How to Improve Your Email Marketing in 2017 1) Send emails to lists that want to hear from you. Nothing is less personal than receiving a “Dear Customer” or “Dear First Name” email, so test every email to make sure you’re sending to recipient names. Stop sending emails on Tuesdays. This is evidence that the inbound marketing methodology is working for email marketers. Engagement rates plummet if recipients don’t open your first email, so if they continue ignoring you, the probability of them ever opening your messages is going way, way down. Stop sending graymail, and listen to what people are telling you by not opening your emails. Test different emails to see if you can improve your open rates. 10) If people mark you as spam, immediately stop sending email and identify the source of the complaints. For best results, customize and personalize email subject lines and experiment with emojis. Every year, engagement rates start to slip, and it gets harder to reach people’s inboxes.
Certainly email is not dead, but it is getting harder to do well. HubSpot Postmaster and Email Engineering Director Tom Monaghan distilled his wisdom into a set of guidelines for email marketing for growth in 2017 at INBOUND last year. Read on to learn what strategies you should start implementing, absolutely avoid, and keep up in 2017 and in years ahead.
How to Improve Your Email Marketing in 2017
1) Send emails to lists that want to hear from you.
If you have email lists with low rates of engagement activity, stop sending to them. Every time you send to a list with low open and engagement rates, it hurts your domain reputation and your chances of connecting with other potential customers.
Monaghan said it best in his talk: “You are what you eat, and so is your marketing.” When you receive tons of emails from brands you don’t engage with, constantly deleting them or marking them as “read” is most likely tiresome. Empathize with your subscribers and treat their inbox the way you would want your inbox treated.
2) Have a goal for each email before you press “send.”
If you don’t have a goal in mind for the emails you’re sending, the recipients won’t know what the goal is, either. Once you define a goal for your email sends, you can define success and build a list to make that happen.
Goals for your emails could include a contact filling out a longer form for a gated content offer to provide your team with more information about their organization, or redeeming a promo code for a purchase on your website.
Give recipients options in your messages, such as calls-to-action and links in text, so they have multiple avenues to achieve your goal. Everyone’s behavior is different, so make your emails flexible.
3) Personalize and test your emails.
Email personalization really works. For example, back in 2014, we found that emails with the recipients’ first names in the subject lines had higher clickthrough rates than emails that didn’t.
When it comes to personalizing your emails, stick with the basics. Personalize according to recipient names and company names, but to avoid being creepy, leave it at that, urges Monaghan.
Nothing is less personal than receiving a “Dear Customer” or “Dear First Name” email, so test every email to make sure you’re sending to recipient names.
4) Send emails from a personalized account.
Don’t send emails from a “noreply” email account. Personalization works on your end, too. Boost your engagement by personalizing the “from” email address to drive replies from subscribers to a real person instead of “noreply@company.com.”
5) Experiment with sending emails on different days of the week.
Stop sending emails on Tuesdays. Seriously, stop.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are the most popular days to send email, but they’re oversaturated with messages that might be overwhelming your subscribers. If you want your emails to be opened, try sending them on Mondays and Fridays. Emails with calls-to-action perform well on Saturdays, so don’t be afraid to send emails on the weekend,…
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