5 Tips To Make Email Marketing Work For You

Katya Constantine Feb 24, 2013 Tweet

Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, when it comes to marketing, your business focuses on optimizing your spend on each channel to maximize your return. Well, here’s the truth about email marketing – when used correctly, it’s the cheapest online channel that a business can have. Your email channel has a direct line of communication with your customer or client at a very low cost. So here are five tips on how to optimize your email channel.

Set up triggered email

Triggered programs are emails that you set up based on customers’ behavior that will run automatically. At the most basic, make sure you have a welcome email and a renewal of a subscription. If your capabilities are a bit more advanced, set up triggered emails based on site behavior, such as a “you have items in your shopping cart” follow up.

Short and sweet

About 50 percent of emails are viewed on mobile devices. Your audience is no longer “reading” your email. They are skimming your email. So build your email to be short and sweet. Have a call to action in your message, and make it easy to find. And, make sure you have plenty of links in your email.

Capture them early

Efficient subject lines are key to the success of your email. Subject lines are the first thing that your reader will see, so capture them early. Keep them short and direct. Tell your audience what your email is about in a few words. That’s it.

Have a conversation

An email is your opportunity to have a conversation with your customer.  So make it personal. Personalize the greeting with their name. If it’s relevant, customize it based on their location or other attributes you have in your database. Customers want to know that the message they received was meant for them. These days, it’s very easy to do this on any email platform.

Evaluate your data

You should always evaluate the performance of your email campaigns. Poorly performing campaigns can occur due to bad lists, bad content, or bad email. Look at the data from your delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and sales. This data will tell you what you did right versus wrong.

At some point, your company will need to email your customers. So make sure to use these best practices to optimize your performance.