Email marketing is making its presence felt. It is constantly adjusting, adapting, and advancing in unison with the everchanging business landscape, and is governing the online marketing industry more than ever.
According to an estimate by Marketo, checking one’s email is the number one activity on the internet. As many as 94% of internet users get online just to check their emails. Undoubtedly, emails have emerged to become an important part of our culture and this is why they provide a steady return on investment, of around $39.40 on each email.
About 247 billion emails were sent per day in 2010 and this number is expected to reach 307 billion by 2020.
These figures should be more than enough motivation for you to start employing email marketing strategy in 2020. So what should you prepare for and what’s in the pipeline in the coming year? Let’s have a look.
Have a clean contact list
When you are about to kick start your email marketing campaign, one obvious question that will pop up in your mind is – do I have a list of contacts to send the emails? This makes it imperative to have a clean contact list.
While you might feel tempted to buy databases from third parties or email people randomly after having gathered their email addresses from all over the place, the golden rule is to ensure that you do not spam.
Undoubtedly, it makes no sense to shoot a promotional email to a German when you are an ecommerce store based in Australia that only offers national shipping and deliveries.
What’s more, when you send targeted emails only to the target audiences, it also boosts your open rates and click rates tremendously, thus helping you in achieving your goals.
To get high-quality contacts and to have a clean contact list, you must entice your users to subscribe to your newsletters. Mailpro can help you here. Mailpro helps you create an online form where your customers can subscribe to your newsletters easily.
Segmentation at its best
With smart customers arises the need for smart email marketing strategies that can be personalized as per the preferences and behaviors of said customers. For this reason, it is highly recommended to segregate your customers dynamically based on real-time data.
This will enable you to update the customer contact list based on the previous interaction of the customers with your website, and target them accordingly.
Mailpro is an amazing tool that helps you segregate your emails based on the address file. You can create your address file internally, segregate it, and keep everything well-organized.
Mobile-friendly and easily-accessible emails
The least you would ever expect is to send emails that are not mobile-friendly and not accessible to your users. The result? All your efforts go down the drain, and you never get to enjoy the expected traction from your users.
The need of the hour is to design your emails in such a way that they can be read by all your target audiences, irrespective of the screen size they view the emails on. Additionally, as an added step, you could also design your emails so that they can be well-understood by those with special needs.
As 2020 is expected to be a year of big innovation in regards to powerful email coding techniques, make the most out of it by designing readily-accessible mails. Use alt-text for every image that you use in your email so that even your visually impaired subscribers can understand what the email is about through screen readers.
You can design your responsive newsletters and emails with Mailpro which provides you with quick access to responsive email templates. Additionally, you can also craft your own newsletter with the help of a newsletter builder.
Personalize each message
Believe it or not, a personalized message such as the one which greets the user like Hi John, is expected to enjoy a far better return on investment when compared to a random generalized email along the lines of – Hi!, or Dear Subscriber!
It is the age of personalization, and more and more customers want brands to treat them with a more human touch. They hope that brands should care for them, and there could be no better way to illustrate your love towards your followers than sending personalized emails.
In addition to greeting them by their first name, you could also follow up with them on their recent purchase, ask for their feedback, ask them about what they thought of your checkout process, wish them a happy birthday and anniversary, and offer them discounts on special occasions.
If personalizing an email sounds like a tough task for you, Mailpro will come to your rescue. The tool helps you create personalized emails by allowing you to input data into your message dynamically.
Automatize your newsletters
Email automation has been with us for quite some time now and has only gotten better over the years. As cloud services have worked their way deeper into the contemporary business landscape, it has become easier for the companies to access data and use it to fuel their marketing strategies.
Automation not only helps you send and track the emails at the single click of a button, it also helps you in analyzing and studying the results and establishing performance benchmarks for a more targeted approach.
You can also empower your email marketing strategy through the right use of machine learning and deep learning techniques. To further enhance the workflows, you can automate the customer lifecycle stages.
Mailpro helps you create a series of automatic emails. The tool allows you to send a welcome email as soon as someone subscribes to your newsletters, or an automatic follow up email when someone abandons there shopping cart and so on.
Clear call-to-action in your campaigns
Let’s not forget that your email marketing campaign is useless if it ultimately doesn’t contain proper call-to-action.
How will you persuade your customers to check out your store? How will you convince them to use their offer code, or to make the most out of your season sale?
This is when a properly placed and crafted call-to-action can help you out by redirecting your customers to the appropriate action and by motivating them to take the desired action.
Mailpro allows you to include a range of call-to-action buttons as per your requirements. You can choose from the classic link, the secure link, message link for Skype, SIP link, FTP link, and so on.
Quality over quantity
There is no denying the fact that email marketing is a powerful tool that could enhance the brand’s visibility online. However, it is equally true that you cannot keep on bombarding your customers with frequent emails in an attempt to make your campaign more effective.
Truth be told, sending emails too frequently could, in fact, backfire. Your users might unsubscribe to your emails if they feel that they are getting overwhelmed by your manner of communicating. What’s more, if you exceed the limit, they can also decide to mark your emails as spam which will hurt your reputation more than ever!
The best bet here is to start slow and see how your users respond to your emails. Analyze the trends, and use the statistics to define your next course of action.
Timing is important
Finding out the perfect time to send your emails is important. While we don’t have a perfect answer with us as to which time will provide the best engagement, we can definitely help you by providing some quick advice and insights.
We recommend you to send your emails on Tuesdays to get the most engagement. However, you can also dig in your data from previous campaigns and figure out what works best for you.
According to the basic rule of thumb, you should always send your emails during off times and not during busy hours. This is because if you send your emails on Mondays at around noon, the chance is high that it will not be noticed as your users might already be busy with something else. On the other hand, sending them during lunch hours and in the evening increases their probability of getting opened.
What’s more, send your emails at imperfect hours like 10:13 am instead of 10:00 am. This is because sending mails at the perfect, rounded out hours delays them and your recipient might not get them when intended.
Test it out!
It is important to mention here that the content of your newsletter plays a vital role in determining the status of your email – whether it is spam or not. This is where Mailpro helps you in conducting a quick anti-spam test where you can get a spam score, avoid spam words, avoid broken links and ensure that your email will not be considered spam.
It also helps you in conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing to help you make educated decisions.
The Takeaway
As email marketing campaigns are becoming more advanced than ever, it is the optimal time for you to employ the best strategies and practices to ensure the widespread success of your campaign. Simply follow the tips mentioned above and you will be able to make your 2020 email marketing strategy stand out.
What do you think of this all? Let us know in the comments below.