The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing In 2021: Win The Inbox Game!
Originally published on WebEngage.
If you are an email marketer, I am sure you would have come across the statement “Email Marketing is dead!” too often that you might start holding it true. Well, let me pop the bubble for you with this guide to email marketing.
Email is an evergreen engagement channel. It’s been in existence since 1971 and is nowhere close to redundancy. The channel has evolved over the years making room for newer technology and techniques to enhance engagement.
Think of email marketing as a car on a racing track where the racer has to maneuver roadblocks to reach the finishing point successfully.
We recently conducted a webinar with our in-house email marketing mavericks to throw light on the strategies that you can apply to boost your email marketing game.
In this article, we serve some of those strategies to make the ride easy for you. Read along to zip through the five checkpoints that can help you level up your email marketing game.
Rev up the automation engine
As an email marketer, imagine you are tasked with manually sending out an email every time someone makes a purchase on your website or abandons their cart, or performs any action. Now think of doing that for thousands of users for different scenarios on a daily basis. 24 hours in a day would not be enough!
That’s where email automation comes to your rescue. It enables you to trigger timely emails based on actions performed by users as well as your brand. Thanks to email automation, it is now possible for you to engage with users throughout the user journey. Email automation helps email marketers tick multiple checkboxes — such as leveraging user data effectively while crafting campaigns, targeting emails to specific user segments, testing out various versions (hail multivariate testing!), and much more.
Press the pedal on personalization
The hype about personalization is real! Customers prefer to engage with brands that speak to them rather than speak at them. To strike the right chord with customers, brands have started weaving in personalization elements in their email campaigns. These elements go beyond just referring to users by their first name.
With hyper-personalization capabilities, you can include behavioral user data in your email.
Want to remind users to complete the transaction? Trigger a cart abandonment campaign including the cart details of the user
Want to entice users with new offers? Craft specific offers based on users’ preferences and purchase patterns
Want to nudge users to redeem their loyalty points? Plugin the data on users’ loyalty points in the email
Make every email interaction meaningful with personalization.
Tighten the nuts and bolts around email deliverability
Solid copy — check
Creative elements — check
Personalized content — check
Deliverability — umm, what’s that?
More often than not, emails that you carefully craft do not end up in the mailbox of your intended audience. And there are a bunch of reasons why this could happen. Brands need to be mindful of the possible issues and iron them out to ensure a successful campaign.
If you want to fix deliverability issues from your campaigns, make sure you pin the below infographic on your work desk (Thank us later!)
Put revenue in the driver’s seat
It is a common misconception that email is a low ROI channel. Nothing can be far from the truth. According to the Data and Marketing Association, the average return on investment for email campaigns is touted to be $38 for every $1 invested.
In our experts’ opinion, email is a highly effective channel for brands in getting more bang for their buck.
Jump on the bandwagon
Email marketing has evolved over the years. Today, marketers need to keep pace with evolving trends and leverage the latest techniques, tools, and resources to boost their email marketing game.
Mobile-first emails
It’s not an overstatement to say that mobile phones have become an inseparable part of our lives. People use their mobile phones to talk, message, make payments, watch videos, and — you guessed it right — check emails! It is imperative that brands make sure their emails are mobile-responsive so that they can engage with their customers on the move.
In the first illustration, the email is hard to read, difficult to navigate, and makes the reader want to click on “back” or “delete”
The email in the second illustration is reader-friendly, easy-to-navigate, and makes the reader want to scroll and take action.
Interactive content
One of the reasons why readers don’t engage with emails as much is because they are plain boring. Insipid. Uninspiring.
What if your emails could make your customers go “Wow!”?
By including interactive elements in your emails, you nudge readers to not just click on your email, but also engage with it meaningfully.
Interactive elements are just the ingredient needed to spruce up brand emails.
New Techniques
Why stick to age-old practices in email marketing when you have newer (cooler) methods to hook your users to your email campaigns. Baking these techniques in your campaigns is one of the sure-shot ways to differentiate your campaigns from the rest and provide a great experience for the reader.
Summing it up
Email marketing is part science and part art. Beautifully worded and aesthetically pleasing emails are essential. But it is also vital for email marketers to focus on not-so-glamorous but essential aspects such as automation, deliverability, revenue tracking, etc.
