Email marketing best practices
Email is the perfect accessory to the well-heeled marketing plan. The success of your marketing plan can be determined quickly by answering this question, do you know if your emails kick butt?
- Email is nearly 40x better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers. (McKinsey & Company)
- Email conversion rates are 3x higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion (McKinsey & Company)
- 70% of people say they always open emails from their favorite brands (ExactTarget)
So much focus in recent times has been spent on social media, that people have forgotten that emails still work! Why? If you have already become interesting to someone, and people have asked to be on your list (still mucho important), they’ll be much more likely to purchase from you than someone on IG.
Keep it personal (unless you are writing on behalf of a publicly owned company, and then maybe depending on your brand). Write to your ideal customer. Why should they care about this information? How will it make their day better?
How do I know what my conversion rate is?
Conversion Rate (%) = no. of signups or purchases / no. of successfully delivered emails x 100
Once you know what your conversion, open and click-through rates are, you can start to compare them to benchmarks in your own industry. For those in the marketing industry, it’s 16.48% open rate and 1.74% CTR (MailChimp – updated March 2018). The average open rate for all industries is 20.81% (Source – MailChimp)
Sending to those who have opted-in. This is not only polite but will allow you to send information to those who are genuinely interested. Sure, people may opt-out at some point, but it’s better than spamming someone
Make sure your subject line tells the reader what is inside. This is not the time or place to sell, at this point, you just want people to open the message. Use a tool to determine if you have an excellent subject line or just an okay one. It can be the difference between a huge open rate or a low one for that message. If your email doesn’t get much attention, update the subject line and send it to the addresses that did not open it the first time.
Hard vs Soft Bounces – a hard bounce means your email address is no longer in use, or maybe it has a typo. A hard bounce can sometimes indicate you’ve hit a spam filter. If you are seeing a clutch of these from one business, they may be filtering you out. Soft Bounces are not normally anything to be concerned with, you should continue to use those addresses. They typically are from vacation settings or a full inbox.
Connect to Landing pages. Landing pages are used for extending your funnel from your ad into your website, and allow the reader to easily continue into the site for more information and increase conversions to sales. Pay close attention to your images. They should expand and correlate your messaging. Stick to your theme across both your message and images. Visitors won’t stick around if there is a disconnect.
Want more information on getting started with sending top-notch Email? Read our Ultimate Email Cheat Sheet.
Written by Amanda MacDonald, Founder of Full Gallop Communications. Learn more about Full Gallop’s email/content marketing services or see how to become a client.
