4 ways to seriously up your email marketing game

Honing your email marketing approach is a truly worthwhile investment for any business and the payoff can be significant. However, along with that juicy ROI comes some fierce competition, and vying for attention in your customer’s inbox has never been more of a challenge.

Did you know, out of all the digital marketing channels (social, pay-per-click, search engine optimisation etc.) email marketing continues to offer one of the highest returns on investment?

So how can you make sure your emails stand out? It’s time to kick that competition to the kerb and connect with your email marketing list on a whole new level. Here’s how…

1. Make it mobile optimised

Mobile optimisation has been around for a while now, and it’s therefore quickly becoming the standard people expect when opening an email or browsing a website. Mobile optimisation essentially means that your email’s text and images can adapt to look good on smaller screens. In other words, the font must be legible and pictures shouldn’t be stretched.

If your campaigns aren’t optimised for mobile, you’re likely to see that unsubscribe rate go up and up. The stats show most people check their emails on their mobiles, so if you want to make a good impression, make your emails mobile optimised.

2. Encourage social sharing

Your email content doesn’t have to be confined to an email. In fact, if your content is really good, chances are the recipients will want to share it with all their pals. Make it easy for your readers to do so by adding social media sharing buttons to each section of your email. If it’s easy for a user to share content directly from an email, they are far more likely to do so.

It’s good practice to include social buttons to each of your social channels too. Put these buttons above the fold – that’s in the first three inches at the top of the email. You can also include a call to action in the body of the email, encouraging readers to follow you on social media, with written links to each channel. This can be a surprisingly effective way to boost your social following.

3. Use a conversational tone

You might have noticed the emails coming into your inbox are a little more friendly in tone these days. It’s no coincidence. Many big brands have found using a more human, approachable voice in their email communications has resulted in more consistent open and click-through rates.

Develop a conversational tone by writing more like you would actually speak to a customer. Think about the type of language you use and try to avoid long, overly formal sounding words. Even your calls to action can be a little more human. Think about writing ‘get in touch’ instead of ‘contact us’ or ‘come on in…’ rather than ‘view collection’ if you’re inviting someone to browse your e-commerce store.

By having a conversation with your customers you can build rapport, help them see that you understand their needs and frustrations, and develop a long-lasting and trusting relationship. It’s a personal touch, which leads us to…

4. Do it with dynamic content

Dynamic content is basically content within the email, such as words or images, which change depending on who the recipient is. Dynamic content is taking the personalisation of emails to a whole new level. Including the recipient’s name in the subject line and at the start of the email is nice, but there are so many other ways you can use dynamic content to impress your audience…

One example is location-based personalisation. In this scenario, you know roughly where your recipient is based and you can set the email content to automatically tailor to deliver a personal experience for them. If you have physical premises, you should share their local store’s location and opening hours, and even include a ‘how to find us’ link which shares a map and best-suggested route. If you run a travel related business, you could share information on the local weather forecast and details of any events happening in the area. You could also tailor your content to international audiences by automatically updating the currency or measurements from imperial to metric.

Taking the personalisation and dynamic content idea even further, you could look into iBeacon technology. This technology means when one of your customers is nearby you can send them a hyper-contextual email to attract them into your business. For example, a restaurant could offer 20% off the bill to people walking past during quiet periods.