Email marketing is a form of direct marketing in which companies approach their (potential) customers via email. The purpose of email marketing is to achieve a certain goal, such as generating sales, leads or increasing brand awareness. In this article, we provide 10 tips for your email marketing campaign.
Why email marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to get in touch with your (potential) customers. It is a direct and personal way of communicating, allowing you to reach your goals quickly and easily. With email marketing you can, for example:
- Inform your (potential) customers about your products or services;
- Stimulate your (potential) customers to make a purchase;
- Point your (potential) customers to offers or discounts;
- Keeping your (potential) customers informed about your latest news and developments.
Email marketing not only allows you to stay in touch with your customers. It also ensures that customers may be more likely to make a purchase from your website. A study by Gerritsen found that getting and opening e-mail newsletters ensures customer retention.
So email marketing is a very powerful marketing tool that you can use to achieve your goals. But how do you do it?
10 Tips for Email Marketing
1. Make sure you have a clear goal. What do you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign? Do you want to inform your customers about your latest product? Or do you want to let them know about an offer? Make sure your campaign has a clear goal so you can tailor your email to that objective.
2. An email should not only be fun to read, but also beautiful to look at. Use attractive images and a clear layout. Make sure your email is uncluttered so your reader won’t easily drop out.
4. Provide a strong call-to-action. If you want your reader to do something, you need to make that clear in your email. Make sure your call-to-action is clear and easy to understand. Examples of call-to-actions you can use are “buy now” or “read more.
5. Test your email before you send it. Make sure your email works well on different devices and in different email clients. Also, test your call-to-action so you can make sure it works.
6. It’s important to send your email at the right time. For example, if your email is about an offer, make sure you don’t send it too late. After all, you don’t want your reader to have already missed the offer. Don’t send the email too early either, this increases the risk that the reader might forget about the offer.
7. In recent years, more and more interactive elements have been added to email, such as videos, polls and chatbots. This makes the recipient more engaged with the email message and think about it longer. A study by Gerritsen on buying behavior after email marketing found that consumers are more likely to make a purchase after being engaged with an email. Putting a poll in the email makes them feel like they matter to the company and that their opinion counts. This makes them feel more involved and more likely to make a purchase.
8. More personalized content. To ensure that e-mail messages remain relevant to the recipient, more and more companies will start personalizing their content. This can be based on data they already have about the recipient, such as name, gender, age, location, etc. But also based on the recipient’s behavior, such as previous emails they have opened or links they have clicked. Personalization also makes consumers feel more engaged with the email and the company. So this is another important tip to use in your email marketing so that readers will convert to purchase.
9. The subject line is the first thing the recipient sees when they open an email. Therefore, it is important that it is engaging and grabs attention. This year we will see more and more companies paying more attention to this, for example by experimenting more with emojis and speaking subject lines.
10. More attention to data. Email is a powerful tool, but it is not always clear how effective it is. That’s why more and more companies will invest in measuring data in 2022. This can be done, for example, by tracking open and click behavior, but also by applying A/B testing. This way, they can more accurately determine what works and what doesn’t, and improve their email campaigns.