6 Best Practices in Email Marketing for Smart Marketers in 2016

We can blame the data or the technology for the mistakes that we have been making otherwise if it was the data or technology things would have been similar for everyone. I mean every business! But why some of them soar high while some are doomed in darkness. Why for some emails are found to be the most classic way of communicating to the customer while others are found wasting time in creating world’s best emails that hardly yield any results though. There must be something we are missing out or maybe we have conducted the process in an absolutely wrong way. Emails are of course one of the most up-to-date and ground breaking technology for conveying your marketing message to your target audience, but spending all your time and money without a prudent approach will hardly make a difference even with this form of marketing. Your business may not even exhibit a marginal increase if you aren’t conducting it the right way! This is why in this article we have tried piling up the main areas that need your attention and can yield you some real awesome results while conducting email marketing.

Real-time Data based Personalization   

Not making apt use of the vast mines of data that is at your disposal in this all-so-digital world would be the worst thing a marketers can do even after going digital. Digital and data is co-related and that conducting digital marketing blindly without making the right use data is almost wasting all your time, money and intellect for barely getting on a platform everyone is working to get on.  I mean you will still be a part of the crowd as majority of businesses are digital now. So, again to make a difference you need to do things a little differently. In fact the term personalization was always based on real time data but we didn’t have the real time data the way we have now. And the idea is this kind of personalization is not something that’s going further than industry standards as this itself is as the industry standards, that’s a different thing the industry standard have become all-so-high and more specific. So, you need to make the most appropriate use of the real-time data such as shopping history, geolocation data etc for personalizing while keeping your marketing messages in context. There are a number of examples with specific figures supporting how personalization & contextualization are yielding results such as the one according to research conducted by Smartfocus that revealed about how the Entertainer could increase its returning customers from 14% to 60% in 12 months by offering personalized recommendations.’

Micromanaging the Data

“Personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates still 70% of the brands fail to use them!” – CMO.com

Overlooking things and not using or making most of the data that you already have on your customer base, you are only thwarting a great lift in the revenue generation that could have been easily managed. However! Yes! While handling the data you actually need to control its every part very minutely or say you actually need to micromanage it. Micromanagement of the data will allow you to use every bit of it helping you build your email specifically for the segments of the target audience you have created. This will eventually help your email marketing venture avoid giving an impression of yet again ‘Batch & Blast’ bit of marketing.

The Right Subject Line

You would find a lot of article or a lot of marketers telling you how the subject line of an email happen to be the most crucial part of an email. Talking about the subject lines, the most effective of them are found to have a few things in common such as they are precise, relevant, localized and of course personalized. To make it even more impactful, a number of smart marketers have started using emojis within subject lines and in fact this trick is proving to be effective, just that they should be used within the right context. Everything has an emotion attached to it and emojis help you convey that emotion making your messages to stand out from the bulk of emails that are in the inbox of the consumers email platforms.

Images & layout

The email service/ marketing cloud providers are consistently becoming more and more powerful making the use of the images and the layout of the email even more important components of email marketing. The user experience delivered by your each email should be aesthetically pleasing and that the consumer should be able to read easily while grasping things quickly. For your information, there are still a number of email providers that don’t show images within emails voluntarily i.e. without seeking the permission to display. This is why, in spite of images being crucial part of your email marketing, it should be your primary or the only way communicating the message, for chances are high that it can go unnoticed.

Personalizing You as the Sender

Its seems so robotic to receive a marketing message from the whole company or department and that consumers really love it if they aren’t treated as if they’re just another name for you. Believe it or not but if you want a successful customer retention rate and your customers to trust your brand, you must have a ‘familiar-face’ emailing them as that will instill this more than a computerized addressing.

The Tone & Manner of your Pitch

I don’t know how you find somebody throwing good words at you in a bad way but a lot of us hate it for sure! This is what! The language you use shows how you feel about the thing you are talking about and the person you are talking to! So, be smart at using the language! Make sure you are making use of the tone of the voice that fits your brand values. It’s always good to read your email text aloud while picturing yourself in the mind of the consumer who is reading your email. Think of how have you felt on receiving the content that you are sending in your emails. Every one of us is consumer of some brands, so I think figuring out what will work won’t be that difficult.

So!

Make sure you keep these ideas in mind while building your next email campaign and reap maximum ROI with your email marketing ventures.