How to Deliver Compelling Email Marketing in 2019

It’s time to step up your email marketing game in 2019. With people’s inboxes constantly overflowing with countless emails from businesses and brands like yours, you have to think of ways to stand out from the crowd.

Email marketing has become an extremely powerful tool when it comes to nurturing leads, promoting consistent engagement, building customer relationships and driving lead conversions. To achieve desirable results, you need to have a well thought out strategy. Failing to do so will lead to your email marketing efforts slipping through the cracks and getting lost in the sea of unread emails.

Follow along to see how you can deliver compelling email marketing in 2019:

1. Understand your customer and their interests

A compelling email marketing strategy starts with how well you know your target audience. In order to deliver compelling email marketing this year, make sure you’ve done your research. If you’re not already doing so, it’s time to start collecting the data and creating customer profiles before building and implementing your email marketing strategy.

Remind yourself that you ARE the expert – you should know everything about your audience; from their consumer behavior to what draws them in to make them want to purchase your product or service. From there, you’ll be able to brainstorm different appeal tactics to engage with them through consistent email communication and guide them through the customer journey.

2. Understand copywriting best practices

Delivering compelling email marketing also comes with a strong understanding of copywriting best practices. If you want to send great emails that will help nurture your leads, here are a few tips and guidelines to follow when building the contents of your email, from the subject line to the body:

Subject Lines

An effective subject line is an essential component of a compelling email. The subject line acts as the gatekeeper, and if it doesn’t grab the initial attention of your audience, chances are they will not open and read the content of your email. To figure out which subject lines work best for your email campaigns, look into A/B testing. A/B testing allows you to test different subject lines to see which ones result in the highest open rates. Experimentation is key, and it ensures that your email marketing efforts are not going to waste.

Another tip to writing an effective subject line is to use personalization where possible. Emails that are more personalized tend to perform better than those that are not. Personalized and highly segmented emails can lead to higher open and click-through rates.

Visuals

Including a variety of visuals is an effective way to appeal to and engage with your audience. Incorporating visual elements such as images, GIFs, infographics, memes, and even videos can help influence your audience. Visuals also help break up chunks of text in your email marketing campaigns, and they’re a great way to engage with people (especially for all the visual learners out there). By ensuring that you’re using the right visual elements that reflect the brand of your business, it will play a huge part in delivering compelling emails this year!

Call-to-Actions

Don’t forget to use actionable language and be clear and concise in the body of your emails. Ultimately, you want your audience to act on something after they’ve read your email. Your goal is to lead them to the next step of the customer journey.

At the end of the day, make sure your email copy aligns with your subject line to ensure that readers will click through the email. Focus the attention on the reader with a ‘what’s in it for you” mindset; talk about how they will benefit from your product or service and what you can offer them. Don’t forget to add your own flair and personality to reflect your brand!

3. Segment your email list

Segmentation is more important than ever before because not everyone in your audience has the same needs and interests. Sending the exact same email to everyone on your mailing list is no longer effective, especially when it comes to driving lead conversion. That’s because they are probably at different stages of your marketing and sales funnel; some may have just entered the funnel and some may be closer to their final purchasing decision for your product or service. It’s important to understand and deliver the experience your future customers expect, even through email marketing.

As a result, segmenting your email list will help deliver more compelling email marketing this year. Brainstorm different appeal tactics that will help target your segmented audiences based on where they’re at in the customer journey. For a segmented list of people who have just entered the sales funnel, you will likely engage with them by tailoring your messages to be more awareness oriented. On the other hand, for a segmented list of people who are closer to the bottom of the sales funnel, you will likely want to tailor your emails to be more action oriented since they are approaching their purchasing decision. Craft and tailor the email copy so that it is relevant and relatable to your specific audiences.

4. Optimize your emails for mobile

In 2018, 52.2% of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile devices. Another way to deliver compelling email marketing in 2019 is to optimize your emails for mobile viewing. By now, it’s clear that responsive web design is an integral part of your mobile marketing strategy. According to Hubspot, 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices.

To ensure mobile-friendly email marketing, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Keep subject lines short
• Keep emails concise and avoid large chunks of text
• Use visuals to break up large chunks of text
• Use a font size that is easy to read
• Place CTA’s and buttons in the middle of the screen

5. Marketing automation

Have you considered implementing marketing automation into your email marketing strategy? Not only can you use marketing automation to build a steady flow of leads for your business, it can also help lighten up the load so you can focus on other aspects of your marketing strategy.

Marketing automation can help turn your prospects into loyal customers. Instead of blasting your entire mailing list with endless sales messages, marketing automation can help you provide relevant information to your audience. That way, they have a chance to absorb the information about your product or service, building a mutually beneficial relationship.

One aspect of marketing automation is the use of email drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are essentially scheduled sets of marketing emails that are trigger-based. What does that mean? Drip campaigns help deliver the right messages at the right time. Depending on certain customer actions or behaviors, marketing automation enables consistent email communication to carry prospects through the customer journey, leading to a higher percentage of lead conversion. It’s definitely worth looking at how to create an email drip campaign that converts and there are a number of marketing automation software out there that can help get you started (e.g. Hubspot, Mailchimp, etc.).

If one of your goals is to deliver more compelling email marketing this year, I hope these tips and guidelines have given you a general idea on where to start. Don’t forget that there are also plenty of tools and resources out there that can help you achieve your email marketing goals. Marketing automation tools like SharpSpring, Hubspot and Mailchimp are a good starting point to hit the ground running if you’re really looking to dive head first to crushing those goals! You can also find a number of email templates to take the visual aspect of your email marketing to the next level. At the end of the day, make sure you stay organized and plan ahead so you can stay ahead of the email marketing game in 2019!

WSI was founded in 1995 and is an innovative digital marketing agency with offices in over 80 countries. We’ve spent over 20 years helping more than 100,000 companies and large global brands unlock the full potential of their business by leveraging the Internet and its many unrecognized opportunities. We’d be happy to help do the same for you and consult on your digital marketing strategy.  Simply give me a call or email me at rknutsen@wsiebizsolutions.net to learn more.