Guest Contribution by Marquis Matson @ Social Growr

If you own a business, you will most likely understand the importance of email when it comes to communicating with business partners and providing customer service. More importantly, your email can be a very effective tool when it comes to promoting your brand and enticing more customers to support your brand. It is equally as important as social media marketing, as these two marketing techniques play hand in hand in reaching out to more audiences.

In fact, according to a recent survey, about 64% of B2B marketers use a dedicated email platform as one of their content marketing tools and 77% of these marketers use email newsletters as part of their marketing techniques. At the same time, 93% of marketers use email to distribute content. With so many businesses trusting the effectivity of email for marketing, it only shows that this marketing tool is very effective if the right strategy is applied.

Why is an Effective Email Marketing Strategy So Important?

Whatever type of marketing effort you may decide to use for your business, there are a number of things that you should consider, such as the size of your mailing list, the type of industry you are in, and the email marketing platform you will be using.

In theory, email marketing sounds easy, but for it to be effective, you will need to practice some of the best practices in this type of marketing technique. If not done properly, your email marketing strategy will not work no matter how much effort you put in. To help you start your email marketing strategy on the right track, you can check out these 6 strategies that have proven themselves effective.

1. Personalize Your Email Without Using the Recipient’s Name

There’s nothing wrong with using your recipient’s name for sending an email. In fact, according to a study by Stanford Graduate School of Business, using a recipient’s name for an email campaign can help boost sales leads by 31% and reduce unsubscription rates by 17%. But just like everything else, too much of something can be bad.

What you have to take away from this is that if you ever decide to use your email recipient’s name, especially on the subject line, it’s best that you use this strategy in moderation. Using a person’s name on the subject line can actually increase the probability of a recipient opening the email by 20%. But if they receive emails from you often and they always find their names on the subject line, they might find it weird and can even turn out to be off putting for some people.

2. Create Subject Lines That Improve Conversions

The moment you send out your email to your recipients, it becomes the subject line’s job to entice the recipient to click on the email to open it and read the content. This is why the way you craft your email’s subject line is important. Depending on your brand, industry and audience, you will need to come up with a subject line that fits what you are promoting.

Remember that when creating a subject line, your goal is to invite your audience to learn more about your brand, and ultimately, convert them into your customers. And if you are marketing via emails, it takes the right type of subject line to increase your email open rate.

3. Segment Your Subscribers

Sending the right type of email content to the right recipient is essential. If done correctly, you can increase your transaction rates 6 times more. If you have thousands of addresses in your mailing list and you want to personalize your marketing email content, you can’t really create different email for each. But by segmenting your mailing lists, you get to create better targeted emails that your recipients won’t be able to resist.

To target your audience better, you should implement the right email segmentation strategies. You can segment your recipients based on their demographics, past purchases, location, survey or quiz results, response rate, purchase frequency and more. By making use of the data you gathered based on your target audiences’ behavior, you can eventually improve your email open rates and gain more customers for your business.

4. Send Mobile-Friendly Emails

The percentage of email open rates from mobile continues to grow annually. According to a March 2019 survey, 62% of all emails are now opened and read through mobile devices. But if an email is not optimized for mobile, it is more likely that a recipient will delete it. In fact, 70% of them will delete the email straight away! So if you don’t want to be a part of the statistics, you’d best make sure that you optimize your email for mobile devices.

For your marketing email to be mobile-friendly, you should limit the use of images, or use images that are optimized for emails. Your choice of words, email formatting and template will also matter. It will also be a good idea to make use of buttons wisely, as this will more likely entice your audience to do something based on your call to action.

5. Use a Custom Responsive Email Template

As more and more users are accessing their email through various mobile devices, it’s essential that you create email campaigns that will look eye-catching when viewed on any device. Understanding the viewing capacity of different devices is important. And if you want to make sure that your emails will work well whether they are viewed on a tablet, desktop computer, laptop or a smartphone, your best bet is to use a custom responsive email template.

Customizing an email template is an important part of branding, too. By creating a unique template, you get to improve your promotional efforts and make your email look more authoritative. And by relying on responsive email templates, you won’t have to worry about losing audiences due to poorly-made emails.

6. Generate Leads through Messenger Chatbots

Chatbots are now playing a variety of roles for various online brands and marketers. Be it for customer support, data collection, communication and sales, chatbots can make it easier for businesses to make the most of their social media marketing efforts. In fact, chatbots can be beneficial for Instagram growth, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms that support this AI technology.

Moreover, chatbots can help you improve your email marketing efforts by generating better leads for you. In fact, 57% of businesses agree that chatbots have helped deliver large ROI to their business with minimal effort.

It is undeniable that businesses can greatly benefit from implementing the right email marketing strategies. It might need a lot of effort on your end as a marketer, but by implementing the right set of email and social media marketing strategies, you will, in time, reap the benefits of streamlining your online marketing efforts.