How to Nail your Email Marketing Strategy in 2021


In this article, we will explore some email marketing tips that you need to be using in your campaigns to make the most of the permission that your leads have given you. Leveraging these tactics will help you build brand awareness, brand equity and increase your revenue.   

Back in the days, when marketers got their hands on email for the first time, you had 99% open rates because people opened just about anything. Then slowly, that changed as you had people collecting lists and selling them. 

Marketers were buying these lists, and all of a sudden, the inbox was a place that was full of spam emails. Since then, the regulations changed the laws, and you need permission to send an email. 

In my personal opinion, it’s one of the most effective tools that you can use to build your brand as it has an excellent return on investment. It is a useful tool, and anyone with a business should add email to its arsenal today. 

Email marketing may sound easy, but you need to keep in mind specific tips to achieve the most for your campaigns. 

Here are 8 tips that can help you skyrocket your next campaign:

Test your Headlines.

Your headline is the door to your email, and you have a couple of seconds to hook your audience with your headline. That piece of text has the power to encourage a recipient to open your email. 

Every email is competing for our attention, so crafting a compelling subject line is extremely vital for a robust email marketing campaign. I get many emails every day, so I scan the headlines, and if it is not something that compels me to look at the body of the email, I delete it.

But, how can you craft an email headline?

Most email providers have split test capabilities where you can write a couple of headline variations, and they will test that out with a segment of your audience.  

Based on data, they’ll then send the email with the most successful headline. Almost every email marketing provider has many great tools to improve your marketing efforts, so test them out to have a competitive advantage and get ahead of the game.

Leverage Text only Emails.

Every day hundreds of polished emails with beautiful visuals arrive at different inboxes and grab our attention but fail to convert. An email environment is where you want to read messages from friends, family, and work colleagues. 

The most valuable emails that we find in there are not these tremendous looking emails because, in reality, most of them are more like advertisements. 

In contrast, when we scan through our emails, we’re looking for these text-only emails that we see from a familiar name, and that’s when we give our most attention to that email. Think about the environment that you’re in and provide a text-only email that feels more personal. 

Craft an email that feels like coming from a friend or a family member, and your audience is far more likely to give you attention. Take the time to focus on the copy, and don’t try to polish it up with unnecessary images. 

Use concise body copy. 

There are marketers out there that use long-form content within their body copy, and they might have some great techniques that they use to get higher conversion rates and click-through rates.  

As a reader, I appreciate a concise copy that guides me to learn more and click to wherever I want to. I’m going to invest my time in this piece of content so having all the essential information within one or two paragraphs is crucial.

Less is more in most cases. As a marketer, spend your time crafting an entertaining or informative email that adds value to the recipient. Remember to create a dense and concise email copy and have a simple call-to-action at the end to make them convert. 

Repurpose your content.

Content marketing is vital for your brand’s growth. You spend a lot of time creating all these blog posts, Facebook posts, podcasts, etc., and there is a way to take advantage of this library even more efficiently.

People subscribed to your email list to hear from your brand. Setting up a drip campaign that will remind users of this valuable content will ensure that they will not forget you. Craft a sequence of emails with your past content in a text format and hit that send button,

You can do this over two weeks or two months, or even a year, and what you’ll find is that although a lot of people that downloaded your lead magnets might not be ready to buy but chances are at some stage over the next year, they will be more open to that.

If you are there consistently in their inbox over time, giving them valuable time, again and again, you will be top of mind when it comes to their buying decisions.

Leverage storytelling. 

Storytelling is perhaps the most effective way to communicate with an audience because of how people digest information. When it comes to a story, a different part of the brain opens up, and according to Yuri Hassan (TedX speaker), people are 22 times more likely to remember a story than fact-based information.

Remember that every email has a point to make or a lesson to deliver. Wrapping that up in a story is far more likely to become more compelling so that your audience will remember your brand subconsciously. 

Take the time to create a story using experiences you have had or heard about, and add these elements to your emails to craft a compelling copy.

Segment your audience.

As you develop your brand and your business strategy, you might find that you have multiple customer avatars. You might have just one customer avatar, and they have numerous problems. Whichever the case, as a marketer, you should deliver a different kind of experience to each user based on these profiles or pain points.

Segmentation is the answer to your problem. By gathering as much information and data as possible, you can create a different group of people and target them accordingly with unique content.

To do that, you can create a landing page that helps users sign up while giving you some information about themselves. Another great way to start with segmentation is by using quizzes and questionnaires.

Most email marketing services have a diversity of tools that can help your brand with the segmentation process, and if used correctly, they can have an enormous impact on your campaigns.

Use a customer journey map. 

Now this follows on a little bit from the last point, which was about segmentation. You need to understand the journey that your customer is on and create a customer journey map. 

What steps do they need to take to become a customer of your brand? Where have they come from, and where will they go after you’ve helped them solve their problem?

If you understand this journey, then you can craft a personalized experience that they need to go through on route to solving that problem. Understand each step that they take, and use that within your email copy to guide them.

The solution can be a great resource in the form of a lead magnet that teaches them how to overcome a particular scenario. Follow up with an email drip series telling subscribers about all of the different types of problems and all sorts of solutions.

Keep your email list clean. 

Crafting an email list doesn’t stop when you acquire these emails. Lists decline by 20–30% every year. Many subscribers will never open your emails, and up to one third will not click your call to action. 

So, what can you do about that?

Make sure to remove unengaged subscribers from your email list so that you can market only to people who want to hear from your brand. Some people provide fake email addresses to get that lead magnet.

They’re not going to see any of the content you send and what this does to your email is it affects your open rates. Ιf enough emails are being tagged by people as spam, then that could end up in the spam folder, affecting everybody on your list. 

The solution? 

You need to ensure that your list is as clean as possible.

A great way to do this is once a year, run a re-engagement campaign and send out a series of emails, and if a group of people doesn’t touch those emails in that time, you could remove them from your list. 

Keeping your list clean will increase your open rates and all the metrics that email providers look towards. A healthier list will ensure that you can create better relationships with your audience as they are more engaged users. 

The Takeaway

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness and brand equity. A plan is essential for this tool to work, and you need to consider every aspect strategically. In the marketing landscape, everything is competitive, and you are competing for that attention.

Make your emails easy to read, and take the time to understand your audience’s pain points. Leverage every single element within your email to make your campaigns as efficient as possible, so you convert cold leads into happy customers.

Αs always, I would love to hand it back over to you, and I would love to hear about your experiences when it comes to emails. 

Let me know in the comments below. Until the next one, keep sending…

——————————————————————————————————————————-

Alex is a content writer at Moosend. Coming from an architecture background, he took the leap of faith in the digital marketing world and never looked back. In his free time, you will find him taking photos in places around the world. Find out more on LinkedIn.

Categories