10 effective email marketing strategies: All you need to know

An effective email marketing campaign brings numerous advantages, enabling you to maintain connections with current and potential customers while fostering personal relationships. It's no surprise that email remains a cornerstone of digital marketing. However, achieving success requires time and the implementation of effective strategies such as personalization and email list segmentation. In this guide, we'll explore key methods to enhance the efficiency of your email marketing efforts. Let's get started!

Top email marketing tactics worth considering

When developing your email marketing content and strategy, your aim is typically to achieve high open and click-through rates, ideally leading to increased conversions. While this can be challenging, it becomes more manageable with knowledge of effective email strategies. Here are several tactics to assist you in creating compelling emails that resonate with your target audience.

1. Divide your audience into segments

Imagine you're planning an in-person seminar on the latest e-commerce trends in your industry. Would you invite every subscriber on your list? Unlikely. Your list likely includes business partners, clients, customers, and newsletter registrants. Instead, you'd consider factors like proximity to the venue and interest in the seminar.

This process of pinpointing the right audience is known as email segmentation. It ensures your emails are pertinent, reaching the right recipients at the right moment. Segmentation can be done in various ways:

Demographics

Utilizing customer data such as gender, age, location, income, and company position tailors offers to the appropriate audience. For instance, clothing retailers benefit from segmenting by gender and age, while B2B sales rely on company position.

Engagement

Monitoring metrics like open and click-through rates allows for targeted re-engagement emails, especially for subscribers who haven't interacted in over 90 days.

Sales funnel position

Differentiating emails for new subscribers versus existing customers is vital. New subscribers may receive general emails showcasing various products, while existing customers benefit from targeted offerings based on their interests.

With tools like Moosend, segmenting your email list based on diverse criteria, from demographics to past-purchase behavior, is seamless. Data suggests segmented campaigns garner 100.95% more clicks than non-segmented ones, highlighting the value of this strategy.

2. Customize your email content

Even a small touch of personalization can yield significant results, making it a staple in any email marketing advice list. Statistics indicate that personalized email subject lines can drive a 50% higher open rate, while personalized calls to action (CTAs) can result in a remarkable 202% increase in conversion rates. Moreover, 91% of consumers express a preference for businesses offering relevant offers. Given these compelling statistics, integrating personalization into your email strategy is essential. Simple gestures like addressing recipients by their names in the opening line significantly outperform generic greetings like "Dear User" or "Dear Customer," which often come across as impersonal and spam-like. Furthermore, expanding personalization beyond just names is highly recommended. Platforms like Moosend offer extensive personalization features allowing customization based on location and employing AI for data analysis to recommend the most suitable products to customers.

3. Enhance your email subject lines

Subject lines hold immense significance in email marketing, with research indicating that 47% of individuals base their decision to open an email solely on its subject line. This statistic underscores the critical role subject lines play in engaging recipients, whether they're email subscribers or potential customers.

Crafting a compelling subject line can be the difference between achieving high open and click-through rates and having emails go unnoticed. Thus, it's imperative to prioritize this aspect of your email marketing strategy.

Given the inundation of emails individuals receive daily, standing out amidst the competition is essential. When crafting subject lines, it's advisable to adhere to these principles:

• Keep it concise: Aim for 50-60 characters at most.
• Utilize powerful action verbs.
• Incorporate the subscriber's name for a personalized touch.

Attention to detail in subject lines is a proven email marketing best practice that shouldn't be overlooked.

4. Implement automated campaigns and processes

Harnessing the power of automation is crucial for managing the multitude of emails involved in an effective marketing campaign. Automated emails streamline the process significantly.

Examples of automated emails include welcome messages, transactional notifications, expressions of gratitude, and reminders for abandoned carts. With an email marketing tool, these emails can be triggered automatically based on user actions. For instance, signing up for a newsletter prompts the delivery of a welcome email.

Similarly, if a customer abandons their shopping cart, an automated reminder along with a coupon can be dispatched. Automation is also invaluable for re-engagement campaigns, allowing for the sending of special offers to dormant customers. Moosend offers versatile triggers for automation initiation, including loops for sending recurring emails at specified intervals.

Moreover, Moosend provides a plethora of pre-designed automation templates and offers customization through an intuitive drag-and-drop workflow builder, empowering users to tailor automation to their specific needs.

5. Strategize your email sending schedule

A prevalent mistake in email marketing is sending emails at inappropriate times. Consider the impact of an email landing in a reader's inbox during the wee hours—it's likely to get buried under the morning influx of messages.

Customizing the send time according to your target audience is crucial. For instance, in the B2B SaaS sector, sending emails during work hours and midweek is optimal. The midday, midweek timing is popular as it avoids the chaos of Mondays and weekends.

Nevertheless, it's essential to experiment with different sending times based on your demographics. For example, if you're promoting a special offer at a fast-food chain, consider positioning it as a delightful end-of-week treat by scheduling the email around 4 pm on Friday.

6. Provide customer education

The primary concern for newsletter creators is the risk of readers becoming disinterested and unsubscribing, potentially leading to a spike in unsubscribe rates. Keeping readers engaged and eager for more content is crucial, and one effective approach is to incorporate educational material, such as case studies, into your newsletter.

This strategy not only keeps readers engaged but also establishes your brand as a thought leader in your industry, fostering increased customer loyalty through the perception of your company as a trusted source of knowledge.

Your newsletter content options are vast and can include instructional videos, tutorials, compelling articles, and insightful blog posts from your corporate website. To execute this email marketing strategy effectively, tools like Moosend provide a robust drag-and-drop editor, a convenient built-in image picker, and a collection of appealing templates.

Creating visually captivating email designs has historically been a challenge, but user-friendly tools make it achievable.

7. Monitor key email metrics

Understanding your shortcomings is essential for improvement, whether in life or email marketing. Tracking various metrics allows you to pinpoint areas of success and areas in need of enhancement.

Key metrics to monitor include:

• Bounce rate: Indicates the percentage of email addresses that couldn't be delivered. This helps identify issues affecting email deliverability.
• Email open rate: Reflects how many recipients opened your email, providing insights into the effectiveness of your subject lines and preheaders.
• Unsubscribe rate: Indicates whether subscribers are losing interest in your newsletter, prompting adjustments to your content strategy.
• Signups: Tracks the number of new subscribers acquired, gauging the effectiveness of your campaign in driving traffic to your landing pages.

Managing and interpreting this data can be daunting, especially without a background in data science. However, platforms like Moosend simplify the process by tracking website interactions and key metrics such as open, click-through, and bounce rates.

Moosend also presents this analytics in user-friendly dashboards, making it easy to comprehend and act upon the insights gained.

8. Tailor for mobile devices

Given the widespread use of smartphones—92.3% of Internet users access the Internet via mobile devices—it's no surprise that 48% of all emails are opened on such devices. Consequently, optimizing content for mobile has become imperative across various online platforms, including content marketing, e-commerce sites, and emails.

Failing to optimize for mobile can result in email templates displaying incorrectly on mobile devices, leading to diminished reader interaction and potential perceptions of spam. To ensure optimal display on mobile email clients, consider the following:

• Design one-column emails to better accommodate vertical screens.
• Center important text for improved readability on smaller screens.
• Ensure the Call to Action (CTA) button is easily tappable with fingers.
• Consider using a larger font size to enhance readability on small screens.

9. Utilize seasonal trends

Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day—what links these holidays? Consumer spending, naturally. These occasions represent some of the most lucrative periods annually.

Harnessing the potential of holiday-themed email templates can help capture a share of the seasonal market. Incorporating appropriate colors and emojis enhances engagement with potential customers, a tactic applicable to any holiday.

Seasonal variations offer another avenue for exploitation. Whether promoting swimwear for summer or ski holidays for winter, aligning your email campaigns with the seasons can yield significant benefits.

Tailoring your email marketing efforts to align with the most relevant seasons and holidays for your products or services is essential for maximizing impact.

Now that we've explored these strategies, let's delve into practical examples in the next section.

10. Conduct A/B testing for your campaign

A/B testing, also known as split testing, involves sending two different versions of an email to determine which performs better, leading to improved email open rates, conversions, or click-through rates. The specific metric to track depends on your company's needs and how you measure email marketing ROI.

However, forgoing A/B testing in email marketing campaigns is not advisable. By testing various elements such as email preheaders, subject lines, templates, email copy, and landing pages, you can refine your email content to create the most effective version possible.