Email is often seen as a cost-effective technique for businesses to promote their products and services, and so, has traditionally been a part of digital marketing strategies and However, email is also a crucial component of digital products that contributes to your users’ experience. When used correctly, email can contribute to the overall user experience to provide very good returns on investment.
Here are 6 best practices and tips from the digital marketers from Yellow, a marketing company Dubai to get the most from your email marketing campaign.
1. Send Welcome Emails
A welcome email is the first electronic message you send to a prospective customer. It is also something you send to someone who has bought a product or service as part of their onboarding process to help them get acquainted with their purchase and your brand.
Since the welcome email serves as your introduction to both buying and potential customers, it is one of the most important electronic messages you can send.
Aside from serving as an introductory message, welcome emails help keep your address list reliable and clean, enabling you to improve your email deliverability.
When you enter an incorrect email address, the welcome message will generate a hard bounce. This notifies your email provider to remove it from your list.
Additionally, welcome emails give the recipients assurance that their signup worked and the information they want is on its way.
Lastly, welcome emails also work as an effective marketing tool. By offering something valuable or exclusive to subscribers at the start of their journey, you will see click-throughs rise.
2. Segment Email Subscribers
Audience segmentation pertains to the process of identifying subgroups within your target market to deliver custom-tailored messages to connect more effectively with them. These subgroups can be based on gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, level of formal education, and other demographics.
Segmenting your email recipients makes it easier for you to target particular audiences. This, in turn, can contribute to an increase in open rates, leads, transactions, and sales.
If you are segmenting email subscribers for the first time or looking for ways to improve the process, start by doing so per industry. This technique can help you send emails and content that the recipient will more likely open and read.
Consider trying sales cycle segmentation as well. Early-stage and interested buyers are more interested in receiving white research papers instead of aggressive sales pitches and offers for a one-to-one demo, but wouldn’t mind getting more informative, research-based ones.
On the other hand, people who are ready to purchase will be more responsive to free trial offers and product webinars.
You can also leverage these segments for your user research efforts. For example, by sending different surveys to different segments.
3. Personalize Messages
Customizing all messages you send can be pretty time-consuming, which is why a lot of digital marketers find this process challenging.
However, personalizing emails is not about sending individual messages to all your subscribers. It’s about creating personalized messages using customer data. Although the process may still take some effort, it won’t be as time-consuming.
Studies show that personalizing messages offers several benefits, so you can’t afford to skip this step.
Personalized emails have proven ROIs and produce higher open rates than standard ones. Birthday emails, on the other hand, can also generate a higher revenue than regular promotional messages.
Aside from these benefits, customizing emails can also help you prevent mailing list degradation.
If you want to start personalizing emails but don’t know where to start, here are some tips:
- Recommend products or content based on the audience segment.
- Tailor messages and promotions by audience segment.
- Send triggered emails based on visitor and user behavior.
- Create a signup form that extracts key information from users or shoppers including, name, location, type of work, etc.
- Ensure your emails can receive replies since the lack of responses removes some authenticity from your message.
4. Create Attention-Grabbing Subjects
What you put in the subject line can make a huge difference in enticing the recipient to open, delete, or report your email as spam.
Because of these reasons, you have to create subject lines that can convince the recipients that your email is valuable and can help them out.
However, make sure your subject lines are short. Avoid cramming in too many details.
Keep them short and simple yet interesting and engaging. This is where you can put your sales and marketing skills to good use.
5. Practice Web Writing
Writing compelling copy for emails is similar to writing for the web. Recipients want to read messages that allow them to scan for information quickly and find and understand the most important points as soon as possible.
The most essential web writing practices you should apply in your emails include:
- Using words your target audience use
- Making sentences and paragraphs engaging and conversational
- Employing bullets and subheadings to make email scannable
- Using short paragraphs
- Following a logical structure
Lastly, avoid being spammy. Do not use multiple exclamation points and never capitalize the subject line and any sentence in the body.
If your email comes out as spammy, you will end up turning off the recipient. Moreover, the spam filters will pick this up and flag your message.
When many of your messages are flagged, your account might likely get blacklisted.
6. Optimize Emails for Mobile Devices
A recent study found out that 81% of email recipients prefer to open their messages on their smartphone or tablet. Due to this reason, you have to ensure your emails look good on the desktop and are mobile-friendly at the same time.
Here are a few tips for optimizing your emails for mobile devices:
- Keep the subject line under 30 characters.
- Place your best, most interesting content at the beginning of the subject line to ensure the recipient reads it immediately.
- Include a pre-header text to help the recipient get a good idea of what the email is about.
- Put your call to action or CTA at the top to ensure the recipient reads it immediately.
- Use at least a 12-point font size so that recipients won’t have to zoom in to read the text on their smartphone.
Where to Learn More
To learn more about how you can make your designs more user friendly, consider taking these online courses:
- Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love
- UI Design Patterns for Successful Software
- Mobile User Experience (UX) Design
If you’re new to user experience design, check out the beginner’s course on How to Become a UX Designer from Scratch, or visit the world’s largest open-source library of UX literature over at the Interaction Design Foundation.
