13 Effective Email Marketing Tips You
Need To Know To Make Your Email
Campaigns Successful

Have you ever sent out a campaign only to record dismal results? That’s probably an experience every green-behind-the-ear email marketer has had. And almost every time, that can be attributed to one thing – or lack of it. Understanding your audience.

Every successful campaign has its roots in understanding your target audience. Here’s why understanding your audience is important:

Helps You Know What Influences Your Customers

Knowing what influences your customers’ buying decisions is critical to your email marketing. Things like their goals, pain points, and ambitions are important to tap into as they will help you connect on an emotional level.

Informs Your Content Strategy

What kind of content should you create? No, this is not a matter of guesswork. Your email content strategy is largely influenced by your audience. After all, the content you create shouldn’t be about your product or services. It should be more about your audience and their needs. Knowing your audience will help you create personalized content that drives results.

Helps You Strategically Grow Your Email List

Understanding who your target audience is helps you create a strategic plan for growing your email list. For example, you can create a lookalike audience on Facebook that you’ll promote your lead magnet to. Speaking of email lists, that brings us to the second of our email marketing tips. The importance of audience research and buyer personas

One of the most important pillars of your email marketing campaigns is your email list. However, a critical mistake many marketers make is to add just anyone to their email list. Some even dig a grave for themselves by buying or renting an email list.

Building your very own list from scratch is one of the most important email marketing tips I could give you today. That’s because your own list is made up of subscribers who:

• Have a relationship with you
• Trust you
• Engage with your emails
• Are interested in your product/services

Read More About Email List Building here

Create a Valuable Bribe

Gone are the days when people were so excited to receive an email they signed up for every list. Today’s inboxes are overflowing and people now carefully choose who they want to receive emails from.

This is why you need to create a valuable resource your ideal customer will be willing to trade their email address for.

Promote Your Lead Magnet Aggressively

Once you’ve created your offer, also known as a lead magnet, you’ll have to promote it to death. Focus your time and resources on platforms your ideal customer frequents.

However, growing an email list is only a small part of list building. You also need to maintain a healthy email list. This includes:

• Regularly cleaning your email list
• Re-engaging inactive subscribers

It takes a lot of work to ensure that your email database is properly functioning. That’s why doing it manually is just next to impossible. Enter email automation.

Pulling off an effective email marketing campaign involves aligning a lot of moving parts together – with precision.

That’s exactly why you need a good email automation software, also called an ESP. For the sake of the budding marketers, email automation software allows you to automatically send emails to your subscribers. These emails are triggered by different pre-set conditions such as time or a particular action (or lack thereof) performed by a subscriber. Advantages of automating your email marketing include:

• Efficiency
• Advanced segmentation capabilities
• Increased conversions

As great as email automation sounds, it certainly doesn’t mean you don’t have an input in the process. To ensure your automated emails achieve the desired results you must:

• Design effective workflows that translate into a smooth customer journey
• Gather as much data about your prospects/customers as possible

Apart from the 2 points above, successful email automation is also a result of using the best automation software for your business. While the ultimate goal may be the same (automating your email marketing), different ESPs offer different functionality, tools, and features. For example, some are built for large enterprises and have features (and pricing) that are beyond that of a simple family-run business while others cater to small businesses.

So how do you ensure the ESP you choose is perfect for your type of business? Here are a few pointers:

• Features :- Write down everything you seek to achieve with your email marketing and use that to guide the features to look for in an ESP.
• Ease of use :- Look for an ESP that is easy to use or one that doesn’t require a long learning curve. This reduces the chances of errors.
• Integrations :- Integration with your other marketing tools (like a CRM) is necessary if you’re to run effective campaigns.
• Security and compliance :- To avoid malicious attacks, fraudulent use, and legal penalties, ensure that your ESP of choice has robust security protocols and adheres to regulations that govern bulk email sending.

With your email automation software in place and ready to go, we can look at some practical email marketing tips that will help you run winning campaigns.

If you have an ecommerce store, read our guide on top 6 ecommerce email automations for boosting revenue.

A popular saying in email marketing circles is that the money’s in the list. While that’s fair and fine, it’s a half-truth.

Why?

Because broadcast messages don’t generate revenue as much as messages sent to segments. The money’s in the segments, not the list. That’s why you need:

• An ESP with excellent segmentation capabilities
• A good segmentation strategy

Research shows that segmented campaigns drive 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns. What makes email segmentation so powerful?

Allows You to Get Personal

The biggest super-power segmentation affords you is personalization. Email Personalization simply means the ability to treat each subscriber as an individual by sending content that’s timely and relevant.

Helps You Optimize Resources

Email list segmentation allows you to focus your resources, like time and budget, in a way that allows you to have maximum returns. By optimizing your resources, your other important business metrics like cost per lead, for example, enjoy a drastic improvement.

So how do you get the best results from segmenting your email list?

Well, it all depends on a number of factors like your business model, product, and subscriber base. However, few segmentation strategies to consider include:

• Demographics
• New subscribers
• Lead magnet downloaded
• Preferences
• Psychographics
• Inactive subscribers

Of all the email marketing tips you’ll ever come across, list segmentation is probably the closest you’ll come to the silver bullet of email marketing.

A big mistake many marketers make is to think email marketing is all about selling a product or service. While that is the desired end goal, that’s not the sum of email marketing.

The biggest use of email marketing is building relationships with your customers.

Why is relationship building important to your business goals? Let’s quickly look at some of the results of building strong customer relationships:

• Trust :- Customers are more likely to trust brands that take time to communicate with them regularly – without necessarily selling.
• Authority :- The more you give your customers valuable content, the more they view you as an authority in your field. As a result, when you recommend products, they’ll easily lap them up.
• Brand Loyalty :- Building good relationships with your customers is a great way to foster brand loyalty. And the more loyal your customers are to you, the more they’ll be willing to spend on your products/services.

Research shows that segmented campaigns drive 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns. What makes segmentation so powerful?

At the end of the day, your revenue growth is related to how well you build relationships with your customers.

And the best way to build those relationships?

You guessed it. Email.

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Whatever the business goal you want to achieve with email, it’s impossible to succeed if your subscribers don’t engage with your emails. That’s why you should be proactive about encouraging your subscribers to engage with your emails. Here are a few ways to do just that:

Personalize Subject Lines

Studies show that personalized subject lines can increase opens by 50% and click-to-open rates by a whopping 58%. Including the recipient name and a relevant offer in the subject line can definitely do wonders for your engagement rates. Read more about email subject lines that get opened easily.

Allow Subscribers to Set their Own Preferences

While this may look counter-intuitive, allowing your subscribers to choose what kind of content they want and how often they want to receive it is actually a great way of increasing engagement rates. It also reduces spam reports and unsubscribes.

Offer Valuable Content

Time is a precious commodity your subscribers don’t have. As such, sending them irrelevant content that doesn’t offer any value will result in them not engaging with your emails. Take time to understand your audience so as to be able to create the kind of content and offers they’ll look forward to receiving in their inbox.

So how do you come up with content ideas that will keep your subscribers opening your emails?

• Spy on your competitors :- Have a competitor that seems to be rocking their email marketing? Subscribe to their list and study what kind of content they’re creating.
• Speak to your audience :- Get feedback from your subscribers on the type of content they want to receive from you. Use a survey or use social media to get the feedback you need.
• Scour forums :- Another great place to get content ideas is forums. Curate common questions your ideal customers are asking and answer them in your emails or blog posts.

The time and resources you invest in creating valuable content are definitely an investment that will pay for itself. After all, high engagement rates will result in higher conversions and sales.

One mistake many email marketers make is to assume that email delivery and email deliverability are automatic. Sadly, that’s not how it works. You need to proactively ensure that your emails reach their destinations. Let’s quickly look at what these 2 terms mean and how you can improve your rates, shall we?

Email Delivery

Email delivery refers to whether a recipient’s email server accepted your email or not. This is way before it reaches the inbox (or spam folder). In most instances, this is due to factors such as:

• Your IP address is blocked :- There are several tools that can help you check if your IP is blocked. If it is, contact your ESP and alert them as soon as you can.
• The recipient’s email address is out of use :- The only solution would be to remove the email address from your database.

Getting your emails delivered is just the first hurdle in getting eyeballs on your emails. The next hurdle to overcome is deliverability.

Email Deliverability

Also called inbox placement, this has to do with whether an email was placed in the recipient’s inbox or went to the spam folder. Deliverability issues are mainly caused by permission and sending practices are not up to standard. Two facets of deliverability you need to work on are:

• Identification :- Your recipient’s mail server needs to prove that you are who you claim to be before allowing your email through. Protocols used here include Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC).
• Sender reputation :- Sender reputation is a score that shows how trustworthy your IP is. The best ways to improve this score are by encouraging engagement and reducing spam reports.

If your emails can’t reach your recipient’s inbox, it goes without saying that your email marketing will be negatively affected. So, paying attention to delivery and deliverability should definitely be one of the email marketing tips you need for a successful campaign.

Contrary to popular belief, not every email should serve the purpose of selling. Failure to realize this has led many a marketer to lose customers due to the dreaded unsubscribe plague.

Understanding the different email types available in your arsenal and when to send them is an important aspect of running successful email campaigns.

So what email types should you be sending to your list? And more importantly, when should you be sending them?

Relational Emails

These are emails that serve the purpose of building stronger relationships with your customers. A typical example would be a welcome series. While the initial welcome email should be sent

immediately after a subscriber signs up, subsequent emails, like all other relational email types, are sent at predetermined time intervals.

Transactional Emails

Transactional emails are emails sent to facilitate an agreed-upon transaction between you and your customer/subscriber. Because they contain important information related to a transaction, these too should be sent immediately after the transaction.

Promotional Emails

By far the most loved email type (by marketers at least), promotional emails as the name suggests usually contain promotional offers. How often you send out promotional emails is mainly dependent on your product. However, send out promotions as often as you can, only make sure to vary the way you promote your products/services. For example, you could send a promotional email in the form of:

• A case study
• Testimonial
• Anniversary celebration

No matter how you do it, creativity is the key to grabbing your audience’s attention and getting them to consume your promotional content.

The 9th slot on our list of best marketing tips is another one that may seem counterintuitive at first – making it easy to unsubscribe.

Why is it important to allow subscribers to unsubscribe?

• It reduces spam complaints
• It increases engagement
• Helps with compliance – particularly regulations like CAN-SPAM and GDPR

Whether you like it or not, some subscribers may want to opt-out of your list. Don’t make it difficult for them to do so. It will do you more good than harm.

Email opens on mobile devices are quickly overtaking desktop opens. As such, you can’t ignore your subscribers who prefer mobile devices. Doing so will result in a reduction in engagement and conversion rates plummeting. Optimizing your emails is definitely one of the best email marketing tips that will help you succeed with your email marketing. So how can you go about it?

• Play it safe with images
• Use mobile-responsive templates
• Break up text into easy-to-read chunks
• Favor button CTAs over text-based CTAs

If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile forget about running winning campaigns. With people preferring to consume their emails on the go, neglecting your mobile strategy will be tantamount to self-sabotage.

A little known email marketing tip you need to know is that email design plays a major role in conversions. The reason for that is simple – design is a critical component of user experience (UX).

The more people enjoy consuming your emails, the more they’ll interact with them. Need design ideas that will help drive your conversion rates up?

• Keep your designs simple
• Favor vertical and hierarchical layouts
• Put important information above the fold
• Make sure your CTA is prominent

Design plays an important role in UX and conversions. And as such, it definitely affects your bottom line. So do pay close attention to the design of all your emails.

Learn How to design emails that look pretty

No matter how great your email may seem to be, run a couple of tests to ensure you send the perfect email. Testing different elements of your email to find out which works best is one of the top email marketing tips you won’t regret applying. This is because doing so helps you craft high converting emails. Some important elements of your emails you should consider A/B testing include:

• Subject lines
• Images
• CTAs
• Color schemes
• Templates

Always A/B test as many elements of your emails as possible to figure out which version will convert better. Failure to do so could result in you running a campaign with a weak email. And that will result in you leaving money on the table.

You’ve run your campaign.

You’ve banked your revenue.

That’s automatically the end of your campaign right?

Not at all.

The end of one campaign, like the end of a chapter in a book, is simply the setting for the next chapter. What that means is that all your campaigns are connected – just like every chapter in a book is connected.

The success of your next campaign is dependent on your monitoring and measuring the processes and results of your previous campaign. Keep tabs on all the important metrics of each campaign and use that data to improve your future campaigns