Quick guide to a successful email strategy
We recently updated this still very actual article. Enjoy the read!
We recently updated this still very actual article. Enjoy the read!
Did you know people receive 121 emails a day on average? Some of them get read, some get discarded into people’s spam folder or junk mail. How many are actually valuable?
The goal of this blog post is to show that email marketing is still a sound practice and represents a higher potential return on investment if accompanied by a well-thought-out strategy that considers users’ needs.
A large majority of the population has an active email address, and 293.6 billion emails are sent and received every day. To what extent should marketers be using this tool?
Text messaging and other instant messaging channels (like the chatbot Bardagi Real Estate developed with us) are very popular amongst Millennials. That said, when it comes to being contacted by brands, email is still the preferred option by all age groups, Millennials included. In fact, according to a 2019 study by Adestra, 77.8 percent of people 19–34 state they prefer being contacted by email.
On the contrary, today email is still consumers’ preferred tool for being contacted by brands: It’s less intrusive than a phone call, mobile notification, or text message while still being accessible at all times. However, users are becoming increasingly demanding and expect to receive a personalized experience. This article from my colleague Edouard does a great job of explaining the importance of this kind of customer experience and offers solutions for effectively personalizing your communications. Basically, the more interesting and relevant the content is, the more recipients will remain subscribers and read your emails attentively.
Yes and no. In fact, it depends a lot on the industry, the content sent, and above all the recipient. Ideally you should test what works best for your business and, if your database is large enough, segment your audience by sending fewer or more emails depending on the frequency selected by the recipient. During your testing, in addition to evaluating the number of people who unsubscribe, it’s informative to calculate the average number of subscribers depending on whether your increase or lower your frequency. Several studies have demonstrated that these results will be highly unique to a particular brand and the behaviour of its consumers. It’s therefore important to find the frequency that’s appropriate for your brand. Sometimes doubling the frequency will clearly increase your sales even if the number of people who unsubscribe increases. There are a few content strategies that can mitigate these lost subscriptions.
According to statistics, 61.9 percent of emails are opened on mobile and 81 percent of users 18–24 use their mobile device to open their email.
It’s therefore mandatory to format your emails for mobile. Most email marketing platforms already have templates adapted for every screen size that enable previews to be generated depending on the user’s device. Finally, you can also send test emails that you can open on your own mobile devices in order to see how they appear
Email can be used to maintain a relationship with your prospects (lead nurturing) and support new customer acquisition. It’s also a good way of retaining users and increasing your customers’ value by offering products that complement their past purchases.
Email marketing is still the best channel for generating B2B revenue according to U.S. marketing professionals in 2018.
According to a Hubspot study in 2019, 73 percent of Millennials prefer receiving promotions or brand content by email. Several tactics for increasing the number of purchases after the reception of an email can be tested: email with a promotion, emailing a reminder after a shopping cart is abandoned, presenting a new product, etc.
This involves identifying points of contact, key communication moments for your profiles, and the message that should be sent to each one.
If you provide interesting content while offering incentives to your readers, they’ll be much more likely to read your email!
Before segmenting and personalizing, it’s essential to understand your audience in order to categorize it by profile. To achieve this, introduce tags in order to track your audience on your website and their activities after receiving an email:
With these tips, you can better understand, and therefore better respond to, your consumers’ needs while optimizing your marketing initiatives.
Once again, the magic of the web lies in the possibility of testing and optimizing, so don’t hesitate to test your email campaigns using A/B tests or trial runs and adapt your strategies depending on your results. Transmission times, email frequency, subject lines, content… Everything is testable and measurable!
Email is a way of communicating with your audience that can (and must) connect with your other owned, earned, and paid media platforms.
Today, marketing automation tools enable you to create a communication flow using several platforms: email, text, mobile device notifications, social media, etc. You can also connect your email or automated marketing tool to your CRM so that your customer service and sales teams know what communication is sent when. If you’re using an email tool that’s not connected with your CRM, be sure to link them so you can unify your data and get a unique perspective on your customers, thereby optimizing your marketing/business initiatives and internal processes. You can also adapt your mass media campaigns using the email addresses in your database. The purpose of all of this is to be able to speak coherently on every platform and become more effective and relevant.
This article contains a huge amount of relevant information for improving your email strategy. We’ve created a checklist in order to simplify things when it comes time for you to put it all into action. Why wait for tomorrow when you can get started today?