Did you know that email marketing is nearly 40 times more effective than Twitter and Facebook for acquiring customers?
In any company, the primary component of the customer acquisition program is Email Marketing, as it is an extremely cost-effective way to reach customers, build trust, and drive higher sales.
Check out these five best email campaign practices that'll keep your customers engaged and improve your open rates.
The first thing is nailing the timing. Yes, as a marketer, you must send the emails to your customers at the right time. The time of a day and the day of the week you send your email can have an immense impact on the open rates. Surveys previously showed that Tuesday at 10 am gets the most open rates and most of the companies follow this. At this time and day, Subscriber's mailbox usually gets crowded, and there are fewer chances that your email gets opened. To ensure your message won't be lost among the horde, you need to try some other peak timing. The latest study shows that 8 am and 9 am have a better open rate on the weekdays, you can also see open-rate on Sunday evenings, and especially on Thursday at 8:30 am gets more click-through. Even try experimenting with the timings by collecting data through email tracking until you find that sweet spot where your message gets open.
Cleanse your mailing lists regularly. Uncleansed emailing lists mean hard bounces, disengaged email addresses, and fewer delivery rates. Cleansing your email lists on a regular basis helps you to improve your email engagement, sender reputation, and deliverability rates. It is essential to separate invalid email lists and unengaged subscribers from your email lists also, remove role accounts as they represent a group or alias(such as @support, @info) since those are often not checked or read. To ensure that you have the most engaged list of emails in your database and your Subscriber truly wants to read your messages, include a double opt-in method in your campaigns as it helps you purge bad email addresses from your list immediately. Doing this keeps your email campaign clean of the prospects who are no longer interested in hearing from you.
Avoid using 'No-Reply' in the email address. Sending an email with a no reply is generally unfriendly, and it doesn't bring a good customer impression. People like one-on-one conversations; they like to ask questions and get answers for their pain points related to your service/product. As they always look forward to receiving messages from a person, not an automated robot message which doesn't respond to their queries. Also, using "No-reply" in your email address is against the CAN-SPAM rule, as it prevents recipients from responding and even opting out of further emails. Instead, use your first name, which is more likely for your customers to open emails and to get more click-through rates.
Write compelling subject lines that your recipients can't ignore. Generally, your recipients see three things before they decide to open or ignore your messages, which are the sender name, subject line, and preheader. Study shows, 50% of your Subscribers decide to open a message based on the subject line. Hence, it is very important that you craft engaging subject lines by using the curiosity gap in your subject lines. Be creative with your subject line, try personalization, use emojis, curiosity gaps, and provide a clear sense of action that your recipient act on. To get a serious boost to your open rate also, conduct A/B testing on your subject lines and see which gets more click-through rates.
Closely tie emails to the landing page and use autoresponders for opt-ins. Always consider where you are sending your recipients; it's where the actual conversion happens. To ensure your recipients get converted to a potential lead, you need to closely tie your emails with the most actionable CTA to the landing page, which gives a seamless transition and the solution to their pain points, not your homepage product line homepage. Also, your landing page should match the email in terms of headline and content; this goes a long way toward a customer's trust. Usually, people forget that they have opted into your emails, to make them remember that they have opted-in to your email database; use an auto-responder with additional actionable content or rewards, and send it out one day, five days, and 10 days after they register.
Follow these 5 practices to ensure your emails don't end up in spam or unread. With actionable analytics, flexible workflows, and powerful list segmentation, you can build meaningful relationships with your recipients.