Are you taking full advantage of email to keep your products in front of customers?
Are you using email effectively?
Today’s consumers want email messaging that’s highly personalized. As VentureBeat reported in January 2016, 50% of the people who unsubscribe from email lists do so because they don’t feel the content is relevant to them, the emails are too frequent, or both.
That’s why it’s important to do more than just add a first name field in your email campaigns. Here are a few best practices to better personalize your email marketing and get better results:
1. Harness the Power of Data
Going beyond name and location in your emails is crucial…but where does that extra information come from? You need highly segmented lists to be most effective, but how do you separate customers into those segments?
There are a few ways you can go about this. The first, and most effective, is to incorporate information you gather about your customers as they interact with your brand. For example, you can use things like purchase behavior, what pages they visit on your website (and how long they spend on each), and engagement with email (such as which links they click on and which subject lines they open) to start sorting customers into targeted segments.
You can also work with third party data to get more detailed demographic information. This may be a customer’s marital status, income, interests, and number of children, just to name a few. Using this information, you can create email campaigns that speak directly to a customer’s needs.
2. Mobile Is No Longer Optional
According to data gathered by email marketing firm Adestra, 61% of email users access their email via mobile mail clients. As more people latch on to the smartphone trend, they find it much easier and more convenient to check and respond to email on the go.
That means that if you’re not optimizing your email campaigns for mobile, you may be turning off quite a few of your customers. (And don’t forget to also optimize the landing pages linked from those mobile-optimized emails!)
3. Grab Attention in the First Few Words
One downside to consumers reading more email on their mobile devices is that they tend to be busier – so they may be choosier about what they actually open and read. You need to find ways to grab a piece of their attention and encourage those click-throughs.
This starts with your email subject line. Make it short, to the point, and compelling. Use personalization and specific, descriptive language to get your point across. It’s also crucial to do A/B testing on your subject lines to see what works best for your customers.
Your first line of text is another major area of focus. Many mobile email clients create a message snippet based on that first line of text, so it needs to be as compelling as your subject line. Many mobile email readers will decided whether to open or delete your message based on that first line, so put the most important information there.
These are just a few tips for getting more out of your retail email marketing campaigns. In future posts, we’ll discuss other tricks like using dynamic content to personalize the same email for different segments, and automation to send emails based on specific triggers. Stay tuned!
