The Dos and Don’ts of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a valuable tool in any marketing toolbelt. Effective email marketing can help you build a loyal customer base and increase sales. A Smith-Harmon survey found that 76% of subscribers had purchased after receiving a promotional email. Email marketing is a form of interactive marketing that opens the door for customers to interact with your brand and, if implemented successfully, creates a relationship between you and your customers.
If implemented poorly, email marketing can harm your business and create a bad reputation for your brand. To help you avoid making those mistakes, we’ve put together the essential email dos and don’ts.
The Dos
Do set-up automated email flows
Developing an automated email flow based on the recipient’s actions is a way to nurture leads and keep your brand front of mind for subscribers. To create email flows, identify different opportunities to reach out to customers, such as new subscribers welcome, abandoned cart, order tracking, product reviews, brand education, birthdays, sales and promotions, back in stock, customer retention and churned users.
Do know your brand’s voice
Emails are a way to connect with your customers, so the tone you choose to use should be in-line with your brand’s tone of voice. A great way to ensure your emails capture your brand’s voice is to have a Tone of Voice Guide that outlines your brand’s writing style and standards.
Do make sure your emails add value
When planning your email flows take a moment to assess if the emails add value for your subscribers. Ask yourself, is this email interesting? Is it something I would want to receive? Does it add value to the customers’ lives? If the answer to these questions is yes, go ahead, and add the email to your flow. If the answer is no, then the email is unnecessary and could be seen as spam by your subscribers.
Consumer surveys have shown that when a company sends too many emails, 67% of email users will unsubscribe. Instead of sending too many emails or irrelevant emails, create a content calendar that categorises and schedules emails that will go out to the subscriber.
Do A/B Test
A/B tests are an opportunity for a brand to assess the effectiveness of its emails and find potential areas for improvement. You can choose to A/B test the email subject, preview text, body copy, email layout, CTA, and when you send the email. A/B tests let you see how the length of the email, the tone, the CTA, and the layout of the email.
When running an A/B test, it is important to have a hypothesis. A hypothesis provides a clear goal and a metric to measure. For example, changing the preview text to include the promotion will improve conversions. A good A/B test will test one thing at a time. If you run tests on multiple elements at once it will be difficult to assess which change was the most effective.
You can measure A/B tests against industry benchmarks. At SOMO, we use our agency benchmarks and industry benchmarks provided by Klaviyo, our chosen email management software, to measure the success of an A/B test.
Do email at the right time of day
There’s no use crafting a killer email if subscribers never open it. Luckily research groups have looked into consumer behaviour and have found that emails sent between 9 AM and 3 PM get the most traction. When it comes to sales and promotional emails specifically, sending emails around lunchtime yielded the highest results. This advice doesn’t apply to abandon cart emails, which are sent within an hour of the person leaving your site.
Do optimise emails for all screens
Gone are the days of people signing into Outlook on their desktops to check emails once or twice a day. Nowadays, most people check their emails on their phones. As such, it’s more important than ever that you optimise emails for mobile. Consider font size and type, number and size of images, and email length when creating mobile-friendly emails.
Do create personalised emails
Personalised emails are more likely to be opened and provide subscribers with relevant information that strengthens their connection with your brand. Research has shown that using personalised emails can boost the open rate by 11% – 55% depending on the level of personalisation. Not sure where to start with email personalisation? Reach out to the team at SOMO, we’re experts in creating email campaign
Do segment your audience
Audience segmentation is a vital step in email personalisation that allows you to send targeted emails to the right groups at the right time. Splitting subscribers into groups based on set criteria such as location, interests, purchasing behaviour, and open rate can increase engagement and revenue for your brand.
Do check the timings of your flows
It is possible to have customers be entered into multiple flows at the same time. To avoid multiple emails going out at once, it is important to map out a timeline of all the flows to ensure that there are sufficient gaps in between the emails.
The Don'ts
Don't ignore a users subscription status
Aside from this practice being illegal in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK, sending non-transactional emails to unsubscribed customers will turn people off your brand. When a person unsubscribed or doesn’t sign-up to receive your emails, the emails are likely to go unopened, end up in the spam folder, or be deleted. A subscription list is only valuable if your subscribers open the email. Rather than annoying these people with emails they don’t want, spend time building a loyal customer base with effective email marketing.
Don't send image-only or image-heavy emails
When creating mobile-friendly emails, you need to consider the number of images you include in your email. Large images slow down load time or don’t load for most people. Image-only emails also limit your personalisation options. Personalised images require more work than personalised text, and including the customer’s name in the email is almost impossible with image-only emails.
Don’t forget to collect data and use it to your advantage
Email data provides insights into your customer and helps you assess the success of your email marketing strategy. Data collection can start from the subscriber sign-up stage. The subscription box is an opportunity to ask demographic questions and segment your subscribers. Data is also collected at the checkout stage or through customer surveys. In addition to demographic data, open rates, conversions, bounce rates, forward/share rates, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates are all indicators of the success or failure of your email campaign. Use this data to assess what is working and make adjustments to what is not working.
SOMO's takeaway
Adam, Performance Director
Automated emails are a wonderful way to keep your customers engaged with your brand. When done correctly they allow you to build the foundation of a long term relationship. There are always more improvements that can be made to your automated emails. This includes personalisation, timing, design, segmenting and the list goes on.
The fantastic thing about the improvements that you make to your business’ automated emails is how measurable the impact of each change is. I’ve seen time and time again, open rate, click rate and value per send increase significantly after just one adjustment.
Want to know more about how SOMO can help you create and manage your Email Marketing? Why not set up a free strategy call with us today.
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