With the breakthrough of social media, mobile marketing, and search engine optimization, email marketing tends to take a backseat. This targeted form of marketing allows you to control exactly who sees your emails, making it easy to customize your message for each customer and thus foster a higher conversion rate.
It is one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing and offers you an easy way to consistently engage with consumers and prospects. If you haven’t already considered email marketing for your business, now is the time.
We take a look at four ways you can boost your email marketing strategy to increase open and click-through rates.
Find Your Optimal Sending Time
If you want to boost engagement and improve click rates, then you need to work out your best sending time. Unfortunately, there is no one best time to send out your email campaigns. Optimal send times vary by day of the week, industry and even specific subscriber lists.
Generally, people tend to favor sending out newsletters on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Tuesday possibly being the best day for you to send your emails. In terms of times of the day, you may want to avoid mornings, as highest email open rates are actually in the afternoon and evening.
However, you really want to go that step further and find out what works for your audience. In order to do so and find the very best time for optimal opens and clicks, you need to do some testing. A/B test your send times to see what works for you.
Create an Email Content Calendar
Once you have worked out optimal send times, you will want to make sure that you can consistently deliver your emails each week or month. Sticking to a schedule will help you to avoid spamming your subscribers with too many emails.
Mapping out your content will also help you to plan for sales, holidays and specials dates, so you don’t end up rushing these key marketing opportunities. It will get you in the habit of sending out emails consistently, which subscribers will appreciate.
Planning out a campaign in advance is essentially about creating a system, and the great thing about that is that it can easily be measured, monitored and modified in order to create your desired outcomes. It will help to keep your team organized and give them enough time to write and refine your email copies before hitting send.
Create Contextual Emails
The great thing about email marketing is that it allows you to segment your subscribers so you can create targeted campaigns. Contextual email marketing is all about creating helpful content for your subscribers and sending it out at the right time.
The aim is to improve engagement and create interactions that your consumers will actually care about as soon as they open your email. The best way to do this is to craft a more personalized experience.
There are various ways to make your emails more personalized for your subscribers, including sending out emails based on interests, geographical location, and whether or not they’re already customers. This will help you to filter out irrelevant subscribers that would not appreciate receiving that type of content.
To create these emails, you will need to include the necessary fields in your sign up form and then filter your audience once you create your email campaign. You can ask them what kind of content they’re most interested in receiving, find out if they are already a customer or anything else that would be relevant to your industry.
Think About Mobile
With more and more people using mobile devices to read their emails, you need to make sure that you take mobile into account when formulating your email marketing strategy. It is estimated that over half of all emails opened occurred on a smart phone.
While you may think this means creating mobile friendly emails, it is best to use responsive email templates. These will respond to the device that it is being read on, so that if your email is opened on a desktop it is still readable.
Of course, it’s not just about using the right templates. You need to consider the user and how they operate on a mobile device. Try to keep your content, as well as your subject lines, nice and short. If you want your subscribers to open and read your emails, brevity is key.
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