The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Strategy 2019

Most organizations use email marketing as the primary marketing campaign tool across all industries. When it comes to email marketing strategy, the goal is to send the best email marketing campaigns, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a startup company or an enterprise. Email marketing will definitely give the results you desire.

There are about 281 million emails sent every day, with the figures predicted to reach 333 billion by 2021. These statistics show email marketing is the best marketing tool for your business. If you are not using email marketing for your business, then you are missing out on bigger opportunities.

Before moving to the email marketing best practices, let’s look at what makes email marketing so good.

• Email marketing has a higher ROI

For every $1 you invest in email marketing, you get $38 as return on investments. Email marketing is a market leader in generating value surpassing all the other social marketing platforms. What’s more interesting about email marketing is that is converts 40 times as many prospects as social media.

With these statistics and proven results, email marketing remains the best tool for driving conversions and increasing the ROI for your business. The results can only be achieved by having an effective email marketing strategy to deliver highly personalized and relevant emails.

Do you want to know how to maximize the ROI from your email marketing campaigns? Stay tuned.

• Nurturing over selling

How many times have you generated thousands of leads only to make a few or even zero sales? The art of selling is a lot more than just generating leads and sending chunks of email. Leads need to be nurtured and slowly introduced to the offers until they make a sale. In today’s world, aggressive marketing doesn’t help, neither sending a lot of emails.

Nurturing leads begins when you send your first welcome email after a visitor subscribes to your mailing lists. The welcome email is followed by successive brand awareness emails before finally presenting the offer. The goal is to earn the trust of the prospects and make them believe that you can provide solutions to their problems or opportunities.

• Mobile Optimization

It is no doubt that the future is mobile and email marketing plays a major role in digital marketing. Ask me I will tell you the majority of the people in the world own a mobile device, and a significant percentage have email addresses configured on their mobile devices.

Statistics affirm that approximately 52percent of emails are accessed on mobile devices in contrast with laptops. In addition, 75 percent of all Gmail users access their emails on mobile. Leverage the opportunities presented by mobile devices and implement your email marketing campaign to reach a wide audience of consumers without much investments in technology or software.

Much of the talk, here are the email marketing best practices for 2019 you can use to create an effective email marketing campaign for your business.

Related article: Linkedin Marketing Guide 2019

TOP 10 Email Marketing Strategies 2019 

1. Use welcome emails to build clean lists

The first email you send to your prospects after signing up is very significant. According to GetResponse, the average open rates for welcome emails are staggering 80% while the click-through rates are approximated at 22-25%.

Besides the successful CTR, welcome emails let you maintain clean emailing lists and improve your deliverability. Clean emailing lists protect you from fraudulent visitors. When a visitor signs with a wrong email address, sending a welcome list will generate a bounce, thus, you can remove all bounced emails from your lists. Clean lists have many advantages such as reducing the likelihood of ending up to a spam trap and initiating contact with your prospects.

2. Segmentation

Before sending your email, segment your subscribers to send targeted emails. Among the Email marketer’s top initiatives, segmentation is second only to increasing subscriber’s engagement. Segment your list into smaller categories having similar characteristics such as industry, job position, location, and age.

With this, you can send email campaigns to a targeted audience with personalized content to increase conversions.

Segmenting your audience leads to 31% open rates higher than non-segmented campaigns. This is because you will be likely sending personalized offers to meet the specific demands of that particular group.

3. Personalize your content

Personalized campaigns create more value generation than general email campaigns. For you to attract and retain customers, you must use personalization in your email marketing campaigns. The goal is to let your customers know that you know them and have taken some effort to find more about them.

Address your prospects with their names not, “Dear Customer”. A typical customer will open your mail when he/she sees their names on the email. It is your goal to collect personal information when building your list and use solutions such as mail merge to include them in your email marketing campaign.

4. Use a catchy subject line

The subject line is the only part people will see before deciding to read the email. In most cases, the subject line determines whether a user will open the email or not. In fact, statistics show that 47 percent of people will use the subject to decide whether to open the email or exit the app.

Take your time to craft a subject line that will present the content of the email in a glimpse or push the reader to open the email. The length of the subject line must be carefully chosen considering the size of different devices. For instance, iPhone users can only see a maximum of 38 characters in portrait mode, having a longer subject line will lose you a lot of prospective buyers.

5. Get visual to create engaging content

Now that you have managed to entice your readers to open your email, it’s time to encourage click-throughs. It is evident that emails with visual content, including pictures and videos, perform better than emails with textual information only. This is because the human mind was designed to perceive visual images faster than textual information.

Besides, visuals let you present engaging, compelling, and interactive information to your customers. Emails with videos have about 8% click-through rate compared to 4.11% to those with textual information.

Consider the below example from Capezioon how to leverage visuals to create high converting email campaigns.

6. Design for mobile

More than half of your emails will be opened on a mobile device. Use responsive design programs to send mobile-friendly emails to seize opportunities on the increased usage of mobile devices. The email must adjust automatically according to the type of device and optimize HTML for faster loading.

If you are like me, I guess the first thing you do in the morning or just after arriving at work is to check your phones for messages, and email. Well, there are 52%of us who do that.

When a subscriber receives an email on their mobile device but the email if not optimized for mobile, what do you think happens? Delete and unsubscribe, you don’t want your prospective customers to experience that. Here’s an example of an email optimized for mobile.

7. Use timing to increase your email conversion rate

Sometimes the time you send your marketing emails is the only thing affecting your email marketing campaign. While the timing may not be universal across all organizations, there are some good practices that have yielded commendable results.

What do you think is a good time to send marketing emails?

As marketers, we all want our emails to be at the top of our subscriber’s inbox. But how can we achieve this? According to survey results from GetResponse, there are two timeslots with the highest email open rates and CTRs; 9-11am and 3-5pm. Plan your email schedules well to step up your email marketing game.

8. Automate if possible

Configure your emails to be sent automatically based on subscriber behavior. Ever received a welcome email just after subscribing to a newsletter? Well, that’s one of the trigger-based emails. Other examples of trigger emails include ‘thank you’ emails and transactional emails.

When a visitor subscribes to your contact lists, they will most likely open an email welcoming them to your brand. Research done by Epsilon shows that trigger emails have 95% higher open rates than traditional email.

The beauty about trigger emails is that you hit the email marketing sweet spot. Make your email marketing strategy topnotch by sending targeted messages based on the behavior of your subscribers.

9. Grow your email list using lead magnets

I assume you’ve come across blogs with “subscribe for free updates” or “sign up to download eBooks.” Well, these are the lead magnets we are talking about. Lead magnets let you build and increase your emailing lists by enticing your visitors to leave an email address on your blog before they leave.

Have you ever considered using lead magnets on your blog?

Here are the effective lead magnets ideas I recommend you check them out.

• Free eBooks

Probably the most popular type of lead magnets. Offer free eBooks and newsletters to your visitors in exchange for their email addresses.

Sign up to get free eBook (Image credit: LiveAgent)

• Free updates and newsletters

Prompt the users to sign up for your newsletters and free updates. Once you get their email, you can nurture them until they become buyers. It’s a win-win situation.

Subscribe for free email updates (Image credit: My Tech Elite)

10. Leverage A/B testing

Stuck between different ideas for your email marketing campaign? Implement both ideas and evaluate their performance using A/B testing. Testing should be an integral part of your email marketing strategy. Test, analyze, deploy: ask the best marketers and they will tell you they didn’t find their high converting email marketing strategy overnight.

A/B testing let you find the best alternative with the best conversion rates for your email campaign. For instance, create two compelling subject lines and send them to your audience. Monitor the subject line with the best conversion and CTR rates from your audience, use that information to perfect your email marketing strategy.

Conclusion

When it comes to digital marketing campaigns, email marketing has so much to offer. From generating massive ROI to nurturing leads to become buyers, an effective email marketing strategy is what you need for your business.

This Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Strategy 2019presents you with the recommended email marketing best practices to take your email marketing campaign to a higher level. The landscape of email marketing is changing, embrace these skills to horn your mail marketing strategy and achieve high conversion rates and grow your business.