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How to Improve your Email Marketing

How to Improve your Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the oldest yet most effective digital marketing tools. Reaching at least 3.8 billion people per year, according to a December 2018 study by the Radicati Group, this provides marketers with a practical, inexpensive way to generate leads, drive conversions, and retain customers.

Unfortunately, many small and medium-sized businesses still struggle with email marketing. While the majority of these businesses use email, only a small fraction can say they’ve mastered the channel, with most still struggling to get meaningful ROI. Below, we look at seven proven tips to help you improve your email marketing returns.

Begin with a clean Email List

Every email list loses a bit of quality every year. Between people changing their addresses and customers moving to new email providers, you’re guaranteed to find a few obsolete contacts on your list. It’s your job to regularly audit the list and weed out incorrect and outdated addresses.

Aside from that, take steps to grow your list. Find a useful lead capture tool, get your opt-in forms out there, and consider giveaways to win new sign-ups.  And, never, under any circumstance buy a list and expect it to be valuable. More often than not, it will get you banned from your email marketing service.

Get your content right

Since emails need to be fairly short, every word counts. So, you want to be keen on what you say and how you say it. Optinmonster has three useful tips.

First, always sound like a real person; avoid marketing jargon and be conversational. Secondly, appeal to emotions; use sensory words to help your readers see and feel the picture. Third, sprinkle your copy with power words to elicit a reaction.

Use psychology to drive action

The human brain is designed to react in predictable ways. Email marketers can take advantage of this to drive action. For instance, Fear-Of-Missing-Out (FOMO) approaches such as scarcity and urgency are guaranteed to earn a higher CTR. Other psychology-driven strategies to help you get more clicks are; color choice, pictures of faces, social proof, and personalization.

Invest in email automation

Only 49% of companies use email automation. This is unfortunate considering that automation has the potential to turnaround your email marketing fortunes. According to a recent study by the Epsilon Email Institute, triggered emails have 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates compared to regular emails. Also, automation boosts qualified leads by 451%, improves revenue by 85%, and increases productivity by 69%.

Use images/video in Emails

In one of his most popular blog posts, celebrated digital marketer Jeff Bullas reveals how he increased email conversions by 344%, thanks to images and videos. The trick is simple, make sure that each email you send out has at least one image. Videos work too, but they can be slow. This makes quality images your best option. Consider GIFs and emojis as well. GIFs, for instance, boost conversions by 103%.

Follow industry best practices

Over the years, email marketing has shown a few patterns that marketers can use to remain competitive. For instance, always send welcome emails. Welcome emails have an incredible 81% open rate and 22-25% CTR! Additionally, send emails between 9-11 am and 3-5pm, on weekdays, for the best outcome. Above all, optimize your subject lines, use lead magnets, and always provide a CTA.

Test and improve

No marketing campaign is perfect. If you want to get maximum value from your email campaign, take time to observe, measure, analyze, and consistently test out different options. Some of the elements you want to test are; subject lines, CTAs, send times, content, and visual layout.

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These seven tips to improve your Email marketing alone might not triple or even double your email marketing revenue. But, they’re guaranteed to have a positive impact on your ROI.

How to Clean Your Email List

How to Clean Your Email List

You need a healthy email list to be successful at email marketing. Ongoing list maintenance keeps your deliverability high and conversion rates at an acceptable level. Use these tips to get the most out of your email list.

1. Purge Inactive Subscribers.

If too many people delete your emails or mark them as spam, all of your messages may go straight to the trash. Reach out to inactive people. Inquire if they still want the information and messages you provide. If not, take them off of the email list. If they’re interested later on, they know where to find you.

2. Be Consistent

You don’t have to email your list every day to see results. You do need to be consistent if you want to email your list once per week, try to stay with that pace. Focus on quality over quantity. You’re competing with countless other marketing messages in their inboxes.

3. Track Your Open and Click-through Rates

Do you know how many people opened your last email? Your click through rate? Pay close attention to your email stats. Track:

  • The type of emails that work best with your subscriber list
  • Open rates
  • Click-through rate
  • Device the email was viewed on

You can learn a lot about your subscriber preferences and use that information to improve with each message.

4. Provide Value in Exchange for the Email Sign-up

People have crowded inboxes, so you need a pretty good incentive to get space in there. If you run an e-commerce store, you can offer free shipping or a discount on their first order. For B2B companies, ebooks or a comprehensive guide to your industry is a good way to attract new subscribers.

Get the Maximum ROI From Your Email List

Get the Maximum ROI From Your Email List

Email marketing has the potential to, directly and indirectly, improve your revenue and growth rate. However, you may not be getting the maximum ROI out of your efforts. Use these suggestions to optimize your strategy, find new ways to grow email lists, improve conversions and increase your brand awareness.

Improve Your Sign-Up Form

Don’t skimp on your user experience. Put yourself in their shoes and go through the sign-up process. Is it clear what information the visitor needs to provide? Eliminate any ambiguity and find technical issues with your email subscription form before anyone uses it. Go short and simple!  Name and email are key and use a pop-up form to get more visibility.

Email Marketing Automation

Manually emailing your list might work when you have a few dozen people, but not when you have hundreds or thousands. Automate your workflow and scale your efforts no matter how many subscribers you have. Drip campaigns, transactional emails, and other triggered events can happen immediately upon subscription.

Give Subscribers a Signup Incentive

Want to give visitors a compelling reason to give you their email address? Put a signup incentive in place. The exact form takes depends on your industry and audience, but discounts for e-commerce shops and ebooks for B2B companies are 2 examples of ways to encourage interested parties to add their name to your list.

Keep It Simple

How much information do you ask from subscribers? For a basic B2C mailing list, stick with a name and email. In general, eliminate as many fields as possible to overcome any signup resistance.

Use Segmentation

Don’t treat your email list like a one-size-fits-all entity. Align your email subscribers with your buyer personas, specific demographics, the form they filled out or other differentiating information. When you have a segmented list, you can customize the messages going out to these users. They get more relevant emails, and you get better opportunities for conversion.

Deliver Value

Are you giving subscribers emails that they look forward to reading? If they’re ignoring your messages or rolling their eyes and sighing whenever you land in their inbox, you’re not going to get much out of your email marketing efforts. Make sure the content you include is relevant, timely, and the value is clear to the subscriber. Ask yourself if you would be happy to receive this type of email in your own inbox.

What’s your key next step from the above to improve your email marketing ROI?