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8 Hacks to Make Your Email Marketing Effective the Inbound Way

make email marketing effective

If emailing only users that were already engaged was the thing to do in the past, under the new privacy regulation in the EU, now it’s the law. Working with people, who’ve already given you consent to do so, will not only increase the engagement rates of your emails but will also help you craft more consumer-centric content.

However, almost every person has subscribed to a newsletter at some point in their lives. When we add up the amount of work-related emails people get on a daily basis, the inboxes become full of letters fighting for the user’s attention.

To have an effective email marketing campaign, you must base your actions on research, facts, and creativity. Your emails must stand out from competitors’ both visually and in terms of valuable content. Here are a few hacks that will make your newsletters convert leads better:

1. Kinetic Emails

People crave experiences. They love to not only see static information but to interact with it to make it fit their own perception of the world and answer a particular need. Furthermore, visual material, drop-down menus, sliders with products and buttons are way more engaging than getting a long, exhaustive message the old school way.

Interactive emails are the marketing trend everyone should’ve already adopted. As you can see, the engagement rates shown below speak for themselves.

kinetic emails

Kinetic focuses on the implementation of interactivity, attention-capturing visual design, and rendering capabilities. Such emails include design elements such as Sliders, Search-in-email option, Carousels, Infographics, Menus, Hover-over animations, Scratch and Flip, and Customer retention strategies. You can now see why they’re such a lead-converting digital beast.

2. Become a Retargeting Master

Building a new audience or a new subscriber list is always hard. Still, reaching out to recently active prospects and opted-in leads with the intention of converting them into regular clients could be an effective and cost-efficient maneuver. In such cases, retargeting is your best friend. According to Invesp 75% of consumers now see a retargeted Ad.

retargeting statistics

For instance, if a person is interested in reading your landing page about holidaying in the Maldives, the chances of them enjoying an email with a discount on another offer for such an adventure is much higher. Here you can ask them to opt-in to a newsletter about travelling through your landing page first. This way you can retarget them later with offers and discounts on a future vacation or trip.

You can create a contact database for your campaign through newsletter subscribers, a thematic landing page, or through an on-site registration process. The main goal is to make people give you their consent to retarget them later through your website.

To make this objective more easily achievable, you should communicate clearly why you need your customers’ personal information, what you are going to use it for. This will help you tailor your content, services, and products to their needs and interests.

Having an opt-in section with clear a CTA helps substantially. To make it GDPR compliant and more attractive to users, make sure to add two types of checkboxes to any form or section that is asking for a consumer’s email. The first type should state that the person gives you consent to collect and use their information.

The second type should let the user select which topics they would like to get information about (e.g. campaigns, new products/services, offers, etc.). This approach will help you determine what content users are more interested in, and thus adjust your marketing strategy to meet their needs.

Make sure to not present the opt-in option right at the beginning of your page. Users need to first engage with your content and view you as a trustworthy source before agreeing to regular emails from you. This is why it’s a good idea to have such a section after you’ve presented the key topics and most valuable aspects of the site and its content.

There are many options you can use to reach the people interested in a particular topic and have them opt-in for more information from you. If you want to convert leads, you need to target them with personalized content at the right place and at the right time. You can’t expect random people to miraculously find interest in your services or brand whenever you reach out to them.

3. Send Emails Regularly but Don’t Spam

junk mail

The best way to get anyone to open and read your email is if they’re expecting it. That’s why you need to regularly supply the mailboxes of your leads with content that feeds their curiosity. Of course, that comes with time, but if you send a killer email and make the user interested in the next one, you’ve done part of the job. Then you just need to continue providing useful content on a regular basis.

Content should hook consumers from the very first. Make sure that when someone opts-in for your newsletter, they get something in return immediately. It could be a “Greet & Meet” email or the last newsletter everyone else got. Provide content as soon as the interest towards it appears!

No need to present the same news more than once. The chance to lose the lead right then and there is enormous. Appear to your audience as a trustworthy source of valuable content that respect’s them. Analyse your open rate metrics and target certain user segments for your email marketing campaigns accordingly.

Every business has a sale cycle, so it might be good to set your timing or the topics of your emails around those. For instance, if someone has seen your fashion collection once, the chances are that if you present the same collection again, people would not likely act on it.

Helpful advice: In general, people usually open, read, and respond to their emails Tuesday to Thursday, during business hours 10 AM to 5 PM. These are the hours at which users are making the transition from work to free time mode and vice versa, checking their emails and social media feeds in the process.

Keep in mind that if you’re targeting entrepreneurs or workaholics, these people rarely have the time to open and respond to emails during the workweek and thus do this during the weekends. Also, some campaigns are aimed at building awareness and do not require any further actions by users after they open and read an email.

An example of this might be a yearly newsletter, presenting the brand’s progress and future plans. In similar cases, the best time to send an email is on the weekend between 10-12 AM.

4. Make Your Emails “Platform-Perfect”

email opens by environment

You should not only be aiming for pixel-perfect emails – aim for “platform-perfect” as well. Especially since the world is now mobile! You want your emails to be visually stunning, engaging, interactive and easy to navigate on as many devices as possible.

If you want to convert leads, you have to offer them a seamless experience that’s accessible through multiple devices, that’s essentially “platform-perfect.” Otherwise, your email address will soon be in the “I don’t read this anymore” folder.

The worst thing possible you could do is give users an experience they’ll remember but in a negative way. And designing an e-letter that looks good only on the desktop won’t cut it anymore. Your email marketing efforts must be aimed at providing a multi-platform experience that moves the overall brand story forward!

5. Add Realness

Half the problems on Earth would be non-existent if people knew how to communicate. So keep it real, that’s your audience, and what they crave is, besides an experience, a real conversation with you. They’ll appreciate and love it! Just drop the business talk.

If you want someone to be your audience, don’t make them feel uncomfortable, whoever they are. And the too formal business talk does precisely this as it switches the reader mindset to a work-conversation rather than a creating a friendly atmosphere. Make people comfortable. Everybody loves an easy-to-talk-to person.

You already know the users, they’re your community, you most probably have even made them your clients. Why not use the information they are giving you to polish your email marketing?

Make your emails personal. It could be an inside joke, a topic you know people are interested in, a cause your community is an active part of. It could even be a business event you’re sure they’ve been to. Add that thing that will make people say, “Wow, this brand gets me.”

Another thing you can do is make a gesture or offer your audience a small thank you. Give them something that will make their day better. It could be a discount, a cool video, or a tip that came just at the right time.

Most people love surprises. Present your audience with something that’s going to WOW them in a positive way. It might be the joke that breaks the ice, a new product, an edgy campaign, or an admirable cause.

6. Don’t Waste Your Subscribers’ Time

Show your customers you value them. Don’t waste their time with blunt sales messages – keep the messages simple and straightforward, make them catchy and fun in a sentence or two. However, you should be careful not to sound too vague or impartial. Every message should, as writers like to say – “keep the story moving.”

Notice the difference between:

“We have a discount.”

and

“We’ve opened 2 new stores. To celebrate this, we’re offering a new themed T-shirt and store discounts.”

One tells a story, it’s valuable, it presents a cause, but it doesn’t waste time. The other is just some fact on a blank digital sheet. No one wants this. To convert leads be direct, keep it simple (1-3 topics per email) but also, build a story that’s engaging. To be successful you need to think of your email marketing on a larger scale and have a content map to follow.

7. Add Clear Call-to-Action Buttons

clear cta

Never forget these! If you have a good story, you’ve captured the attention of the user, now it’s all about saying, “Hello, buy me now!” If you can add creativity, it’ll surely help, but make it very concise.

Use a simple design and bold typography to make the buttons stand out. Some users might not read your email at all – they might already have heard the story on some other channel. These leads may want to jump directly to buying or navigating to a section that presents new information, so make it easy for them to so by adding a “Buy,” “To the Store,” ”More Information” buttons.

Others may only enjoy half the story or be captured by a CTA at the end. Thus, having a button leading to a service/contact us page will help you close the deal. Have at least a few buttons with call-to-action keywords in them, leading to the pages that will help move users down the funnel. This approach is an essentially proven method to generate and convert leads more efficiently.

8. Don’t Forget the “Unsubscribe” Part!

unsubscribe button

Real advertisers respect people. The unsubscribe option is vital if you don’t want your email to be reported as spam. Learn to use it to your advantage by providing all the necessary information to the subscriber so that they can control their subscription terms, data and easily opt out at any time.

Know what content and tone resonate well with your audience and create marketing automation workflows to polish your overall email marketing strategy and provide valuable content to your subscribers at the right time for them to read it.

To Sum Things Up

The old newsletters you were used to getting are slowly becoming a thing of the past. Today marketers are aiming to provide interactive experiences to potential clients. Metrics show that emails involving such practices perform better and resonate well with audiences.

So, hunt leads the inbound way and hope that your audiences inboxes will be filled with more great content and less lead-killer advertising. Let’s make email marketing an effective practice together!