Email Marketing Game Strong -

Email Marketing Game Strong

27 August 2015

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While content is ultimately the most important factor that goes into email marketing for your business, there are other considerations that are essential to keep in mind while you are planning to execute a successful email campaign. Email subscribers are an extremely valuable segment of potential customers and business leads because they have already communicated interest in your product or service and have chosen to care enough to stay informed. Below are 5 crucial email concepts that your business must adhere to in order to facilitate the grounds for a more prosperous campaign.

Time and Day Matter– According to Marketing Land, emails go “stale” after about 24 hours. This backs up the importance of sending your campaign at the time where your audience will be more apt to opening it. Unfortunately, there is no definitive time and day that email blasts perform best across every industry. As a business, you must first understand your audience habits. Then, ask what your email is offering the audience, and determine when they would have the time to want to open it. For example, SISDigital knows the sweet spot for our subscribers is Wednesday morning. Why? They aren’t slammed with catching up on emails from the weekend, they aren’t thinking about or participating weekend plans, and they are in a working mindset. Find your audience’s sweet spot by split testing your email efforts. (Check out our data below)
Optimization is Key– If you want your subscribers to take action from your email campaigns (hint: you ALWAYS want them to), your emails must be digitally optimized. Take the extra time to test out your email to make sure that photos link to content, there are clickable links that lead to correct pages, sharing buttons work, and that emails are viewable in optimal format across devices through responsive design. Copy should be concise, short, and scannable for optimal reception on the audience end, and CTA’s need to be mentioned sooner rather than later.
Subject Lines Will Make or Break You– The art of the subject line is constantly changing, but one of the ultimate goals of an email marketer will always stay the same: draw in the audience in a compelling way through the first thing they see- the subject line. MailChimp informs marketers that the best email subject lines are usually short, descriptive, and provide the reader with a reason to open your email. They go on to say that many subscribers ignore splashy or cheesy phrases (Read: stop using cheesy lines). What’s hot now are customized subject lines (names, emojis, trending words and phrases), localization, and using merge tags. Set your emails apart from the competition without being annoying or weird. Some of our favorite headlines come from TheSkimm and Digg (featured below).
Mobile Friendly– Marketing Land research showed 66% of all email in the US is now opened/read on smartphones or tablets. Similarly, Business to Community reports that 72% of US online adults send or receive personal emails via smartphone at least weekly. If you haven’t transitioned to mobile-friendly email design you could be missing out on potential opportunity to drive conversions from your campaigns. Get to it.
Analyze Your Audience– In order to drive a truly successful email campaign, you need to understand who you’re writing for on both a psychographic and demographic level. Research your subscribers. Divide them into segments. What are their hobbies, what tasks do they complete on a daily basis, what are their pain points, what makes them happy, where are they on the weekend- take in as much as you can and then revolve your content strategy on catering to your audience. Once you have your content strategy perfected, use insights from your email hosting platform to find out more in-depth analytics that can include things like open rates (pictured below), click rates, and performance statistics.

After you implement these five tips to your existing email marketing strategy we urge you to remember that no campaign is successful without measuring analytics. If you haven’t already, start digging into the data from your email marketing efforts. This will give you the greatest insight into what is working, what isn’t, general market behavior, etc. By reviewing analytics regularly, you can adjust strategy if needed and see what is really hitting home with your subscribers. Need help with email marketing? We got you.

About Morgan Jones

Morgan is a graduate from the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a BA in Communication Studies and a minor in journalism. She brings to the table a vivacious spirit and unique creative energy that she uses in all things SayItSocial. When she isn't being an awesome Digital Account Executive, you can find her running the Wrightsville Beach loop with her dog Grizzly, out on the beach, or on her front porch reading her nook.