It’s 2022 and email marketing strategy remains one of the best ways for a company to stay in touch with an audience, customers and clients. It’s tried and tested, and it still works.
While email marketing has been around for a long time, the medium has evolved. And so has the ways it’s used by individuals, companies, brands and marketers.
For a brand to truly connect with the individuals that make up their mailing list, it’s absolutely necessary to stay well abreast of current email marketing trends.
The sort of email marketing that was the norm even a few years ago wouldn’t get a look-in these days. Individuals have wised up, and so have their inboxes. Send a marketing mail that comes across too ‘spammy’ and it’ll likely get filtered out into your recipients’ junk mail or promotions folders.
Fine-tuning your mailing list parameters, connecting better with audiences, offering more of what they want and personalising your marketing emails are all important factors when it comes to making the most of this channel.
It sounds simple, but it’s the cornerstone of an effective email marketing strategy. Rather than sending out marketing eDMs haphazardly, formulate a clear set of goals that you’re looking to achieve by communicating with your customers/ audience through this channel.
Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely (S.M.A.R.T). Setting and monitoring a clear structure of goals will allow you to more effectively monitor the outcomes of your plan.
Your plan should include getting to understand and know your audience better and tailoring the tone and style of your content to suit accordingly.
Think about what your audience gets to of receiving your emails – hint, it’s interesting information, rather than constant sales pitches.
It’s fine to let your readers know about new products, but writing style and tone count for a lot. If your eDMs come across as a hard sell, you risk losing the trust and interest of your readers.
Making and sticking to a schedule consistently is one of the most important aspects of your email marketing plan. Tracking the frequency of your mailing schedule means you can ensure you’re not contacting your mailing list too frequently – which can become annoying and result in unsubscribes.
Be sure to make use of the engagement reports in the email marketing tool you use in order to monitor the open rate, click through rate and number of unsubscribes after each mail out. Track this important information and use it to adjust your schedule if necessary.
Emails that are visually appealing, uncluttered with a clear and concise message do better. Keep your primary message short, clear and right at the top – marketing emails are no place to bury the lede.
You might choose to use a template upon which to build all of your marketing emails. This way you can incorporate familiar fonts, logos and images that help with branding and will look familiar to your readers. This look and feel can carry across to some of the other content you share on social media.
You can mix up the fonts and layout a little, but it helps to have a recognisable ‘look’ to your emails. When adding images to your emails, refer to the guidelines set out in your email marketing tool of choice with regard to image size, in order to ensure your emails will render correctly and be easy to read.
Personalisation of emails has been a big trend over the past couple of years and this will only continue through 2022.
As a starting point, you want to be addressing recipients by name. This could be at the top of the email, or perhaps within the subject line. Your email marketing tool of choice should have a few options for adding in the first names of recipients from your audience lists.
Another option to help open up communication is to include a reply-to address that allows recipients to respond to your marketing emails with any queries. This can be a good way to foster real communication, although a little time intensive in some instances.
Rather than signing off your marketing email with just your brand or company name, consider creating a more personal signature with a contact from your company that recipients can reply to directly.
Monitoring engagement reports after sending your marketing emails is the only real way to see what works and what doesn’t and learn how to improve performance.
The metrics to track are open rate and click through rate – you’ll also want to track whether or not members of your audience are unsubscribing after receiving particular emails.
Open rate will vary depending on the size of your audience and how engaged they are. Anywhere from 10%-30% is within the normal range.
A catchy, well-written subject line is one of the most effective ways of boosting your open rate. If you’re offering a sale or special deal, try to fit that into your subject line.
Click through rate refers to the number of recipients that click through to links within your marketing emails. These numbers are generally smaller, but can offer very good insight into the sort of content that your audience is most interested in.
As with everything in marketing, the truth is in the data. Depending on your particular audience, there will be a most effective time to send our your marketing emails.
In most instances, the most effective times to send out emails are midweek mornings, with Tuesday and Thursday mornings proving to be the best times to send to get in increased open rate.
If most of your audience are professionals on traditional work schedules, aim to send out your emails around 9-10am.
Different times will work better for different types of audience, particularly if your readers are spread across different time zones. Experiment with different timing and of course refer to past performance in order to boost your open rates, click throughs and engagement over time.
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