Email marketing is always changing, but last year brought even bigger changes (don’t worry, they’re positive and exciting). To make sure you stay ahead of the game and send out email campaigns that really engage your subscribers, we’ve made a list of the top five email marketing tips for 2021.
The ‘best time to send’ has changed
The shift to working from home changed our daily work habits, and therefore changed peak subscriber scrolling times. Some companies even saw engagement increase when they changed their send-out day to Saturday or Sunday – previously less popular days. We love Mailchimp’s ‘send time optimisation’ function, which calculates the optimal time to send your emails, based on your subscribers’ previous open times. We recently used Mailchimp’s ‘time send optimisation’ function on our client Amazing Spaces newsletters, and the open rate went from 25.9% to 29.5%, benchmarked against an industry average of 19.17%.
Your communication must be more customer-oriented
As customers are focusing on their purchasing experience with a brand just as much as on the quality of the product, your emails must be as user-friendly as possible.
Firstly, it must be optimised for all devices (we loved this tweet which gives you a brilliant hack to optimise buttons for mobile). Secondly, use the customer’s language by navigating content with extra care to make sure you remain ethical and inclusive – focus on being more empathetic, humane, and create feelings of safety and comfort. Lastly, make sure your email campaign loads quickly on any gadget.
Personalisation goes beyond adding a first name to a subject line
“To make your subject lines stand out from the crowded inbox, personalization will be key. In fact, message personalization is the #1 tactic used by email marketers to increase engagement rates.” – Aine Devane, Manager International Marketing Automation, HubSpot.
To create truly personalised, purposeful subject lines, you need to look at your customer’s actions (the pages or content they’ve viewed), their demographic information (their age, interests, and industry), their interests, and their birthdays or anniversaries.
Your email list is key
“A great email list is one of the most valuable things you could have for your marketing. Investing time working on growing your email list will lead to an incredibly high return on your investment when you’re ready to sell a product or reach your customers.” – Emily Ryan of one of our favourites – Westfield Creative.
It’s so important to have a strategy to make up for lost contacts, because email marketing databases naturally degrade about 22.5% every year. This percentage increased in the initial months of the pandemic, with the rise in unemployment changing contact’s email addresses as they leave or move from a company (don’t worry – during the second half of last year it returned to normal levels).
There are many ways to grow your email list. You can post on social media to let your followers know your email is coming soon, hint at the value they will get from it, with a link to sign up (Mailchimp allows you to create a beautiful, free landing page that makes people want to join your audience). You can also add many different ways to sign up throughout your website: a pop-up, a ‘subscribe’ button, a link at the bottom of your email signature encouraging sign-ups, or a lead magnet which asks you to sign up in order to get the lead magnet.
80 – 90% of your content should be educational rather than promotional
This concept can be so easily forgotten or misunderstood, but instead of just selling your product, your emails should be useful to your readers, because only once you have their attention and trust can you market your product and services to them. This is why most of your newsletter should be educational, playfully enlightening or beautiful to look at, and only the remaining 10 – 20% should promote your business.
If you believe in the power of email marketing to grow your business as much as we do, send us a message and we can chat.