The New Year is the perfect time to reflect on your company’s marketing programs and make plans for a better year to come. After the busy holidays, it’s good to take some time to implement those tactics you had always planned on.
Whether it is starting a new email program or improving upon the email system that you already have in place, there is always room for improvement. We’ve put together a list of tips to help you win at email this year.
- Adopt Automation: It is worth the time and effort to build out regular email templates that will help carry your brand forward throughout the year. It doesn’t take long and once you have your email templates in place, you can automate your emails to go out throughout the year whenever you press send. If you aren’t already automating your emails, it is worth setting up an automated program to help support your efforts throughout the year.
- Set up Triggered Emails: Whether it is a welcome email, a birthday email or an abandoned cart email, triggered emails are a great way to increase engagement with customers. A welcome email helps build customer expectation and engages them in the moment they are most connected with your brand: email signup. An abandoned cart email reminds subscribers to follow through on a purchase and a birthday email recognizes customers for their loyalty with a special wish or offer. All of these moments are natural times to communicate with customers, and increase the relevancy of the communication. According to Epsilon, triggered emails have a 152 percent higher click-through rate than traditional emails.
- Add Social Media Buttons to Your Emails: If you have a consumer’s email address, then you have the opportunity to extend that relationship to social media. If you aren’t already doing so, let 2018 be the year that you add social media buttons to your email templates. It isn’t hard to implement and will make it easier for customers to engage with you on social media. This will help you in two ways. First, if the consumer uses social media more than email, then you will be able to get their attention wherever they are. Secondly, if a consumer talks about you in social media, their friends are listening. Use this as an opportunity to expand the conversation to new prospects.
- Start Testing Subject Lines: Subject lines are a consumer’s first point of interaction with your brand in the inbox. A subject line that stands out is more likely to get opened. In order to compete with the many brands trying to get your customer’s attention in the inbox, it pays to test subject lines with a test group and send the winner to the rest of your list. If you aren’t already testing subject lines, let 2018 be the year of A/B testing.
- Test Image Filters: In the era of Instagram, image is everything. If you’ve just been slapping a photo into your emails and pressing send, 2018 might be the year to really consider your visual message. Test framing, layout and filters to help deliver visually rich messaging to your customers.
- Build Your Audience: Email is the most effective digital marketing channel and there is no better way to increase its effectiveness, than to build your list. There are any number of ways to increase your list such as making email signups easier on your website, running social media campaigns, collecting emails in person and within apps and running partner campaigns. No matter what your strategy, commit to increasing your list in the New Year.
- Segment Your Mailings: Sending a mass email to your entire list is not the most effective way to get your message across. Use your data to segment your marketing emails so that messages are more targeted. Targeted messages are more relevant, and more relevant marketing leads to higher ROI.
- Clean Your List: If your email list is full of expired email addresses or email addresses of people that have unsubscribed from your newsletter, then chances are you are going to wind up in the spam folder. Ensure that your list is clean and that you are only sending messages to real people that actually want to receive marketing from you. If you don’t, you’ll miss out on the opportunities to connect with people that are looking forward to hearing from you.
