Here’s how to improve your email marketing strategy

Email marketing is a great way to build strong relationships and spread the awareness of your brand. It’s one of the most personal types of communication available, and it’s also very cost-effective.

This blog will discuss a range of examples of how your company can improve your email marketing strategy and make the most out of the tool in order to engage with your different customers. 

First, let’s start with one of the most important factors - using personalisation within your content.

The art of personalisation

Customers are now exposed to more communication than ever before. Nowadays, people are only interested in receiving marketing messages which they find interesting and have some sort of relevance to their everyday lives. 

One way in which brands can stand out from the crowd and really resonate with their audience is by using personalisation within their email marketing. However, statistics have found that around 38% of companies aren’t undertaking any kind of personalisation. 

Personalisation is particularly important to leverage within your email strategy because it’s such a popular channel. The competition is fierce and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out within someone's inbox.

HubSpot is an absolute champion when it comes to personalisation.

There are over 100 personalisation tokens available for you to use within the platform. This provides you with so many opportunities to create catered content which will hit your customers more directly than the competition can.

We recently put together a blog which discusses how to use personalisation to offer customers a 1-1 to market experience. Why not have a read of it here?

Segmenting your audience 

Research has found that segmented emails generate 58% of all revenue *Makes a note to self to instantly go away and start segmenting their database even further*.

I know, these are some crazy figures and they pretty much prove that you need to effectively segment your audience if you wish to be successful when it comes to email marketing. Here’s a brilliant blog from HubSpot on tips for success with segmentation. 

By using segmentation within your email marketing strategy, you’ll then be able to break your contacts up into smaller groups of people. This will allow you to create clean and concise lists within your database, making it much easier to send targeted marketing. 

There are lots of different benefits when it comes to sending targeted emails. These include:

• Higher open rates.
• Improved click-through rates.
• Lower unsubscription rates.
• Higher response rates. 

Segmenting your database can be quite daunting. There’s loads which needs to be taken into consideration. Here are a few areas which you could look into just to get the ball rolling: 

• The size of your contact’s company.
• How many times a contact has viewed a page.
• How many of your emails a contact has opened.
• The location where the contact is based.

Your emails should be mobile friendly 

Mobile phone penetration worldwide is expected to reach 63.4% by the end of 2019. If your emails aren’t mobile friendly at present, I’d really recommend having a look into solving this as quickly as you can. 

We’ve all been sent an email that doesn’t look good on our phones in the past. To be honest, I’ve sent a few in my time too. The logo is pixelated or the call-to-action takes up 3/4s of the page. It looks unprofessional and will most probably affect the email’s performance.

Similar to segmenting your database, there’s a lot which you need to take in when it comes to ensuring your emails are mobile friendly. Here are a few best practices which are worth noting down when it comes to mobile friendly emails:

1. Try and use short subject lines.
2. Keep all emails under 600 pixels wide.
3. Make sure your call-to-action is clear (but not too big).
4. Use a large font size.
5. Always run tests before you publish an email. 

The last point is really important.

You should always test your email on multiple devices before you send it out. Again, HubSpot is awesome at letting you run email tests, so let’s have a chat about this in a little more detail.

The power of running tests

I know, I know, running tests can be pretty mundane and time-consuming. But it’s incredibly important that you’re running tests every time you send an email out. 

There are two different types of testing when it comes to email marketing. The first is sending tests to ensure that an email looks right on different user devices, including laptops, mobiles and computers. 

This is really easy to do in HubSpot. All you need to do is click on the preview option on the left-hand side of the page while you’re in the email tool. Check out the screen grabs below.

The second type of testing is A/B testing. For example, you might wish to change the subject line within an email and then run an A/B test...

Variant A might say something like “Check out our brand new guide to inbound success.” 

Variant B would then be a little different, saying something like “You don’t want to miss out on our guide to inbound success.”

Both subject lines have used two completely different tones. However, one is going to be more successful than the other. Then roll this method out for preview text, opening greeting, CTA placement, plain text vs HTML… anything.

This will help you undertake analysis and decide what kinds of best practices you’ll use for your emails moving forward. 

Here’s a really helpful article from HubSpot which will help you effectively A/B test your marketing emails in the future.

Although email marketing is a big deal, there are lots of elements of HubSpot which hold equal importance to helping you achieve Inbound success. 

We’ve put together a brand new guide which talks about these different elements, and how you can ensure you’re making the most out of each of them to create an effective Inbound Marketing strategy.

Get your own copy of the guide (and a few follow-up tips in highly- personalised, A/B tested, well-segmented emails)

From setting up your landing page templates to building up your database, our brand new guide covers everything you need to ensure you give yourself the best chance of achieving Inbound success. 

Click on the button below the receive your very own free version.