10 Tips for E-mail Marketing

If you follow the best practices, e-mail advertising can be remarkably effective.

 When you think of e-mail marketing, you might be picturing spammy messages filling up your inbox. But that’s not the right way to advertise through e-mail. 

According to Oberlo, the average ROI for e-mail advertising is $42 for each $1 that’s spent. That’s why NuStream put together 10 tips for e-mail marketing. If you have any questions or concerns about e-mail advertising or digital marketing in general, feel free to reach out to us at any time. Our team is here to help grow your online campaign anyway that we can.

1. Know Your Audience

One of our tips for e-mail marketing is getting to know your customer base a bit. Your messages should be relevant to your audience members and their interests. How are you supposed to do this — send individual messages to each customer? No, not necessarily. An easy way to keep your messages relevant is with segmented e-mail ads. You can break up your customer list, segmenting them by age, gender, location, past purchases, e-mail engagement, survey results, website behavior, etc. For example, let’s say that your store sells clothing. A middle-aged woman in Florida is probably going to buy completely different apparel than a young man from Alaska.

Therefore, you should send these two people two completely different e-mails. According to HubSpot, using segmented campaigns can increase revenue by 760%.

2. Build Your E-mail Advertising List Up

You shouldn’t buy an e-mail list. Your ROI will be much higher if you build the list yourself. If someone actually signs up to join your list, they’re more likely to have an active interest in your company. So, you may be wondering how to build an e-mail list. 

 There are a couple of ways to do this. You could include a signup on your website or at your brick-and-mortar location. You can also share your signup form through social media. Once you have a nice e-mail marketing ist built up, make sure to keep going with it. Don’t let up.

3. Send a Warm Welcome E-mail

Once someone joins your e-mail list, don’t wait too long to welcome them as a subscriber. This gives you a chance to introduce yourself and set the person’s expectations for the types of e-mails you’ll be sending in the future. By getting started on the right foot, it can help bring about a successful e-mail campaign.

4. Have a Real Person Send Your E-mails

Typically, people are more likely to open e-mails that come from real people and not a company. Because people receive so much spam nowadays, they’re not going to trust a generic e-mail address. They’re more likely to trust a personalized e-mail message from a person at your company that they can identify with.

5. Send Consistent E-mails Regularly

If someone signs up to join your mailing list, they shouldn’t see your e-mails as spam. When you send regular e-mails that are helpful and informative, people are more likely to remember you when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Don’t SPAM

 Although, make sure you don’t overdo it. You don’t want to annoy your customers and encourage them to unsubscribe. Yes, most people check their inbox every day, but you shouldn’t slam them with new e-mails daily. If you’re not exactly sure what is too much, start off slowly. You can see how your customer base responds to your e-mail before you send the next one out. You also want to find the best time to send your e-mails. People are more likely to check their inboxes in the middle of the week compared with the weekend.

6. Don’t Let Your Subject Line Go to Waste

Your advertising e-mails will probably have a lot of other e-mails to compete with in people’s inboxes. Thus, you’ll want to make sure that your e-mail subject line is good enough to stand out from the others. So, you’re wondering — what’s a good e-mail subject line? Keep the subject line short and straightforward. You don’t want it to confuse your readers, and the line gets cut off around 50 characters, particularly on mobile devices. It’s important to make sure that your e-mails are mobile-friendly. Nowadays, so many people use smartphones and other mobile devices as compared to desktop computers.

Avoid Spammy Language

Again, you don’t want your online e-mail advertising to be perceived as spam. So, you shouldn’t make your subject line seem spammy. Don’t use words like “free,” “cash,” or “save.” It’s best to also avoid using all caps or too many exclamation points in a row. You may want to include a question that the e-mail then answers or a specific number, like 15% off.

7. Keep Your Messages Short and Sweet

With their busy lives, a lot of people have a short attention span. So, if you want them to read your entire e-mail ad, you’re going to have to keep it on the short side. Write clearly and concisely, and make sure to include a single call to action, as opposed to overfilling the ad with multiple CTAs. Many readers will just scan your e-mail. You want to make sure that your CTA button is easy to find for even the speediest of readers. Additionally, too much copy in an e-mail is a red flag for some spam filters.

8. Use an Entertaining Voice

If it makes sense to use humor with your company’s brand, go ahead and do that. When there is a distinctive personality in your messages, it’s more likely that they’ll be read and then shared. Just don’t go too far so that you seem unprofessional.

9. Say Thank You

Another great tip for digital marketing is expressing your appreciation. Don’t forget to thank your readers for taking the time to subscribe to your list and read your message.

10. Test You E-mails

And this is the last one of our tips for e-mail marketing. Before you send your message to hundreds of people, test it to make sure that it works. You want your e-mail to look neat and clean, and all the links that you included need to be in working condition. If possible, check your e-mail on different devices and browsers and through the various popular e-mail providers (like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook).

Bonus Tip

You can use e-mail A/B split testing to see which version of your e-mail has the best conversions. Try out different subject lines, CTAs, and content to see what works best with your audience. But make sure you’re only testing one element at a time. Or the results of your testing will be inconclusive.