Just like any other online marketing strategy, your email marketing strategy too needs fine-tuning.
But when making tweaks, it’s always better to go with research findings than with your own assumptions.
And that’s what we’ll see in this post … we’ll look at 5 data-backed email marketing tips that will help you maximize your email channel ROI.
Let’s get started.
1. Writing winning welcome emails
Welcome emails generate four times the total open rates and five times the click rates compared to other bulk options (Via Experian)
It doesn’t matter whether you run an online store or sell a SaaS offering, your welcome email is your first and best chance to impress your subscribers.
Despite being popular for their effectiveness, many companies don’t send welcome emails at all.
Or, they don’t send the welcome email as soon as they should. Too late, and the subscribers don’t remember opting in.
Experian says:
Experian’s report also suggests handy ways of improving the performance of welcome email.
Expanding the welcome email into a welcome email series and including a link to the preference center are two great tactics.
The first one helps warm up the subscribers and the second one helps gather more data about them (so you can do better segmentation).
Chad White, the author of Email Marketing Rules, points out in his book how delayed welcome emails cause higher SPAM reporting, and suggests sending them immediately upon subscription.
White also recommends optimizing the welcome emails according to the source of acquisition.
He explains that a subscriber who optins using your homepage signup is a potential customer and will appreciate a generous offer in the welcome email.
Whereas, someone who opts in on the checkout page is aware of your brand and won’t particularly need an incentive in the form of an offer in the welcome email.
So go back your welcome email and look for ways to improve it.
Try creating a welcome/onboarding series of 3 emails and see how your subscribers engage with it.
2. Personalizing emails
Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10% (Via Aberdeen)
When people talk about email personalization, they mostly talk about adding a name to the subject line and email body, which it surely is.
But this is not all that’s there to it.
As John Bonini of Litmus pointed out in his webinar, email personalization can be as simple as making a meaningful offer.
Bonini gives the example of Dollar Shave Club.
He explains how this company personalizes the email experience without needing the [first_name] tag.
Here’s the email’s personalized message:
“Hey, before we go and ship this box, want us to save you a trip to the store? Whaddya need? Shaving cream? Hair gel?”
If you want to start with email personalization, read our earlier post How to Make an Automated Email “Feel” Personal (and Why You Should) where we’ve covered this topic in-depth.
3. Powering email marketing with marketing automation
56% of companies currently use an email marketing provider and are 75% or more likely to be purchasers of marketing automation software over the next year (Via VentureBeat)
Most email marketing services let you send emails at pre-defined times.
For example, if you run a weekly newsletter, you can schedule emails to be sent at specific days for several upcoming weeks.
This is just setting up an autoresponder, and this is the most you can do with an email marketing service.
A marketing automation software, on the other hand, enables you to send emails when a user performs a specific action.
In fact, a user’s action triggers such emails.
A good example is that of Amazon’s.
If you’ve ever failed to complete a purchase on Amazon, you should have got Amazon’s abandoned cart email.
Basically, marketing automation tools let you define workflows, for instance, you could setup a rule like:
“If a user does X, do Y.”
A real-life rule would be:
If a user misses the live webinar event, send them a recording.
You get the idea, right?
As you can see, marketing automation triggers an email based on the subscriber’s activities, and so such emails come across as highly relevant and engaging to the subscriber.
This naturally boosts a their response rates.
As your business grows, you will reach a point where you’ll need a good marketing automation software to take your email marketing to the next level.
If you’re at it already, look up for one now.
4. Sending segmented campaigns
Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue. (Via DMA)
Segmented campaigns are campaigns that go out to specific segments in an email list.
For example, if you subscribe to an online course marketplace like Udemy, you’ll only want to get email updates about the subjects you want to learn, and not about the 1000s of others that are taught on the platform.
Such targeted updates are nothing but segmented campaigns and are only possible with the right segments in an email list.
Creating advanced segments requires sophisticated lead generation tools, but you can start with whatever segmenting options your email marketing service offers.
Most services, for example, will let you slice your list based on the subscriber’s activity, location, gender, and more.
This information too can help you a lot in creating segmented campaigns.
If you haven’t started with even basic segmentation, do so now.
The more you delay, the more revenue you’ll lose.
5. Using content calendars
Only 49.5% companies maintain a content calendar year-round. (Via Litmus)
While an email marketing plan or an email content calendar isn’t a must-have in your email marketing toolkit, creating one can improve each of your email campaigns.
Planning your emails helps ensure that each email goes out on time, and that you have enough resources to execute each campaign.
In their simplest form, email content calendars are your email sending schedules.
But you can use them to store a lot of other information as well, just like HubSpot does.
In their email calendar, HubSpot records a lot of details like the recipient’s persona, the segments the campaign is sent to, personalization elements, and so on.
If you start documenting your emails in a similar way, imagine how much information you’ll have at the end of a full email cycle.
This information could come in handy when you plan future campaigns.
Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch.
All you need to do is to make a copy of HubSpot’s email planner template.
So there’s no reason to not try, right?
Wrapping it up…
That’s it for the top email marketing statistics to reshape your email marketing strategy.
And it doesn’t matter whether you start by planning your email schedule for the entire year or by enriching your subscriber’s onboarding experience with a welcome series, start somewhere.
Need a push in the right direction?
Grab a free trial of Sendlane and get started with your first welcome series with personalization AND automation.
You’ll be surprised by how easy-to-use this email marketing service is.
Plus, it has all of the best tools and features to give your email campaigns additional mileage with a little optimization.
So, have you ever come across an email marketing stat that changed how you approach email marketing?
Share in the comments below.
Jimmy Kim
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This is a great article on email marketing.
I particularly like the part about segmentation. Sometimes you want to send a different email to those who previously opened your emails from those who didn’t.
Because these people are at different levels of communication with you.
It enables you to be more relevant.