On any given day, our inboxes are flooded with emails. 

And many of these emails appear to us as a task to deal with or something to ignore. 

The world of email marketing is extremely competitive – you are fighting for space in someone’s immediate interest and that’s a tough job, especially in today’s world. 

But when done well, email marketing is extremely powerful. 

As a top Email Marketing Agency, here are our five top tips for success

Segmentation

If you have more than 5k subscribers then you need to segment.

The whole point of segmentation is to provide your readers with personalised and relevant content. So, you’ll need to create targeted email campaigns as well as segmenting your list, so it does require some leg work but it’s worth it. 

The success of emails is all about personalisation and relevance and segmentation has been proven to radically increase open and click rates. 

And the success of your email marketing is imperative to, well, the success of your email marketing. 

Email providers like Gmail and Outlook will chart your engagement, open and click rates to judge the authority of your emails. 

So, when your audience becomes unengaged, your reputation will become negatively affected and your emails will be less likely to appear at the top of their inbox so less people will engage with your emails and so on. 

There are tons of ways that you can segment your audience to improve your audience engagement such as gender, customer type (business vs personal), buying frequency, past purchases and more.

You can segment by basically anything that naturally divides your audience. But, arguably, the most important way for you to segment your email audience is active vs inactive audience members. 

To start, take your lowest engagement and send a retargeting email in which you ask them whether or not they want to stay signed up to your mailing list. 

You should then send a follow up email, roughly one week later, that gives people the option to opt out. 

Once you’ve filtered out your unengaged customers, your click and open rates should level out, as should your reputation. 

The most important thing is making your email content relevant to the person who’s reading it, which brings us on to automations.

Automations 

Automation emails are a sure-fire way to ensure that your customers feel like your emails are personal to them. 

They are an opportunity for you to say thank you, get more information about them like their birthday, age, gender – information that can better instruct your segmentation. 

Automations are an easy way to engage with your audience in a personal manner as they are automatically sent to any audience member who engages with your business in a specific way. 

Automations should include…

• A welcome email for people who have signed up to your mailing list – this email should say thank you, give a little information about your business and ask for a little information about your customer 
• A welcome email for first-time purchasers – people who give their email address whilst making a purchase are different from those who give their email without purchasing because they already know your brand, so this email should just be a thank you
• An abandoned cart / browser email – this is the classic “did you forget something?” and an opportunity to entice your customer with an offer like 10% off 
• A post-purchase email – this is where you might ask for feedback from a customer who has made a recent purchase or plug your social media accounts and ask them to tag you in a photo 
• A lapsed customer email – this is for people who at some point in the past made a purchase from you, it’s a little reminder to let them know you’re still here and a great opportunity to promote an offer that lets them know they are a valued customer

When you create your automations you should have a clear idea in mind of who these emails will reach and what you would like the outcome to be. 

What’s the action you would like them to take? 

Goal Setting

Recipients spend between 8-11 seconds reading emails, so there’s no space for anything unengaging. 

Yes, this comes down to content but first, it comes down to goal setting. 

Before you begin to create an email, ask yourself “why am I sending this email?”

• What do you want your readers to gain from it? 
• Why should they open it? 
• Would you open it? 
• What have you gained from the email? 

Of course, you want people to buy – that’s why you do any sort of marketing, but you can’t afford to be one-track minded, especially when it comes to email. 

Email is about building authority, a reputation, it’s about gaining trust through the email so they open your emails in future. 

Take emails from fashion brands. 

When you receive an email from Pretty Little Thing, you seldom think “oh god, here comes another email to make me want to buy their new in’s”, you think “hell yeah I want to know how to rock double denim”. 

Which leads us on to content.

Content

What’s Inside

As a rule of thumb, your email content should be 80% value and 20% promotional. Meaning, you’re only trying to sell your products as the primary message in 20% of the emails you send out. 

Don’t panic. 

You can still include secondary messages that are commercial i.e. “p.s. don’t forget about our sale”. However, the bulk of your email content should be of value to the reader i.e. how to, updates on your business, directing them to blog posts you’ve written, editorial content, UGC etc. 

This is how you build up a reputation and gain trust with your readers – they want to open your emails because they know there’s something valuable in there… and you tease them with the subject line. 

That being said, commercial emails are important and it’s worth having a few banked like new in, sale, best sellers so if you’re ever caught short you know there’s an easy template you can bang out and send. 

But generally, you should aim for the content you release to be succinct across all channels. So a plan is always helpful. 

Subject line

Subject line should be 5-6 words that tell the reader what’s inside the email.

Tips: 

Ask questions

Use verbs

Use numbers

Use emojis 

Using the above techniques draws the eye in and makes people want to open the email, whether that’s because they want the answer to the question or they want your 5 top tips for healthy meals on a budget or they like your use of the love heart emoji. 

But, beware of spam traps in your subject lines. 

The use of things like “FREE” and “REMINDER” or “HELP” are likely to trigger your email as spam, which won’t do anything for your reputation. 

A great tool for checking whether your subject line is likely to be viewed as spam is litmus.com. 

But overall, your subject line should give an insight as to what’s inside your email, without giving too much away that nobody is bothering to read it. 

Design

The design of your email is crucial considering the lack of time people spend reading emails. 

If you have an eye catching design, people will be more likely to give your email their time. 

You should be aiming for a 50/50 text/image split, with simplicity, clarity of what you want the person reading the email to do and focus. 

Each time you receive an email, you should know at the moment you open it whether or not you are being asked to buy, and if so what products. 

The first third should form a visual funnel that leads the eye down to the CTA so it feels natural to click there, rather than it being some sporadic addition to the content. 

Also, engaging CTA’s don’t just rely on ‘buy now’ or ‘see more’ or ‘shop now’. 

The header of your email should include a top navigation menu – some people won’t bother reading your email but they’ll  be reminded that you exist when they receive it. 

They might open it just to click on your header (which should always link to your homepage) so instead why not capture that with a menu, direct them to women’s, men’s, sale, new, last chance or whatever your categories are. 

Your design should be clear and focused but it is okay, and often beneficial, to include a secondary message. 

For example if you are using your email to promote what’s new, there’s no reason why you can’t direct people to your sale items also. Likewise, if you’re sending out a round up of your blog posts for the last month, you can include a secondary message that directs people to your new products. 

Timing 

They often say “timing is everything”, and we agree. 

Our fifth and final key to successful email marketing is the time at which you send your emails and there are some best practices.

Typically not Mondays or Fridays because these aren’t typically days when people are thinking about reading their emails. On Monday’s, people are usually catching up on admin in the office and on Friday people are heading home and putting away their screens. 

You should increase the frequency of send around payday when people are more likely to make purchases. You should also choose to send commercial emails around the end of the month when people are getting toward payday, rather than mid-month when people are saving their pennies. 

Over time, the best practices for the timing of sending your emails has changed but in a recent article, the data shows that the best times are 8am and 4pm – perhaps because these are times when people are looking for a distraction i.e. on their commute and more likely to make purchases. 

Some email applications offer a service by which they will automatically send your emails out at times that they deem to be the best for engagement but truthfully, there is no right or wrong answer since every email list is made up of people who have different habits and different tendencies, so it’s not one size fits all. 

In conclusion

There’s clearly a lot of power in email marketing.

It’s the perfect opportunity to use long-ish form content to engage with your audience and a place where you have real creative freedom. 

But if neglected, your email marketing reputation can decline… and fast. 

These five keys to successful email marketing are a great place to start when it comes to taking control of your emails to ensure you’re getting the best out of this incredible platform. 

Bio – The Good Marketer is a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generates conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.