Secrets to Email Marketing Success, Revealed!

Despite the rise of social media and the extensive use of content marketing in today’s digital marketing landscape, email marketing remains the most effective way to convert viewers into real customers. In fact, the traditional practice of sending newsletters and general content via email has now evolved into remarketing.

Email marketing may be the oldest trick in the book, but it is an old trick that remains relevant in the modern era of digital marketing. What’s interesting is that there are still ways to push your email marketing campaign to a whole new level; to achieve higher conversion with an effective campaign. These are the secrets that will help you achieve email marketing success.

Personalised Subject Line

A lot of email marketers fine-tune their content to perfection, but a lot of them forget about one crucial detail: the subject line. Before recipients actually see the content of your emails, they first decide whether to open the email based on the subject of the emails. Personalising your subject line gives an instant boost to your email marketing campaign.

Even better, there are a lot of tools that can help you personalise the subject line for your recipients. Many email marketing tools now offer string-based personalisation. Others turn to Artificial Intelligence or AI to help craft the best subjects based on the highly personalised content of an individual email.

In a market as competitive as today, simply adding the recipient’s name to the subject line isn’t enough. Utilise the tools available to you to further personalise subject lines of your newsletter.

Mind the Excerpt

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Yes, we instantly check the excerpt after seeing an interesting subject line in our Promotions folder. That’s how most email users react when receiving promotional emails.

Similar to blog posts that you use for content marketing or SEO tags you add to web pages, that little snippet of content that viewers see first can make or break your campaign. Once you are done optimising your subject line, it is time to pay closer attention to your excerpt.

The excerpt in most – if not all – marketing emails is always the first few words of the email. That’s an opportunity on its own. You can use anything from quotes to an image with a compelling <alt> tag to capture the recipients’ attention.

Continuity Matters

Businesses with extensive email marketing campaigns focus their time and resources towards making the content of their newsletters suitable for the target audience. This is a great thing to do; at the end of the day, your content and a suitable call to action are what converts recipients into actual buyers.

That said, email marketing is just as comprehensive and multi-dimensional as other digital marketing instruments. Using it as a one-way communications channel is not how you reap the most benefits.

Instead of sticking with linear, one-way communications, adopt the same storytelling approach you use in social media and content marketing and use it in your email marketing campaign. Instead of sending one email after another, create a storyline – a flow – that the recipients can follow.

The impact of this approach isn’t always apparent. Not immediately, at least. However, you are actually building a stronger audience base than you realise. It starts with one person noticing the story inside your newsletter. The rest is easy from there.

Use In-Depth Data

Delivery reports and read receipts are the usual metrics tracked in an email marketing campaign. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great metrics for measuring your exposure, but if you want to know more about email marketing campaigns, however, there are other things to understand too.

Content and content effectiveness are the simplest examples. They are easy to observe, and they influence the impact of your email marketing campaign almost immediately. It is not a secret that the recipients love certain types of content. Delivering a different type will cause a sudden dip in conversion or other metrics.

The same data can then be used to craft better content for different audience groups. Instead of treating the entire mailing list as one huge list, you can start compartmentalising the recipients more meticulously. Once you have this understanding, you can use newsletter examples and boost effectiveness like never before.

Stay Consistent

One of the worst things you can do when running an email marketing campaign is to send a lot of emails in quick succession. While the intention isn’t to spam the recipients, they may still see your emails as annoying and decide to block you entirely.

The way to go is by remaining consistent. Set a schedule for your emails and stick with it. If you want to send more than one email every month, let the audience opt into an individual list. This is how you appreciate your audience – believe me when I say that they will appreciate you in return. Now that you know the best secrets to email marketing, success will be yours!