12 Tips to enhance your email marketing program

Email marketing is an ever-evolving channel that continues to give marketing teams the highest ROI when compared to other viable channels. And that’s only one of the many reasons why we love it so much. That said, no matter where we are in our marketing journey, we’re ostensibly all looking to grow and up our game, so we too can evolve along with our favorite marketing tactic. 

It doesn’t matter what your experience level is—beginner, experienced or pro marketer—there’s always room for improvement, and we’ve gone ahead and done the research for you. 

5 Email marketing tips for beginners

Everyone has to begin somewhere, and when it comes to marketing 101’s you’ve probably already got a handle on the basics:

• Create measurable goals

• Outline your campaign

• Test before you send

• Measure your campaign results

Understanding these basics is an excellent place to start for marketers of all levels, but to help you stand out from the rest, we’ve got a few additional and detailed tips for a beginner to consider.

1. Have SMART goals set before you send.

Having goals is essential in email marketing. However, your team needs to take the time to carefully define each goal on varying levels. Enter: SMART goals. This acronym helps marketers define their email campaign goals with more detailed action, addressing more than just the goal, but also the plan to reach it.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Success is in the details, and when you apply the SMART acronym to your goals, you’re going to know:

• Specific goal details

• Measurable details to define success

• Attainability factor

• Relevancy to your team’s more significant goals

• Timeframe of when these goals will be defined

2. Define your resources ahead of time.

One mistake that many beginner marketers make is not defining their resources ahead of time—and no, we aren’t talking paper, pencils, and pens. 

Instead, this marketing tip suggests knowing what resources you’ll need to make your email campaign happen. Marketers will need to think in two different categories for this:

People – This is oftentimes an afterthought but is essential in designing an email marketing campaign that will succeed with the budget and manpower available to you. People can include a graphic designer, content specialist, or even a designated email marketing specialist. 

Tools – Tools are just what you would think of when it comes to resources, although they’re specific to your channel, in this case, email marketing. Tools to consider may include your email marketing platform and any project management tools. 

3. Map out your prospective client’s journey.

Customer mapping is another area that tends to be forgotten until a marketing team has a bit more experience. However, mapping out your customer’s journey prior to sending out any email can help simplify the lead nurturing process significantly. A customer journey map would look something like this:

Source: Campaign Monitor

Defining this process will save your marketing team time and will help to automate the lead nurturing process to help encourage leads into customers. 

4. You’re a guest in your subscriber’s inbox.

Consumers turn to a brand’s email subscription list because they want something from them, so it is important for marketers to remember that they are a guest in a subscriber’s inbox. This means treating each subscriber with the respect they deserve and addressing them as an asset, not another face in the crowd. 

This is where email personalization comes into play. Personalized email content is known to deliver six times higher transaction rates, so make sure your content is tailored to your reader’s needs. List segmentation is an excellent way to ensure that your readers are getting content relative to them and their needs. 

5. When to pitch your product/service.

As a marketer, you know that your email campaigns serve an ultimate purpose: to land a new customer through purchase or sign-up. What you must remember is that your readers also know this is your ultimate goal, so instantly picking your product or service is going to leave a rather nasty taste in their mouth. 

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and keep your SMART goals in mind. This will help you carefully breadcrumb your sales pitch throughout your campaign, ensuring you aren’t blindsiding readers while also not blatantly pitching them a product without offering something in return to your readers. 

4 Email marketing tips for the experienced marketer

Once you’ve got a solid background behind you, an experienced marketer will want email marketing tips to take their campaigns up an additional notch. Based on the current research and trends for 2019 and on, here’s what we’d be considering adding to your campaign strategies. 

6. Prioritize storytelling.

Yes, while readers do turn to a brand’s email newsletter for sales related information, they also want to know that your brand is about the human experience. Gone are the days of simply talking up your product and services. Now, readers want to know how your goods are going to work for them in the real world. This is where effective storytelling comes into play.

Source: Campaign Monitor

In this email example, we see clear storytelling elements: 

• A problem – lack of a localized team

• A climax – “Success got the better of you”

• A solution – Timeboards makes it “super easy…”

Here’s that same email without the storytelling elements:

Source: Campaign Monitor

It’s very clear which email is likely to not only increase reader engagement but be more relatable to the reader on a “real world” basis. 

7. Be mobile ready.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of mobile technology, such as cell phones and smartphones, people are spending less time on their desktop computers and even at their mobile laptops. In fact, almost half of the world’s emails are opened and viewed using a mobile device. 

That means that your email marketing team needs to be prioritizing responsive email designs. These designs are explicitly coded for optimal viewing across different devices. Another option includes mobile-friendly designs, but with all the varying pieces of email campaigns these days, a responsive design is considered the best practice. 

8. Focus on revenue-focused metrics.

Marketing teams know at this point that they have to monitor their email campaign metrics carefully to understand what is and isn’t working. That means watching your open-rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates, and while they are vital to your email marketing success, more revenue-focused metrics can be focused on to determine the financial success of your campaigns. 

Some revenue-focused metrics you’ll want to watch include your:

• Unique opens

• Unique clicks

• Click to open rate

Understanding your unique opens and clicks is vital because these are your reader’s initial impressions on your content. What makes them different from open rates and click rates is the fact that they don’t include multiple clicks and opens from the same source, only the original. 

Your click to open rate is the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens and is often used to measure the effectiveness of your emails’ content. These numbers will tell you just how good your content is at getting readers to act to learn more. 

Source: Campaign Monitor

9. Make your emails skimmable to increase overall engagement.

The average human attention span is currently under serious debate—some claiming that it’s shorter than a goldfish (8 seconds) and some are claiming it’s around 12 seconds. While the debate is still ongoing, the truth is, human nature is to skim through emails, not sit and read through each and every one. We want the details, and we want them now, which is why it’s so vital to creating emails that are easy to skim through. 

Source: Really Good Emails

3 Email marketing tips for the pros

While the marketing pros may know quite a bit, that doesn’t mean they aren’t in search of email marketing tips to up their game. Here are three tips the marketing pros should carefully consider for their email campaign strategies.

10. Add artificial intelligence to your email marketing toolshed.

Marketers know that adding artificial intelligence in the form of chat boxes can boost their overall user engagement. However, technology is continuing to improve to the point that AI may be able to assist email marketing teams with better-segmented email lists, better product recommendations for customers based on past searches and purchases and more. 

11. Add more plain-text messages into the mix.

While email marketers are looking for more ways to get their reader’s attention, that doesn’t mean they have to discount the use of simpler emails in their email marketing campaigns. In fact, in 2019, the use of more plain-text emails seems to be a growing trend. 

In fact, researchers have found that plain-text emails can be more effective in marketing because they’re easier to open and they look more personal, like an email a loved one or friend would send them. 

Source: Really Good Emails

12. Make effective use of social media.

Marketers have stated that they plan to increase their spending on social media because it can help bring in a greater number of new prospects than many other channels. However, email marketing remains the king in overall ROI. This means that taking your social media data, such as user demographics, can help boost the knowledge of your ideal targeted audience to help you generate more relevant materials. 

Wrap up

Like email marketing, the tips for bettering your email marketing strategy are ever-changing to suit the needs of readers and the technology available to marketers, which means that marketers need to be continuously studying the trends and how they change to give readers the best possible experience. 

Marketers of all levels can implement our email marketing tips, but remember to work with what you can, which means you must understand:

• Your overall budget

• Your available workforce 

• Marketing tools at your disposal

As your email marketing strategy continues to grow, you’ll want to learn how you can be more effective in how you run your campaigns and manage your time. Check out these email marketing hacks for saving both time and money.