While the landscape of marketing is constantly evolving, I do have some good news…Email Marketing still works! As of 2019, email generates $42 for every $1 spent (that’s a 4,200% ROI), making it one of the most effective marketing channels.
In this article we’ll be exploring email marketing trends and email marketing strategies to test out in 2022.
First…some general guidelines about email marketing:
- It takes time and likely quite a few iterations to find the sweet spot
- At times, it can be challenging to interpret the results of your email marketing campaigns and diagnose issues… and it’s impossible if you don’t have proper tracking and analytics set up.
- What works well changes… a lot! What works amazingly well in the hospitality industry would fail miserably and when it comes to selling professional services. The sweet spot you find in your businesses email marketing will be somewhat unique, and based on the combination of factors such as industry, price point, age, size of company, etc.
1.) Segment your email list
Segmentation is essential for delivering targeted marketing campaigns that are tailored towards a specific prospect’s problems, wants, and needs.
With the tools that exist today, it’s far easier to segment and to a much more granular level.
You can segment your email list and prospect list by things like…
- Industry
- Position title
- Revenue / income
- Demographic info such as age or sex
- Company size
- Sales cycle
- Behavioral segmentation (more on this in a bit)
One simple way to start doing this is by creating segmentation tags to add to leads in your CRM. Then, start adding these tags when you add new leads. There are even ways to automate this process (such as using Zapier to add a “clicked email” tag to those who clicked a particular email).
2.) Conduct a segmentation survey
One way to easily segment is with a segmentation survey.
Let’s say you have a list full of contacts for which you only know their name and email address. Send them a survey and ask for info that will help you segment your email list accurately.
You can think of this as giving a way for subscribers to self-select for which segment they should be in.
4 types of segmentation surveys:
1. Demographic surveys
Use this type of survey to ask questions about age, gender, education level, occupation, household income, etc.
2. Satisfaction survey
A satisfaction survey can be as simple as asking a customer who recently made a purchase to rate your product or service on a scale of 1-10.
Cleaning subscribers from your list who respond negatively, or even just separately segmenting these leads, can be very effective for increasing your overall conversion rates.
For those who respond positively, this will also give you a chance to engage with them in a specific way based on how they respond.
3. Interests and lifestyle survey
If your product or service generally corresponds with people with specific interests, hobbies, or lifestyle, try running an “interests and lifestyle survey” where you ask them for more details.
If you sell high-performance bicycles, then it is probably more relevant to survey people about whether they bike as a hobby, than to do a demographic survey. A single 25 year old lawyer who likes biking should probably be in the same segment as the widowed 55 year old pastor who likes biking.
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
NPS surveys go beyond asking how much someone likes your brand, product or service, and asks how likely someone is to recommend your company or product to a friend.
When it’s time to send that email out to ask for referrals, you can send that email only to the segment of subscribers who said they are likely to recommend your product.
3.) Try Incorporating SMS
It’s worth expanding your email marketing strategy outside the realm of purely email, by testing out text messages as part of your campaigns. Including a couple text message followups as part of your overall campaigns can be effective for trying to catch the attention of those who might be more responsive to texts than to emails.
Test it out and see how it compares to campaigns with email only!
4.) Optimize for mobile
Mobile accounts for 41% of all email opens, and this figure is expected to rise.
More and more people check their emails from the phone, so it’s important to double-check that your emails are optimized for both mobile and browser viewing.
There’s nothing more frustrating to customers than to get an email with important info that they can’t read properly. Most email marketing platforms can help automatically optimize your emails for mobile (such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo, etc.).
Some extra tips to keep in mind, when optimizing your emails for mobile:
- Use a single-column layout of 600-800 pixels in width.
- Try to keep the subject line to 6 words or less if possible, to help prevent it getting cut off on mobile screens
- Create your buttons at least 45 pixels x 45 pixels.
- Increase the size of your font to improve readability on smartphones.
- Make the call-to-action easy to click from a phone.
- Testing your emails on various devices, yourself, even if your email marketing platform has an option to do this automatically. A quick review of a test email on a mobile device will help prevent bugs or mistakes which result in unreadable emails.
5.) Optimize your email send times
While many business owners can end up overly focused on minor email marketing details, such as whether their emails should go out at 9am or 10am, you can use a simple option for automatically optimizing your email send times, to ensure this isn’t an issue you have to worry about.
Tools like Mailgun by Sinch can help automatically find the ideal send time for each individual email subscriber based on historical data, to help maximize your engagement and conversion rates.
6.) Use more behavioral emails
Did you know that automated emails (such as onboarding emails) enjoy 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails (e.g. newsletters)?
Automated emails that are triggered by specific user behaviors are very effective at creating conversions, in particular. If someone checks out your pricing page, and then gets a targeted followup email, they will be much more engaged and that much more likely to buy.
Try incorporating some of these behavior emails into your email flow:
- Welcome emails
- Onboarding emails
- Post-purchase emails
- Check-in emails
- Abandoned cart emails
- Re-engagement emails
- Customer appreciation emails, such as
- Birthday emails
- Anniversary emails
- Milestone emails
- Early access emails
- Thank-You emails
You can even automatically customize your newsletter and email content to every single individual, using tools such as Rasa.io.
7.) Re-Engage Inactive Subscribers
Over time, it’s natural for some subscribers to become disengaged with your content. With the right strategy, a certain percentage of inactive subscribers can still become a customer or send referrals.
Create a re-engagement campaign to run to inactive subscribers after a 3-6 month period of disengagement.
You can re-engage inactive subscribers by conducting surveys (you can combine this tactic with the segmentation survey strategy too!).
Or by sharing new types of interactive content.
