6 Tips You Can Easily Apply to Your Email Marketing Efforts

Email marketing is a hugely useful effort when you’re trying to accomplish any of various business initiatives, and there are plenty of ways that you can make it even more useful. Let’s run through some of our favorite email marketing tips that aren’t challenging at all to implement if you’re committed to enhancing your efforts through this medium.

Split Up Your Lists

You’ve likely been collecting email contacts (and the permission to email them) for some time. Have you taken the time to subdivide this list into different groups, based on various factors?

This is a process known as market segmentation, and is a very valuable endeavor to undergo.

Think about it: would you engage with one of your prospect’s employees the same way you’d engage with the CEO of the company? Would you bring identical sales pitches to try to sell your managed services to a healthcare group as you would a manufacturing company? What about someone you were just beginning communications with, as compared to a loyal, repeat customer?

Hopefully not—so why would you treat your email marketing any differently?

Creating varied lists to send different emails to allows you to better shape the message you’re sending. Unfortunately, an email urging someone to make a purchase is ultimately going to be wasted if it is sent to someone without the authority to make that purchase, or to someone who wouldn’t benefit from such a purchase. Dividing up your lists helps you more directly communicate with your recipients, allowing you to focus your messaging more specifically to their segment’s shared concerns. Not only does this help keep your messages from being deleted unread or unsubscribed to, personalizing your emails can increase open rates and overall return on investment

Be Mindful of Mobile Devices

How do you most frequently check your business email? If you’re like most people, you probably use a mobile device most often. In light of this, it pays to ensure that your emails are optimized for these devices—and that your website is as well, so slow loading times don’t discourage visitors from clicking through the links your emails provide.

The foundational idea of mobile optimization is to make your content as easy to access and read as possible, so your marketing materials (emails included) need to reflect this kind of optimization.

Be Strategic While Writing Your Emails

There’s a lot that you can do while actually composing your emails to make them more effective for your marketing. Keeping them short and sweet is a good start, not focusing on the features that your services offer in favor of promoting the benefits. Adding some visually appealing elements, like templates, images, and even formatting can all help to get your message across more effectively as well.

Your emails can also be written in such a way that helps coax your recipients further through the marketing funnel, utilizing social proof to show them that your claims have merit and giving them clear calls-to-action to guide them to their next steps.

How do you do that?

Use Automation to Your Advantage!

Today’s marketing solutions and email platforms can work together to make keeping in touch with your prospects and clients very much a “set it up and let it go” effort. Automating what you can in your marketing makes it far easier to maintain the level of communication that proper marketing requires. Which sounds more sustainable to you: manually responding to each and every inquiry you get, or letting the system you have in place do it for you as you take care of your other responsibilities? By allowing an automated platform to ensure your entire campaign is sent out, your marketing efforts are much more likely to be consistent.

Personalize Your Messages

This is where the benefits of marketing segmentation really come into play. Take the determinations that you made while segmenting your lists and implement them into your different messages, crafting them to more directly target the recipient of that particular email. After all, a company’s CEO and a member of that same company’s sales team have different levels of authority, different responsibilities, and different priorities. Therefore, different messaging will resonate better with one group over the other, as we mentioned above.

You want your emails to speak more directly to the reader, seeming less like an impersonal form email and more like an individually crafted message. Throw in a few personal details to encourage more of a connection, and your marketing emails can become far more effective.

Experiment and Optimize

We also recommend that you don’t hesitate to come up with multiple versions of your emails (or any marketing effort, for that matter) and compare how they perform when compared to one another. This is a process known as A/B testing, and has long been used to pick the best available option.

You can also utilize your analytics to gather more optimization data, seeing when the most effective time to send your emails is and what approach seems most effective. Over time, this kind of data can be used to make better and better decisions.