Here are 12 email marketing tips for your 2020 campaigns
2020 got off to a rocky start for everyone, don’t let this affect your email marketing strategy. Make 2020 the year you commit to learning about your audience. With so much data available, it’s easier than ever to create an individual user focussed, unique experience for each subscriber.
1. Increase your open rates.
The average open rate for all industries we analysed is 21.33%. However, you should look at your individual industry to see exactly where you should be aiming.
For example: religious emails tend to have one of the highest at around 27%, whereas vitamin and supplement based email campaigns only have around 15%.
To stretch your open rate beyond the industry average, start by revamping your:
- Subject line to really boost fascination and/or importance
- “From” field to feel like a personal conversation
- Preview text (pre-header) to explain the content of your email
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people are most likely to open personal emails, so creating a prompt connection with your subscribers is extremely important. Anything you can do to create a more personal relationship, you should. That means being completely transparent about who sends your emails and what’s going to be in them.
2. Excel at automated campaigns.
Automation doesn’t need to be robotic or generic – in-fact, quite the opposite. Automation can help take your 2020 email marketing goals reach new heights by freeing up your time and personalising your communications.
Start with some easily automated campaigns like:
- Welcome emails
- Thank you emails
- Transactional emails
- Birthday emails
Automated campaigns deliver better open and click rates because they’re timelier and more relevant to the customer. For example, a welcome email has on average a 50% open rate. This means that, compared to standard newsletters, they are 86% more effective!
3. Personalising your customer journeys.
Once you’re comfortable setting up automated campaigns, add automated customer journeys to your 2020 email marketing goals.
Also known as a drip campaign, automated journeys are timed to go out at different intervals, and they contain highly relevant content. It involves sending marketing information to prospects repeatedly over longer periods of time in order to nurture prospects or leads through the marketing funnel.
When a new user subscribes, you could send them a series of premade campaigns to introduce them to your business. You could also send timely product reminder emails when you think a subscriber hasn’t visited or purchased in a period of time and use this as a retention method.
Why not set up an automated re-engagement series?
4. Make it a high importance to connect with your subscribers.
In an increasingly digital world, people crave human connection.
Start by segmenting your subscriber list based on demographics like location, gender, age, and interests.
Next, revisit how you write your email content. Pretend you’re writing for an individual, not your full database. Your writing should sound more like a conversation with a person rather than marketing copy.
5. Make sure your emails are accessible to everyone.
Nobody wants to lose subscribers, just because they can’t read your email. By 2022, there will be 4.3 billion email users around the world. That figure includes people of all abilities and backgrounds. For example, 1 out of every 12 men and 1 out of every 200 women suffer from a colour deficiency. You can test your email for colour blindness on Litmus.
As part of your 2020 email marketing goals, try to make your campaigns as accessible as possible.
Follow guidelines such as:
- Sharp contrast ratios between text and backgrounds
- Using alt text to describe images – many people have images turned off by default, so having this alt text will help users understand the nature of the image. It will also help for subscribers with screen readers
- No flashing lights (Flashing Animated GIF’s) that could induce a seizure
- Including captions or scripts for videos
- Avoiding complex sentences and vocabulary
You could also break your list up into age groups and create campaigns with larger, bolder fonts for older audiences.
Dark mode has become a very popular setting that many people now have as a default on their devices. This is becoming increasingly difficult to manage as at current, there is no code or setting you can put in place to adapt the style of your email. You can however adapt your images to use a drop shadow to png icons or a boxed background colour to ensure these elements remain visible when dark mode is enabled.
6. Include some interactive elements.
Interactive content can help increase engagement because it encourages subscribers to click.
You don’t have to go above and beyond to include interactive elements. Instead, look for ways interactive features would fit into your overall email strategy. Reviews are the perfect place to start.
You could also send out interactive menus, image carousels, polls, and games. It could even be something as simple as a hover effect on a button!
7. Improve your click rate.
Getting your email opened is half of the struggle – but how can you get subscribers to click your links?
The average email click rate can range from 1% to almost 5%, so it’s essential to do everything you can to keep subscribers engaged if you want to produce the highest ROI from your marketing efforts.
Aside from following the other 2020 email marketing goals on this list, revamp your CTAs.
- Stick with a single goal and CTA for each email. Adding too many CTA’s or click through points will draw the customer away from clicking or they will click on a less important aspect of the email meaning your initial goals your goals will be missed.
- Use a prominent CTA button in a contrasting colour rather than a hyperlink.
- Surround your CTA button with plenty of whitespace, this has a better way of drawing attention.
8. Integrate your email marketing campaigns.
Too many marketers still create their email campaigns as a single use newsletter. Integrate your campaign with other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or SMS.
Analytics and integration options from email service providers makes it easy to track your subscribers around the internet and create personalised campaigns. Epitome Digital have a fantastic partnership with one of the best marketing platforms in the industry. Take a look at how we can help with your marketing automation.
9. Take your newsletters to the next level of automation.
Generic email blasts are a thing of the past. Today, people expect personalised content.
Even newsletters should include some personalised content. Start with some basic segmentation based on the information you have about your subscribers’ interests, behavior, and demographics.
Using our marketing platform, not only can you segment your data to send relevant emails to a portion of your database, but rather than creating multiple newsletters for multiple segments, why not create one newsletter with our genius blocks to show and hide elements of your email based on those segments. Smart marketing!
10. Set up a loyalty program.
Who doesn’t love to feel special?
If you don’t have a loyalty program, 2020 is a great time to start. If you do, make one of these 2020 email marketing goals to promote your program through mailer campaigns.
Loyalty programs aren’t just for big, luxury brands. You can also use them to collect information, prevent churn, and encourage word-of-mouth advertising.
11. Optimise your emails for mobile users.
Over 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, so optimisation is critical for engagement and ROI.
Yes, design plays a crucial role, but so do your copy, content, and media. Consider your subscriber’s state of mind when you send your campaigns.
Images and landing pages also need to load at lightning speed (especially as 5G coverage grows).
Copy should be straightforward. No fancy wordplay – just get to the point of what you’re wanting to push to the subscriber.
12. Avoid going into the users SPAM folder!
Finally, you can’t capitalise on your 2020 email marketing goals if your campaigns go straight to the spam folder or if subscribers are junking your emails.
Gmail recently started asking users if they want to unsubscribe from lists they haven’t opened in the past 30 days. Marketers should take a hint here and make sure to keep their lists clean.
Send out a re-engagement campaign. If subscribers don’t reply, it’s probably time to cut the cord.
Not only should you keep a clean mailing list, but the content of your email can also have a massive effect on your email and the dreaded spam folder.
So… In conclusion
Start with one or two of these 2020 email marketing goals and focus on getting them right.
Think of it like lifting weights: Proper form is better than lifting as much weight as possible, great technique takes time to master.
- Improve your open and click rates.
- Optimize the entire experience for mobile readers.
- Keep your mailing list clean.
- Set up automated campaigns and user journeys.
- Revamp your newsletters.
- Focus heavily on accessibility.
