Email Marketing “Hacks” That Make Your Campaigns Irresistible

According to a recent Litmus survey*, the Return on Investment (ROI) for email marketing campaigns averaged 38:1.  Another study from Campaign Monitor* reports that ROI for email marketing is closer to 4400% (44:1).

 Are you seeing 3800% to 4400% ROI in your email campaigns?  

If not, you can start improving your email marketing ROI today by following this guide.

5 Ways to Get More Opens in Your Email Campaigns

1. Personalization matters.  Calling your customers (and potential customers) by name increases open rates by 23%.  *Remember, there is a law of diminishing returns here.  The more you use this, the less effective it will be. Make sure to use this tool strategically.
2. Are you boring?  Be intriguing, relevant or controversial.  No one wants to read boring emails.
3. Are you negative (especially in the morning)?  Don’t send negative emails in the morning.  People tend to want to start their day on a positive note.  That “10 reasons your business is going to fail” email isn’t going to get opened in the morning.  Save that for the late night worriers.
4. Always use odd or specific numbers. “How I made $1,000,000 in 9 months”  is not as effective as “How I made $998,769.78 in 9 months”
5. Use the second subject line.  You have another 7-10 words you can fit in here to entice your readers to open.  Sorry, but “view this email in a browser” just ain’t that enticing.

Get More Clicks Using These 5 Tips

1. Use captions on your images.  People read them so you should be writing them!
2. Add a “Press Play” button on your images (that link to a video).  Don’t forget the caption. This significantly increases click through rate.
3. Use animated flash banners to attract attention to your Call To Actions (CTA’s).  Movement attracts eyeballs (and clicks).
4. Video in email?!? Use gifs to create a preview of your videos in your emails.  Link the giph to the video and see your click through rates improve overnight.
5.  Ask questions in a survey format.  Make sure your audience isn’t sure what the correct answer is, but they would definitely like to know. Make them click through to find out the answer.
   1. Example: “Which Marketing Channel Has The Highest ROI?”
      1. Direct Mail Marketing
      2. Display Ads
      3. Retargeting
      4. Email Marketing

This image is more likely to get clicked.

Example of a “Play Button” image

4 Types of Email Marketing Subject Lines That Drive Results

1. Curiosity Driven.  Arousing curiosity in your readers is a surefire way to get your email opened.  Here’s an example: “It’s not sexy, but it works like crazy”.
2. Results or Case Study.  Showing tangible results inspires and motivates people to click.  They usually want to know more about how it is done and what it means for their business. Example  “How this solopreneur makes $9,769.89 in 3 days”
3. Scarcity.  Nothing quite motivates people to take action like the fear of missing out (FOMO).  Example “[CLOSING] You’re about to miss out….”
4. Benefits.  Helping your readers is a surefire way to get your open rate up.  Example “[FUNNELS] Get more optins…” or Example “Steal these funnel templates”

The 3 Types of Emails You Need To Understand

When you’re crafting your email campaigns keep in mind these three types of emails and how you can leverage them to drive more customer satisfaction, engagement and sales.

1. Transactional
2. Relationship
3. Promotional

1. Transactional emails.  These emails are generally what you’d expect.
   1. Examples are order confirmations, purchase receipts, shipping notifications, account confirmation, support tickets etc.  These emails have the highest open rates.  One reason for that is they overcome the most important SPAM filter of all.  The human SPAM filter. People are expecting these emails and they open them.  Do you have upsells in your transactional emails?  If not, why?
2. Relationship emails.  You’re building a relationship with your customers (at least I hope you are) and these emails keep that process moving along.  This is your business following up on the promises you made to your customers.
   1. Examples are welcome emails, webinar confirmation emails, lead magnet delivery, referral requests.
3. Promotional emails.  You probably get the “gist” of this but promotional emails help you sell.  They’re not all sales copy though.
   1. Examples are promotional (free) content, sale announcements, trial offers, one-time upgrades, event announcements.

How to Use Email Marketing Broadcasts and How Not To

If you’re still sending broadcasts to your whole list as your primary email marketing strategy you’re missing out.  Not every customer is at the same point in your sales or marketing cycle.  So why would we treat them that way?

Determining what stage in the relationship you’re at with any given customer is how you should decide which emails to send them.  Additionally, using segmentation based on content and optin forms is a more sophisticated, and more profitable, way to engage your audience.

For example, if a prospect opts in for your “Free! Social Media Guide” you wouldn’t want to send them to an offer about your Search Engine Optimization services.  You know they are interested in Social Media.  If they haven’t indicated an interest in SEO it wouldn’t make sense to send them content or offers regarding that, at least not right away.

Your goal is to give them what they want.  Then give them more of it.  

Of course, this is obvious when we think about it.  However, if you’re sending mass emails to your audience without segmentation, you’re likely making this mistake.

Broadcasts should be used as a means to segment your audience, promote events and share broad appeal topics.

Eventually, you can show your customers other items or services they might be interested in.  However, doing it all the time will stifle the gains you could be seeing by giving them exactly what they want.  Use broadcasts to figure out what that is.

Segmenting Your Audience with Broadcasts

When you send a broadcast about Social Media Strategy to your entire list that’s totally fine.  In fact, you should do that.

You can make the safe assumption  that everyone that opened that email has some sort of interest in Social Media.  You’ll know that everyone that clicks through, definitely has an interest in it.

You can then segment them into customers that would be interested in future emails and offers regarding social media.  That makes sense, right?

However, you wouldn’t want to continue sending email after email regarding Social Media Strategy to your entire list.  A couple emails on the topic, spaced out over time, is appropriate.

Depending on your open rate for emails it could take a few times to reach the majority of interested parties, but you need to make sure you’re not burning out your prospects, primarily the ones that have no interest in that topic.

How Broadcasts Can Create Better Ad Targeting

When we send a broadcast out we get a lot of actionable data.  The act of opening, not opening and clicking gives us information we can use in other parts of our business.

An example of this would be using your segmentation (from above) to create targeted lists of customers based on their interest.  Using the social media strategy email again as an example.  We could export a list of every person that clicked through that email.

Those click throughs would give us a customer file we could use to generate lookalike audiences (as well as target the people that clicked through).  We can reasonably assume the lookalike audience we create will have some interest in social media strategy.

Using this tactic we’ve now created another large pool of potential prospects that we know are very likely to be interested in social media strategy.   That’s powerful.

It saves us time on targeting and weeding through the wrong prospects.  Primarily, it saves you money and increases the effectiveness of your ad spend.

Use these email tricks and best practices to increase your engagement and bottom line.  The beauty of these tips is that you can start implementing them today and see results immediately.

These strategies help make your content more accessible, interesting and compelling; which makes them more profitable.

Infographic Embed:  “Is It Time To Rethink Your Email Marketing Strategy?”