Even though social media is largely increasing its influence in the world of digital marketing, email marketing still remains the most personal form of communication.
However, email marketing has become a lot more difficult to grasp than a few years ago. Nowadays, if you don’t meet your audience’s needs and requirements or catch their attention immediately, your email will most likely end up in their spam folder or marked as read.
That is why we decided to compile a comprehensive list of the best email marketing tips for 2018.
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Differentiate existing audience from prospective
Imagine meeting someone for the first time in your life and starting a conversation with them. It might be a rather pleasant conversation but is not laid-back because you two don’t really know one another.
Then, an hour after your conversation ended, you meet an old friend of yours. You hug each other, joke and laugh and then you decide to go for a drink. In the bar, you have a great time together and keep talking for hours.
These two conversations simply cannot be the same. That is exactly how you are supposed to differentiate between the audience that you are sending an email to for the first time and the audience that is already on your mailing list. The former is a new acquaintance, while the latter is an old friend.
A practical way to implement this idea and even increase profits on your most engaged and profitable audiences, is by routing your traffic through more than one delivery vendor. Use high-end ESP or SMTP vendor for your less engaged list (prospects), such systems are more expensive, and use an additional vendor, such as Amazon SES, which is a top tier email delivery platform, with a very attractive low-cost pricing model but with strict bounce rate policy for your clean engaged audience (clients list).
Make sure to take into account the difference between your relationships with your existing and prospective audience when crafting and sending emails, and you will do yourself a huge favor.
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Personalize and Segment
Nowadays, everyone is trying to sell something. Our inbox is loaded with dozens of emails from who-knows-what-company trying to sell us who-knows-what.
When we open an email, we want to see our name in it. If we are addressed personally, we are much more likely to respond.
However, you should dive even deeper and try to separate your audience into several categories.
Imagine the difference between talking to your spouse and your child.
Even though you know both of them and call them by their names, you will not talk to them in the same manner. You should bear this in mind when writing to your already existing audience.
Segment your audience based on their needs, profile info, website activity, location, responsiveness and so on. This method will be very helpful to you in the long run since it will allow you to devise different strategies according to your audience’s characteristics.
Therefore, personalized and segmented emails will simply be a must in 2018.
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Visualize your content
Over 80% of the information that we get is visual. In that sense, people are spoiled and they expect the content to be visually appealing.
One of the most important email marketing strategies is to include visual content in your email – videos, photos, animations or GIFs. Email service providers are increasingly allowing this feature, so you should take advantage of it as soon as possible.
Build your own email list and keep it clean
It is very important to have your own audience. Yet, it can be difficult and time-consuming to create a list of people who are genuinely interested in your product or service, but it is the only way to stay truly relevant to those who receive your emails.
It is much better to have a shorter list of people who will be engaged by your emails than to send them out to random email addresses.
Also, from time to time, you should clean your mailing list. You can do this by asking your audience to reconfirm their subscription and then delete all those who no longer want to receive your emails.
This might seem counterproductive, as you would probably like to see a long mailing list. However, it will pay off in time. Remember – quality over quantity. Read more about lists management!
Use your own IP address
Most email service providers offer a pool of shared IP addresses that you can send emails from.
Now, if your emails are sent from the same IP that a dozen other companies use, your reputation will depend on theirs. If one of them spams their audience from an IP that you use, your emails will be recognized as suspicious too.
Keep in mind that your IP is directly associated with your reputation. That is why you want to have your own IP address or more of them if you have a large audience. It might be slightly more expensive, but it is definitely a safer option.
Measure and analyze by using KPIs
If you invest a lot of time, effort and money in an email campaign, it is only natural that you want to keep track of its performance.
In the world of digital marketing, measuring your success is much easier when you use key performance indicators. Some of the most relevant KPIs are click through rate (CTR), conversion rate, bounce rate, list growth rate, overall ROI, etc.
Conclusion
There you go! Those were some of the best email marketing tips to stay relevant in 2018.
If you follow them and carefully tailor your campaign around your audience’s needs and desires, you will see outstanding results very soon.
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