they open the email.

These are just a few of the ways that you can use email marketing to improve conversions.?

Originally published on the CrankWheel blog.