Email marketing has become one of the main channels brands use to connect with their audience. It’s an effective way of staying in touch, fostering loyalty, and generating repeat sales.

However, email marketing can be a competitive channel, and getting your content noticed can be challenging since most users receive several promotional emails a day. Let’s look at the email marketing strategies you can implement to reach your engagement and retention goals.

Why You Should Prioritize Email Marketing

Email marketing is a channel that pretty much every business uses. There are applications for retailers, B2B marketers, tax professionals, healthcare organizations, and others.

Developing an effective email marketing campaign is one of the best ways to invest your time and resources since email has the highest potential ROI of all digital marketing channels.

There is a huge potential for scalability since you can automate many aspects of your email marketing campaign, and promotional emails are a great way to meet your audience where they are, with the number of email users projected to exceed 4.5 billion by 2025. 

However, the average user receives 100 to 120 emails a day. Getting your content noticed can be a challenge. You need to implement tried and tested email marketing strategies to engage and retain your audience.

Focus on Growing Your Email List

The first step to developing a successful email marketing campaign is to get people to sign up for your emails. 

Target the Right Audience

It’s best to get started with some audience research to understand the needs and expectations of your customers. Buyer personas can give you a better idea of how your typical customer uses email and what kind of promotional content they want to see in their mailbox. 

Add a CTA to Your Website 

When implementing your website’s design, strong call-to-action remains one of the best ways to draw attention to your email list and get people to sign up, making it a pivotal element in the web development process.

Make your CTA noticeable. Place it on the side of your content or towards the top of your web pages. Use white space to draw the eye to this element, and add a message with an enticing action verb to encourage users to sign up.

Show the Value

Tell users why they should subscribe to your email list. A common practice is to display a pop-up window that promises a coupon code or exclusive offer if users share their email addresses. 

However, there are other ways of delivering value. For instance, you can use email to share educational content that will support a more complex buying decision.

You can also use gated content to get contact information, such as asking users to share their email and subscribe to your email list to access a white paper or eBook.

Get Users to Opt-In

Your email marketing efforts will result in a better experience for your audience if you get users to opt-in voluntarily. Make sure users understand they will receive promotional emails when they sign up and that they see the value in doing so.

If you have recipients in the European Union, you’ll have to go further and obtain explicit consent and keep it for your records to meet the GDPR compliance requirements. Provide recipients with a way of opting out to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. 

Keep Your Email List Up to Date

Not every email signup will result in a purchase. If a recipient loses interest in your campaign and doesn’t respond to re-engagement efforts, you should remove them from your list.

Cleaning your email list has several advantages:

  • You can keep adding new prospects to your list without finding yourself with a huge list that is difficult to manage.
  • Receiving unwanted emails is not a good experience, and it can result in a negative opinion of your brand that could impact future purchases.
  • Recipients who have lost interest won’t open your emails, and your sender score will drop.
  • Having several recipients who are no longer interested in your email campaign can skew the data you collect for your analytics program.

Boost the Open Rate of Your Emails

Now that you have a strong strategy in place to grow your email list, you can focus on optimizing your emails to get more recipients to open them.

Always Share Relevant Content

Your emails need to deliver content that feels engaging, valuable, and relevant to your audience. Think about segmenting your audience so you can send emails that reflect the needs of different buyer personas or that align with the needs of buyers during the multiple stages of the sales funnel.

If you notice a drop in your open rate or see that most recipients don’t click on the links you share, rethink the type of content you share.

Deliver a Positive Experience

Your emails should load fast and display as intended. All your links should work and if you use visual content, make sure the resolution is good. You can use responsive design to have your emails adapt to the screen size the recipient is using. It’s also a good idea to test your emails before sending them.

Write Eye-Catching Subject Lines

It’s common for internet users to get more than 100 emails a day. Craft eye-catching titles to make sure recipients will notice your emails and open them.

A good subject line should use strong keywords and tell users what they will find in the email. If you make a vague promise to entice users to click, they might find the content disappointing and develop a negative opinion of your brand.

Many marketers capitalize their subject lines or use emojis to stand out. These practices can come across as spammy. 

Instead, use brackets to draw attention to [important words]. This simple trick can increase open rates by around 30%.

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

Users open approximately 43% of emails on mobile devices, and this percentage keeps increasing. Keep in mind that a large portion of your audience will likely see your content on mobile and that you need to optimize your emails for this platform:

  • Mobile users might not see your entire subject line. It’s best to keep your subject lines short and sweet.
  • Many mobile users rely on email preview features to decide if they want to open an email. Make your first lines of text count!
  • Images can load slowly on email. Remove background and reduce image size when possible and consider using fewer images.
  • Keep your email copy short and to the point. Use short sentences, paragraph breaks, colors, headers, and other email design elements to make important information stand out on a small screen.
  • Instead of using hyperlinks for your CTAs, add a button that will be easier to tap on mobile.

How Often and When Should You Send Emails?

Your open rate might drop if you send emails too often or if you send them at the wrong time of day.

The frequency depends on your niche and the buying behaviors of your audience. You can use audience segmentation or even let email subscribers decide how often they want to receive promotional emails. 

If you work in a seasonal industry, you’ll want to increase the frequency of your emails before your busy season.

The best way to figure out when you should send emails is to use analytics to track your average open rate. Many marketers see better open rates when they send promotional emails early in the day during weekdays, but this trend can vary depending on your target audience.

You can uncover when your subscribers are likely to open emails by running an A/B test and sending the same email to two groups at different times or on different days to compare the open rate.

Top Strategies to Engage Your Audience

You should have a better idea of how to get recipients to notice your emails and open them after reading these tips. The next step is to keep your audience engaged with your email campaign.

Email marketing is a great way of doing branding and positioning. The placement of your company logo design in your email plays a very important role. Top placement is the most desirable location for your company logo, and if you keep it in the top left corner then it will be perfect according to the market experts. They say most subscribers scan the message from left to right, the logo is the first item they notice.

Write Engaging Copy

Getting a recipient to open an email is only the first step. Now that you have their attention, you need to give them a reason to take the next step in their buying journey. Engaging copy is crucial because it will keep recipients reading and make them want to take action. 

It’s best to keep your copy short and focus on a single topic for each email. Use action verbs and strong keywords throughout your copy and take advantage of white space to draw attention to your main takeaway. 

Avoid Cluttered Email Designs

When a recipient opens an email, they should be able to identify your main message immediately. If you don’t have a sentence or CTA button that stands out right away, you might need to rethink your design.

It’s best to stick to a streamlined design with a few recognizable branding elements so that your email template doesn’t become more noticeable than your message.

Keep Your Audience Engaged with an Email Series

Automated email series are a great way to keep prospects engaged. An email series can deliver bite-sized information that will progressively take a recipient closer to making a purchase decision.

You can keep your CTA for the last email in the series and focus on making recipients want to open the next email in the series by consistently delivering value through educational content. 

Connect Email Marketing with Your Other Channels

Give users different ways of engaging with your brand. You should add buttons to your social media profiles at the bottom of your emails, include links to your blog posts, and encourage people to send you an email if they have questions. 

Increase Engagement with Email Analytics

Using an email marketing platform will give you insights into your email open rates, your click-through rate, and other meaningful data points.

Analytics can help you learn about your audience and uncover strategies for boosting engagement. You can, for instance, run A/B tests to see which subject line or which CTA leads to the most engagement, or use data to figure out the best time to send your emails to get the most engagement possible.

Top Strategies to Retain Subscribers and Customers

Email is one of the best channels to stay in touch with your audience. With the right strategies in place, you can turn your email list into a powerful tool that drives repeat sales and increases the average lifetime value of a customer.

Use Automation

Automation can help you get more out of email marketing:

  • You can send automated thank you emails to stay in touch with customers after a purchase.
  • You can use automated emails to keep delivering value after a purchase with a short email series explaining how to get more out of the product the recipient just bought.
  • You can also rely on automated emails to suggest the next step, whether it’s connecting with your brand on social media or considering a new purchase.

Time Your Emails with Analytics

Analytics can give you a better idea of what the typical buying journey looks like. It can also help you figure out how quickly customers are likely to make a repeat purchase and what kind of product they will consider.

You can leverage analytics to pinpoint when you should start emailing customers after they make a purchase and what kind of products or offers you should promote. 

Keep Delivering Value

Keep delivering value to justify emailing customers regularly. You can share valuable content with emails that will help customers get more out of the products they purchased, but you can also share freebies via email, like eBooks, printables, and more. Another common practice is to deliver value via special offers, discounts, and coupon codes. You can use this type of content to foster loyalty and keep generating repeat purchases. To do so effectively, using a customer rewards platform with omnichannel personalization will be the right solution for your business.

Customers are not fond of receiving duplicated information, and it may get marked as spam material due to plagiarism. Therefore, unique content carries more value, so always check for plagiarism or duplication through plagiarism checker free before featuring the content in your emails.

Think about using a reward system to segment your email list and encourage customers to make repeat purchases to unlock new reward tiers.

Personalize Your Emails

Personalization can keep subscribers engaged with your email campaign because it will help you deliver content that feels uniquely valuable to each recipient. Consumers expect personalized experiences from brands, and 90% of them are willing to share personal data for a better experience that includes personalization. Also, brands are using AI to write personalized emails as this helps them to improve the open rates and generate more revenue.

You can send personalized emails with product recommendations based on a shopper’s purchase history, but you can also send reminders for the rewards the recipient can redeem, or even share an exclusive offer to celebrate a customer’s birthday.

Conclusion

Focusing on email marketing can pay off since it’s a channel with a high potential ROI. It’s one of the best ways of establishing and maintaining a connection with your audience, and with the right strategies in place, your email marketing efforts can help you boost sales and loyalty.

However, you need to research your audience thoroughly to understand what prospects and customers expect from your email list.