Email Marketing Guide
Email Marketing Trends and Best Practices For SaaS Platforms
Accelerate Your Email Marketing Campaign!
Email marketing is the hottest topic in 2021. Twitter acquired Revue, a newsletter platform for publishers in January this year. HubSpot acquired The Hustle, a media startup that specialized in newsletters in February. Facebook started testing a newsletter tool for publishers in March.
And when big players of the digital world started showing their interest in newsletters then it is obvious that the topic of email marketing gets heated in media channels. And that exploded the bomb of curiosity in other players to rethink their email marketing strategy. As a result, email marketing got more attention from marketing experts.
“Email marketers are sending 27% more emails than they then did pre-coronavirus.” — HubSpot
But planning, creating and getting success in every email marketing campaign is not a cakewalk, at all! That’s why today we are going to discuss some amazing email marketing trends and best practices that are still relevant in this year. So that it will help you to create a successful email marketing campaign for your brand to get better results.
Let’s take a look at our first most debated trend… and that is:
Storytelling empowers engagement
Storytelling is the most powerful technique to win the battle of engagement.
It touches the heart of customers. Email marketing allows us to meet our customers directly. And if they already have given us a chance to prove ourselves then it’s time to tell a story. A story that can help by educating them or by giving a suggestion that can add quality to their life.
But storytelling is incomplete without a personal touch that carries us to the next level of personalization!
Personalization matters
Yes! That’s true! It doesn’t matter your customers are from which corner of the world but they all are humans. We all are humans.
As a kindness, empathy and helping nature is inbuilt in our system, we all love to interact with people. So engaging through emails should be like meeting personally. No doubt, we are sending emails through digital platforms but, everywhere, there is a kind soul, behind every screen.
Giving a personal touch doesn’t take much effort from you. You only need an easier to use email marketing tool that has more personalized features. Especially for you.
“Personalized messages have an ROI(Return on Investment) of 122%.” — Instapage
Attractive themes give the best interaction
An attractive theme means, attractive brand!
It will help you to look better and stand out in a crowded market. And it is important too. Emails with beautiful graphics tend to catch more attention. But to catch more attention, we need to adopt the right timing.
Better timing means better results
People are busy! They are going busier day by day due to the ocean of content on digital platforms and if you want to get more attention then you’ve to adopt the right timing.
Timing that is suitable for your customers. And if you’re a global brand then you need to dive deeper into the timing section.
Generally the time just before and after office timing (8:30 am or 6–8 pm but not after 8:30 pm) works best.
But it may not work for you, so experiment with this segment and you’ll find a better timing with little effort.
Now we’ve discussed timing but what about the frequency of email campaigns? Should we send email campaigns daily, weekly or monthly?
Right frequency is a necessity
Too many emails may irritate your customers. And lesser emails may irritate your brand marketing!
So you’ve to decide your frequency in such a way that it maintains a balance between both. Customers will say thank you for that and marketing will never look back. And from years of experience of big email marketing brains, we can say that weekly emails give better results.
It is predictable too. One email in a week is digestible!
Drip campaigns deliver the best result
Email marketing automation (aka drip campaigns) are best to engage frequently with your customers. It’ll also help you to figure out the level of engagement that works best for your brand. It will help you to create an excellent drip campaign.
People, open all your emails, will be the biggest fans of your brand. A direct engagement with them may help you to grow bigger. You can also ask him to review your product, share few thoughts on their social media profiles or recommending your product to others.
Automated emails enjoy 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails. — Epsilon
The subject line is the first meeting
The subject line is the first thing that pushes customers to open an email. And sometimes it is the only reason.
So, while writing the subject line keep in mind that short, to the point and attractive call to action type subject lines look better in analytics.
Want better results in your analytics dashboard?
A/B testing is waiting for you!
A/B testing is the best evaluation method
A/B testing is the most popular method to choose the best formats for your email marketing campaigns. There are few areas, where you can perform A/B testing like subject line, pre-header text, content, call to action and email campaign tone.
A/B testing not only works in email marketing but also works in other segments of digital marketing like social media marketing, landing page design and web content optimization.
So take it as an improvement tool that gives you free hand to find the better things in marketing. But these things take time to give optimum results, so have patience.
To the point call to actions
Never confuse your customers with too many calls to action at a time.
One, clear, to the point call to action at a time, is enough. Marketers who get better results through email marketing suggest that using 1–2 calls to action is a suitable number to get success in any email marketing campaign.
If you are sending out an email to gain more readership for your blog. Tell them directly, why they should read your content and what benefits they can get from it?
But it happens only if your email deliverability is better. Now we need to know a little bit about how we can fix the high deliverability of an email campaign.
Double opt-in means trust
Use the double opt-in method, always. You may look at this as a barrier at first sight to gain more subscribers but it can also help you to get real followers. Because in the end, only open rate matters.
If you have huge subscribers and most of them are not interested in your brand. They are only subscribers, not your fans. And creating an email campaign for them is time-wasting.
Double opt-in comes into the role to build a quality mailing list. That may help you to build a list of real customers.
It’s time to clean your list
Giving an easier way to unsubscribe from your mailing list is better than landing in the spam folder!
If people don’t like you, they also don’t care about you!
So be aware and give them an easy, single-click option just in front of their eyes to unsubscribe from that email campaign. Take a look at statistics to know what uninterested users do!
54%: Unsubscribe from emails.
(According to research conducted by Janrain and Blue)
That’s why it is important:
“A small list that wants exactly what you’re offering is better than a bigger list that isn’t committed.” — Ramsay Leimenstoll
Tell them you’re social
Always use the social media profile links of your brand. It helps your customers to find you on social media.
People research a lot about any brand before making any single purchase. So, your presence on social media also triggers their brain to believe in you. If they’ve already met you there before, then it is for sure that they will trust you more than any other brand.
If they are happy with your products and services then they can share few words about you anywhere in the world. That helps.
I don’t think, we need to discuss the power of digital platforms like social media and search engines in the third decade of the 21st century.
Customers shares everything good or bad. They are kind, treat them with kindness if you are not getting a positive response in the early days. Have patience, work on your strengths, solve their problems. As a result, you may get a lot of reviews, mostly positive ones. And that leads us to the most heated topic in marketing, User-generated Content.
User-generated content is a boon for marketers
Reviews, social media posts, comments, emails and shares, there are so many ways, users use to share their thoughts about any brand. Marketers called it user-generated content.
If you use User-generated Content in your email marketing campaign people will love you more, they will trust you more and more they will care for your emails.
User-generated content is also the best way to get positive feedback. That can help you to polish your brand and make it better to overcome new challenges.
Final thoughts
Getting success in email marketing is all about caring for customers. The more you care, the more you get better results.
Storytelling, personalization, themes, timing and everything that we’ve discussed above only matter if you put your customers and their needs in the first place on the priority list! Remember customers are everything!
We need to do only one thing:
“Make the customer the hero of your story.” — Ann Handley
Join me on LinkedIn.
