Melanie Hardcastle
Apr 14, 20222 min
Email marketing remains one of the best ways to reach customers and close sales. But if you're not doing it right, it can't serve you to its maximum potential. Today I want to cover a few of my best practices for enhancing your emails, boosting open and click rates and ultimately, closing deals.
Personalize
Personalization is huge for email. It grabs people's attention and is a great way to open. You can personalize in a few places. The first is the subject line, which we'll dive into below. The second is in the opening line of the email. Most email service providers have merge tags you can use, which make it easy to pull in your audience member's name from their contact info. Hello, Melanie just sounds better then a generic Hello there!
Have excellent subject lines
Subject lines are absolutely crucial to the success of your emails. They are the first thing that a potential reader sees, and they get them to open your email. Compelling subject lines are short (they should be readable in the inbox preview) and to the point. They give an accurate description of what the email's content is, and never mislead. Subject lines are also a great place to personalize, as mentioned above. An example of a great subject line would be, "Melanie, have you thought about your marketing strategy for 2022?". A poor subject line would be "2022 Marketing Strategies". Questions are a good idea, and including an emoji is also fine, depending on your brand's voice/tone.
Test, test, test!
Testing is an essential part of any strong email marketing strategy. The top things that I recommend testing are subject lines and calls-to-action. Testing your subject line (trying subject line A vs. subject line B) can show you which garners more opens, which is one of the most important email marketing stats. Testing a call-to-action shows what drives readers to engage with your content. It's important to remember to only test one variable at a time so that you can get accurate results.
Clean your list
This one isn't as fun, but is important. A "clean" list is one without outdated contacts or too many bounces. You can pull reports from your email service provider telling you which emails bounced, and then remove them from your list. Another important category to remove is those who have never opened your emails. It's a tough pill to swallow, but if someone isn't opening, they aren't your customer.
I hope these ideas get you excited about your email marketing as we march on through 2022! As always, don't hesitate to reach out if you need help reaching your goals or creating a email marketing strategy that converts.