Best practices and tips to optimize your E-mail marketing strategy

What is E-mail marketing?

 Email marketing is one of the prominent channels in digital marketing which is being used to communicate with your customers (both existing and potential) through electronic mail.

 Many people think that E-mail marketing is dead and is considered as Spam these days. But it is actually not the case…. Let’s look at some data points (based on secondary research).

• 94% of Internet users use email, while only 61% use social media. Almost 55% people do have this habit of checking their e-mails in the morning.
• There are close to 4 billion unique users having at least one e-mail account and is likely to reach 5 billion in the next 3 years.
• Average e-mails sent and received in a single day are around 2.7 billion.
• Over 50% of e-mails are getting opened on mobile devices mainly due to easy accessibility of Smartphones and other digital devices.

Email marketing is never going to die and will stay here for many years. It’s one of the best tools for marketers due to following reasons:

1) Economical and affordable: Email marketing allows brands to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of nearly nothing per message.

2) High level of personalization: Unlike other channels you can personalize your e-mail for each and every customer.

3) Accessible and measurable: With e-mail marketing you can reach out to your customers any time due to easy accessibility to smartphones. Also it’s easy to track and measure the impact of your communication as lot of E-mail marketing platforms provide you with parameters like Open rate, CTR, conversions and Unsubscribes.

Though e-mail marketing is going to stay for a long time however it’s always good to use it wisely to get better results. To me there are 4 important C’s which every marketer should focus on to get good results.

Content - Be very precise with your message and keep it in line with the basic framework of e-mail marketing known as SBCS (Subject, body, Call to action and Sign off). Keep the right balance between the text and image (too much text will take away the attention of your customers and too many images will make your e-mail heavy which will result in slow processing on the browser)

Context - Focus on individual marketing as opposed to mass marketing. Work on segmentation and send relevant communication to relevant customer base. Personalization increases your e-mails from getting opened by almost 20%. Use marketing automation tools to create customer journeys providing valuable content along the way.

Consent – Lot of time brands do send the communication through e-mail to the list of potential customers which they have acquired from some external source, this is not considered to be good practice as it can hamper the reputation of your domain and can impact the deliverability of e-mail’s which you send through your e-mail engine.

Connect - Your call to action is one of the most important pieces of content in your email. Beyond persuading your subscribers to open your email, your next goal is to get your customers to click on your content.

In this dynamic environment you have to adapt to new technologies and trends to be at the top. Some of the key trends to watch for and follow in E-mail Marketing are listed below:-

1.      Predictive Marketing

Identify the customers from your database who are more probable of opening your e-mails and taking up the offers you are sending to them. With the help of these predictive analytics tool you can assign an engagement score to your customers which can help you in identifying the most relevant data set for your campaigns.

2.      Mobile Responsive

With easy access to smartphones and other digital devices by which you can access your e-mails on the go it becomes very much essential for the marketers to develop their mailers keeping in mind mobile responsiveness. Your customers will not be interested in your communication if it is not designed as per their mobile device.

3.      Spam Scoring

After putting in so much effort in creating and sending the e-mail communication to your customer you would surely not want your e-mails to go into their spam folder and missing an opportunity to connect with them. These days all the major E-mail marketing platforms provide you with a feature of calculating the spam score letting you know the probability of your mailer going into spam.

4.      Send time optimization

With so many e-mails hitting your customer’s mailbox (both solicited and unsolicited) every day you would surely don’t want to be missed out. Send time optimization enables you to analyze the customer behavior which he has exhibited in the past and basis that it will assign a preferred slot for each customer to send the communication.

5.      Mapping customer journey

Targeting customers based on the customer life-cycle is perhaps one of the best ways to reach out to them. Identify the touch points and events to reach out to your customers with relevant messaging; these could be welcome communication, milestone celebrations, and personal events like birthdays or anniversaries. 

“Email marketing strategies definitely have the potential to be a strong revenue generator for any brand provided you are using them effectively and wisely.”