Email Marketing Strategies and Email Marketing Tips that Work

Effective Email Marketing Strategies

Most small businesses have dabbled in email marketing – whether it’s a newsletter, e-blast or other email marketing strategy.  Let’s cover some of the most effective email marketing strategies and some practical email marketing tips that will help your small business.

Email Marketing Strategy #1: The Email List

Your list is the single most important factor in your email campaign.  Your house list (you are developing a prospect database, right?) is your best email marketing list.
If you have integrated your email marketing platform and your customer database (typically requiring a CRM system) – that’s the best option.

Email Marketing Strategy #2: The Email Communication

Email communication comes in many forms – informational, newsletters, promotional, etc. For purposes of this article, let’s cover promotional (revenue generating) email marketing communicating.

Email Marketing Strategy #3: The Offer

This goes without saying but developing a compelling offer is critical to the success of your email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing Strategy #4: Segmentation

Once you’ve selected your offer and your email list – it’s time to segment the email marketing file. There are unlimited ways to segment your email marketing file – age of leads, geography, purchase history, recent activity, marketing acquisition channel – be creative and think about what is most relevant to your offer and list.

Email Marketing Strategy #5: Email Delivery

Depending on your business model the day of the week and time of the email delivery can impact open rates. Personally – for most B-to-B or B-to-C email marketing communications, I recommend Tuesdays (Wednesdays are second best) around 11am – eastern time.  That hits your email prospects before lunch on the east coast of the US as well as around the start of the day on the west coast.

Effective Email Marketing Tips

Let’s cover small of the most important design elements of your email marketing campaign. Follow these email marketing tips and you will develop optimal email marketing communications.

Email Marketing Tip #1 – Value Propostion

You have (at most!) 5 seconds to communicate your value proposition through email. Think about how you go through your own email. Your value proposition must be clearly communicated and the first ways the recipient discerns that is through:

1. The From line
2. The Subject line
3. The Email Preview Pane (if applicable) – Images and Content

Email Marketing Tip #2 – The From Line

The is the most important line for establishing trust. If you are using your house email marketing file, the recipient should know you. If you segmented recent or previous buyers, you have a greater chance establishing trust. Send your email from an email address that builds trust and contains your brand.

Email Marketing Tip #3 – The Subject Line

Get to the point – early. And make it compelling to the email recipient. Most email recipients open their inbox, read the From Line first and then the read the Subject Line, and decide to open, delete or save.  Subject Lines and From Lines work together – don’t emphasize brand in the subject line – communicate value to the recipient, in 40 characters or less.

Email Marketing Tip #4 – Images and Content

Your content should clearly reinforce the value proposition and benefit to the prospect. Your images and layout should be attractive. If you choose to send HTML based emails with images – check the layout of the email in multiple email clients.  Odds are your email will arrive with the images turned off, so make sure your value proposition is clearly communicated with and without images.

Email Marketing Tip #5 – Personalization

Personalization, using the email recipients’ information in the email (i.e. name, etc.) is information you should leverage. Consider how you can capture and use prospect data to improve conversion rates. At a minimum, it is generally better to use Dear [first name] instead of a generic salutation.

Email Marketing Tips and Strategies that Work

Effective email marketing requires testing. Once you have the basics in place, it’s important you test and track your results.  Implementing effective email marketing strategies is very important. But out of all these email marketing tips the most important one is to track your results. Email marketing is iterative and specific to your business’ niche.
Contact Marketing Practicality directly to optimize your email marketing efforts.