6 Powerful Email Marketing Strategies You Should Adopt

This article was last updated on January 13, 2021

For years, experts have said that email marketing is dead, but it continues to reign supreme as the most impactful marketing channel. Every year it yields the best results for businesses. Data shows that it delivers the best marketing ROI (return on investment), rating 73 percent in preference over other channels like organic search and content marketing.

Also behind those numbers are powerful email marketing strategies. It isn’t enough to keep the same strategy year after year. After all, what was trendy becomes old hat, meaning sales and marketing teams must continue tweaking their strategies to find additional success.

If you’re looking for new marketing strategies to employ, look no further. Below, we share six powerful email marketing strategies that you should adopt and give insight into what makes them powerful.

Personalize Your Emails

Most subscribers are aware that they’re not your only customer and that you send emails to many, but the company has to make them feel less like a number and more like the individual they are. Personalization, in our opinion, is one of the most powerful email marketing strategies you can integrate. Not only does it increase overall engagement, but it’s also essential for customer retention and sales. There are many ways to personalize your emails, too, including anniversaries, website behavior, past purchases, and adding customer names.

The latter is perhaps the most common way to personalize a campaign but imagine how much more powerful your emails would be if you took your personalization to the next level! In 2013, the Direct Marketing Association reported that 75 percent of all email revenue is generated by personalized email campaigns versus the one-size-fits-all approach.

If you’re familiar with segmenting your email lists, you can use your data to personalize the content you provide your customers. Meaning, based on demographics like their interests, age, location, etc., you can make your emails more relevant and useful to customers, thus boosting your open, click, and conversion rates.

Automate Your Email Campaigns

Automation is a marketing strategy that continues to be adopted by companies in every industry imaginable. When it comes to email marketing, automation has a whole host of benefits. The main one is that it can reclaim numerous hours your team has spent individually sending out emails. Automation makes our list of powerful email marketing strategies because of trigger-based emails and their different uses. Trigger-based emails are sent out based on behaviors or specific events, such as, welcome, thank you, and milestone emails.

And subscribers are fans of this approach, too. Epsilon found that open rates for trigger emails are as high as 49 percent, which is 95 percent higher than traditional email open rates. Now, this isn’t to say that every aspect of your email marketing strategy should be automated; there are still aspects of the process that aren’t as impactful without human touch but adding automation to your arsenal is a gamechanger. A few examples of trigger emails you can send:

Related: Common Email Automation Mistakes to Avoid and 6 Insanely Powerful Email Automation Tools

Activation email:

A different take on the standard welcome email; this version is sent after a customer creates an account but doesn’t use the product within seven days. The triggered email will send an automated email that shows your login information as well as resources to help get them started, a few pro tips, and contact information for additional support and scheduling training if needed.

Transactional email:

These emails typically get sent out in relation to purchases customers have made, such as abandoned carts, out of stock order confirmations, items shipped, and delivered emails. Customers appreciate it when you keep them in the know and automating these emails can be a time saver.

Customer loyalty email:

Customers want to know that their business is appreciated, and a customer loyalty email is a perfect way to do so. Surprise your customers by sending an email that rewards them with early access to new features or beta testing opportunities, a free treat of their choice, or a percentage off of their next purchase. The sky’s the limit!

Give Something Away

Let’s face it; one of humankind’s greatest weaknesses is that we love free things. There’s just something about receiving something worthwhile for free that taps right into the pleasure center of our brains. When you offer something for free, the recipient is often willing to do something in exchange for it (we’d feel guilty if we didn’t at least offer it!) even if it’s something as simple as entering in our email address. That’s what lands giving away items like e-books, templates, or tools for free on our list of powerful email marketing strategies.

According to a study conducted on an email list of 6,300 subscribers to learn which types of content earned the highest rates of opens and clicks, they found that consumers love their free resources. Of course, we highly recommend testing your own email list to find out which media in specific they most prefer, but now, you have a head start.

A/B Test Everything

As a company that creates captivating, brand-specific email templates, we understand the necessity to test every piece of your email marketing campaign, from the subject line, to the signature and everything in between. A/B testing your emails gives insight into what works best, and it helps you learn which designs resonate most with your audience. If you’ve got any interest in putting out the best email possible, then you’ll want to invest in this method.

This powerful email marketing strategy is dubbed so because it allows you to create two or more different designs that slightly vary and watch which ones have the best open rates. Not only does this directly influence your future designs, allowing you to give your readers what they really want, but you can also tweak your designs as you learn more.

Optimize for Mobile

Mobile devices are the future, so catering to them is easily one of the most powerful email marketing strategies. We can’t stress its importance enough. There are 144 billion emails sent out daily and 53 percent of those emails get read on a mobile device. Your readers are always on the go and like to take their experiences with them. The best way to ensure that your emails get read and don’t earn a first-class ticket to the spam folder — or worse, they unsubscribe — is to optimize your emails for mobile.

You always want your customers to have the best user experience possible, and that includes making sure your emails look good no matter where they’re read. Try implementing tricks like increasing your email’s font size for improved readability, making the call to action obvious and easy to click, or converting your desktop emails to a one-column design.

Reengage Inactive Subscribers

As with any business, sales and marketing teams mainly focus on gaining new customers, but we suggest trying a different approach: reengaging with inactive customers. Data reveals that the average percentage of inactive subscribers in an email list is around 63 percent, so there’s plenty of work to do! You may be wondering why you should reengage inactive subscribers. One of the reasons we suggest this is that it’s much easier and less expensive to target existing customers than new ones. Plus, they’re more familiar with your company and its services than someone who just signed up.

Another reason is that your inactive subscribers are still your subscribers. The first step in your re-engagement campaign is to define what inactivity means to you. Is it someone who hasn’t opened one of your emails in some months? Next, start trying to reengage them. You can conduct polls and surveys with incentives for engaging, or you can also create an email with a catchy subject line that highlights what’s changed since the last time they’ve visited.

MailBakery

Discovering which powerful email marketing strategies work for your company isn’t an exact science; it’s more like a recipe: you make it your own by adding various ingredients and tweaking the measurements until you find success. One particular ingredient that can make your email marketing campaigns a success is MailBakery. We can create stunning, brand-specific email templates that are sure to grow your business.

Are you interested in cooking up something fresh with us? Contact our team today, and let’s get baking!