Email Campaign Branding – Best Ideas For 2020

As 2019 draws to a close, you can look forward to the next year with excitement and a desire to take your business to the next level. You’ll want email marketing to be part of that journey. Research has constantly shown that the ROI of any email campaign is going to be higher than other digital channels.

There are many reasons for this, but email being permissible marketing, and the ability for it to be segmented so it’s more relevant, are two key reasons for its success.

Of course, if you want the best success in the new year, then you need to brand your email campaigns. There are several advantages to this.

To start with, it helps to distinguish you from other brands. This can be important in very competitive markets. Another advantage is that you can set customer expectations that can be a very positive experience for them.

Finally, it allows you to focus your email marketing campaigns in one direction. This can make it quicker, and therefore more cost effective, when creating campaigns.

So, what are some of the best email campaign branding ideas for 2020?

1. Create A Learning Environment

An interesting option is to create a learning environment within your email campaigns. This can be based within your specific niche or to do with your products. Learning is an important stage for your business, as educated subscribers will make better informed decisions and you’re giving away free information, which will help build a strong identify and relationship with leads.

This also works because you can use video sharing sites like YouTube to host videos and use that as another marketing channel. Plus, you can reuse the videos in a drip marketing campaign later on or connected with a certain landing page.

2. Build A Campaign That Features Current Customers

Brand your campaign by featuring the work that some of your customers do, using your product/service. This is a way of building peer recommendations without actually allowing customers to directly talk to each other. You can tailor peer recommendations to current deals/offers or a recent event.

This is a great way to build sales as 81% of customers will trust the recommendations of a peer. In addition, it will allow you to create a lot of content without much work as the majority of content will be created by your customers.

3. Create A Common Dictionary

One of the biggest things that can cause problems with campaigns is when emails have different language used between them. For instance, calling a house a home in one email but a residential building in another. This can confuse audiences and can cause other branding issues.

So, sit down before the new year and come up with a branded dictionary that you can use in emails and staff can use with customers when engaging with them on social media, in-store or on the phone.

4. Tell Stories With Campaigns

Another branding option is to tell stories in your campaigns. This could be customer journeys, product development journeys or how staff are doing at your business. Stories can draw audiences into your emails and get them emotionally involved.

Look for ways to make your campaigns highly emotional. The more engaging they are for your audiences the higher your campaign retention will be. Also, customers will be more excited about seeing your campaigns land in their inbox.

Conclusion

As you see out 2019, think about how you can re-brand your email campaigns to make them perform much better in 2020. A great campaign can take your business to the next level. Just what branding will you use?

Will you be changing your email branding in 2020? What will you do to take your brand to the next level?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Why Less Is More When It Comes To Designing Your Email Campaigns

Less is always more when it comes to email.

Email campaigns are successful for numerous reasons. One of the main metrics used for showing the success of a campaign is that it has generated conversions. This often forces campaign designers to continuously add items to their campaigns in order to give audiences plenty of choices and maximise conversion opportunities.

However, this isn’t always the best option. In many cases, there are significant challenges for business owners who put too much into their email designs. For one, audiences feel bombarded. Even though the average time for reading an email has increased, the amount of time is still less than 12 seconds. That isn’t a lot of time for you to get the main message across.

Therefore, you need to remember the famous US Navy acronym KISS. KISS is an acronym with many different variations of the words, but they all mean the same thing: keep whatever you’re doing simple as this is always what works best.

Too Much Information Can Confuse Audiences

When you have too much information within an email, you can confuse audiences which can have three significant implications for your email. Firstly, it can mean that readers abandon your campaign quickly without converting. Secondly, it can increase unsubscribe rates as audiences think your campaigns are spam. Or, it might turn active subscribers into inactive subscribers who still receive your emails but never open them.

All of these aspects will lessen key metrics of your email marketing campaigns. This will make it more expensive to conduct email marketing, and make it seem less worthy. However, the issue is not to do with the email marketing system or your audience, but rather your campaigns’ design.

So, here are four ways to ensure you’re not overloading your campaigns with too much content.

1. Keep One Goal In Mind For Your Campaigns

The first things you need to do is to ensure that you’ve got one goal in mind for your campaigns. That one goal should lead to one action that the audience should take. The whole basis of this content should be that one goal and there should be limited mention of anything else than this.

2. Limit Images To One Important One

The next important aspect is to ensure you’re limiting content on an email to one image. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, half of all emails are now opened on a mobile device, so more than one high quality image slows down the rendering of the email and increases the chance of email abandonment.

Another problem is that more than one image can be distracting. You are better placing one image that clearly demonstrates the core message than bombarding the email with lots of images. If you have more than one image to show, then perhaps have the other images on the next step, on the page they have to click through to.

3. Have One Call To Action

When you’re having two calls-to-action on an email you’re going to confuse audiences to what you want them to do. This can mean that some of your audience will not even bother with your call-to-actions and instead abandon the email. Instead, focus all your effort on one click-through action.

4. Too Much Text

Another key issue with email campaigns is that there is too much text content within it. You want audiences to be able to quickly read the content. Research has found that emails with between 50 and 125 words have a higher response rate than those with less or more words in the content.

Conclusion

The key takeaway is clear: less is definitely more when it comes to email marketing. So, look carefully at your campaigns and ensure that you’re not putting in too much into them.

How do you restrict content on your email campaigns? Do you keep emails simple? Does it work?

Let us know in the comments.

Image from Pixabay

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Keeping Open Rates High Even When It’s Not A Holiday

People may not be jetting off on holiday, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want some holiday cheer in their emails

When it comes to email campaigns, there are a few signs of a healthy list. One of them is your open rates. During any holiday period, you can expect your business’ mailing campaigns to have high open rates. After all, this is the time when your prospective customers have more time and tend to spend more.

However, you don’t want to be limited to just the holidays for successful campaigns. This could waste a lot of time and reduce your revenue potential. So how can you improve your email’s open rates to keep your campaigns alive? Here are our top tips:

1. Promise Something Sensational In Your Emails

Your audience are curious and if you promise something sensational in your emails’ subject line, it doesn’t matter what time of year you’ve sent it, you will peak some interest.

Of course there’s the problem of being too sensational. Some of your audience will think you’re either lying or just trying to seek attention. At the same time, when you create a sensational headline, you need to fulfil the promise you’ve made. Otherwise your audience won’t carry on their purchasing journey.

In addition, if you can’t match audience expectations, then later campaigns will suffer. This can be damaging to your whole brand as some sources state 80% of your sales will happen between the 5th and 12th interaction. If your audience abandon you before those interactions because of unfilled promises, you’ve lost out.

2. Emphasise The Benefits Of Reading

The one question your audience will be asking when they receive your email is why they should read it. Therefore you need to answer this question in the subject line and pre-header text.

The reason you give should be something that benefits the reader. While most e-commerce stores concentrate on discounts or special offers, it doesn’t have to be this. It could be some key information to improve their life, or giving them free information about how to save money.

3. Use Lists And Tips

One of the easiest forms of content to read are lists. By using your email campaigns to distribute and publish lists, you can attract lots of readers whatever the season. You can always use the anticipation of holidays for list creation. For example:

  • Five foods you need at a Thanksgiving dinner.
  • Ten top presents for fathers day.
  • Three holidays you can’t afford to miss.

You can also improve this by moving away the transactional emails (i.e. attempting to sell a product/service) to creating a list of tips for your audience. For example:

  • Five tips for a stress free Thanksgiving dinner.
  • Three ways to save your career today.
  • Ten quotes to inspire your children at school.

4. Keep Your Subject Lines Short

With more emails being opened now on mobiles, it’s important to keep your email subject lines as short as possible. Generally it’s recommended to keep them under 50 characters. That doesn’t seem like a lot of room, but consider that all six subject line examples given in point three don’t have more than 50 characters, you can see that there’s a lot potential for you to write.

5. Play On Positive Emotions About Holidays

Sometimes it can be really good to rely on the emotional pull of a holiday in order to get people to pay attention to your emails. Think about the positive emotions that are associated with Christmas, Thanksgiving and other holidays. Could you play on these emotions in your email campaigns? For instance, “Get that Christmas morning feeling back!”

Conclusion

While holidays are great for email campaigns, you need to generate interest in your products/services all year round. Consider how you can use your subject lines to create exciting and compelling reasons for your audience to open your email at any time of the year.

Do you have open rates that are poorer outside of the holidays? How do you get them better?

Let us know in the comments below.

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5 Ways To Turn Emails Into Engaging Experiences

Make your emails more interactive with readers!

Emails are one of the best ways for you to create an experience for your audience that will sell. In fact, email has been found to be the best sales platform online for over a decade. Audiences trust emails when they’ve subscribed to a list, and they enable you to offer relevant content.

However, there are many missed opportunities when it comes to selling via emails; especially when audiences are looking for an engaging experience.

So how do you make more of your emails and engage you audience? Here are five techniques to try in your next campaign.

1. Start Designing Emails That People Want To Read

Before you start implementing new software or strategies with your email campaigns, you need to create effective emails, to begin with. There are several ways to do this without making to many changes to your campaigns.

These tactics include:

  •  Stop using jargon or inside-industry talk.
  •  Use engaging subject lines, preheader text and titles in the email.
  •  Use personalisation.
  •  Ditch the passive voice.

Use these tactics and you’ll start to see better open rates and readers spending a longer time on your emails and landing pages. You might see a higher click-through rate too.

2. Use Videos Within Your Email Campaigns

Videos are highly engaging and very memorable. They can also be attached to email marketing campaigns with ease. This makes them valuable, especially as 81% of people have been persuaded to make a purchase after watching an explainer video.

As emails are already highly effective at selling, adding video to the mix will increase their effectiveness. At the same time, you can improve your reach online by having the videos hosted on YouTube. Every subscriber who watches your video will then count towards the views count, and the more views you achieve, the more your video will be promoted.

Videos should be short, so try for under two minutes, and have a clear call to action at the end.

3. Use Polls, Surveys And Quizzes To Engage With Audiences

Users love polls, surveys and quizzes; especially if they’re not serious, a little bit fun, and don’t give too much information away. For instance, if you sell a range of dolls, you could have a fun quiz matching the audiences’ personality with the dolls’ characters.

Polls are also great, as people get rewarded by seeing their votes count for something. For example, you could offer subscribers the choice of what new flavour you will develop next, or what video you will create. These interactions help you to see what audiences are looking for and guide your content creation strategy.

4. Send Emails At The Right Time

You know what makes emails really engaging? Them being delivered at the best time for your audience. If they are in the mood for reading your email, and have the time, they will read your email. But if you send it at a time when they are too busy, it could be lost.

There are few ways to determine the best time for sending email campaigns other than A/B Testing. This should be done almost continuously. It doesn’t hurt to segregate your list either into different groups that read their emails at different times.

5. Keep It Short And Simple

Another really good way to get your emails to be engaged with, is to keep them short and simple. The less information you have on the email, and link to a landing page, the more click-throughs you are going to get.

However, you will only achieve a better click-through rate if your original premise has several elements including:

  •  An emotional need from the audience.
  •  A relevance to the audience.
  •  Ease of access to the audience.
  •  Something to intrigue them that the next step is different.

Conclusion

Email marketing is really effective and with a few tweaks you can boost their effectiveness and earn more revenue from your campaigns. The five simple tactics above can help you get that better engagement experience for your audience and make your campaigns generate great returns.

How do you make emails engaging? How do you determine what an engaging email is?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image supplied by Pixabay.

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How To Draw Attention To Key Information

How you can draw attention to important information in your emails.

Any email that’s successful has done one thing right: it’s got the audience to pay attention to the key information. This information can be varied from price amendments to delivery changes. Whatever the information, the method to draw attention is practically the same.

In fact, there isn’t just one aspect that will help draw your audience’s attention towards key information, there are many. This quick guide will help you design an email campaign to get your message across and ensure subscribers don’t miss out on important information.

1. Get Your Email Subject Line And Preheader Text Right

The first thing you need to do is ensure that your email subject line and the preheader text convey the importance of your message. At the same time, you need to avoid words associated with spam so your email stays out of the junk box.

You can do this by using possessive sentences that give the reader ownership and convey some urgency to the message. You can also read our recent blog post about what words to avoid in your email to stay out of spam boxes.

2. Less Text

Text takes time to read and can be frustrating for your audience. Therefore, you need to be concise with your email text and only write what’s necessary. You can highlight important text by putting it in bold, but this should be seldom used.

Never use capital letters in an email as this comes across as aggressive and can damage your brand’s reputation. Colour usage in text is okay, but it’s best left alone as certain colours can convey emotions that you might not want to attribute to your email message.

Finally, try to shorten paragraphs so they’re only a sentence or two long. This is better for mobile display and in addition makes it easier for your audience to read.

3. Use Images And GIFs

Another way for you to convey a message is to use images. Images are processed by the brain much faster than text, have a higher retention rate, and are more attractive to the human eye.

GIFs are a popular way to display a message and they have the bonus of being associated with a cultural reference or are humorous. Therefore, your message has an added attractiveness and higher chance of being retained. Because they are also moving images, they draw the attention of the eye.

GIFs can be used for various messages including:

  • Adding humour to recent issues your business has suffered (i.e. system down).
  • Showcasing new products/services.
  • Telling an important story (i.e. new staff member)
  • They can help demonstrate complex concepts.

Image/GIF placement is also important. People tend to read the left-hand side of a screen more than the right-hand side.

4. Send Emails When Audiences Will Read Them

It’s important to ensure your emails are being sent at the right time. Sending an email when people will just delete it because they are too busy isn’t useful. Instead, you need to analyse when people are less busy or are more receptive to emails.

It can be a complex operation to determine this, but by A/B testing campaigns you should be able to determine the best time and day to send them. If you haven’t done this yet, you should prioritise it for the best results.

Conclusion

Any email campaign you send will convey important information that you’ll need your audience to digest and retain. There are lots of different stages that are needed for your emails to get the attention they need. One of the most important steps is using visuals as part of the email and GIFs are very effective visual pieces of information to help.

Do you use GIFs in your email marketing campaigns? What tactics do you use for your audience to read and retain key information?

Let us know in the comments below.

Image from Pixabay

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What You Can Do To Make Sure Your Email Is Read

How can you get your emails opened

Sending emails is not enough, they must be read to be of any value to your business. But getting them read by your audience can be challenging. There are so many emails delivered to your audience’s inbox every day that yours could be overlooked if it doesn’t grab their attention straight away.

So how can you ensure your emails are read and get your audience to take the next step in your purchasing path?

1. Make Your Subject Intriguing But Specific

Audiences don’t like too big a surprise – they want to be sure that what they are opening has relevance to their needs or wants. At the same time, you don’t want to give the whole game away. Otherwise, they won’t read the email because there is going to be no new information for them to gleam.

2. Be Provocative

Sometimes, you need to try to get the audience to react strongly to your email. If they feel strongly about an email subject, they are more likely to open it to see if your views match. It’s the same kind of reaction that humans get about hearing of a secret, they instinctively want to know what the central message is.

3. Be Negative

Titles with negative words have higher open rates than those with positive titles. Why? Because as humans, we like to know we are better than someone else. So, you might create a title about the worst website design principles or terrible accounting practices because people want to know that they aren’t doing them to make them feel better about themselves.

Use words like:

  • The worst
  • Absolutely wrong
  • No fewer
  • Diabolical

4. Offer Exclusivity

People want to feel special about what they are reading. So, you should use words like VIP, special, exclusive etc. These are words that make people think they are part of a small community or that the offer is only for them. It increases their buy-in and their need to read the content to not miss out on whatever’s in the central message.

5. No Capital Letters

In email etiquette, words written entirely in capital letters are considered to be shouting at the audience. This is something that most people don’t enjoy so it’s best to avoid it whenever possible. Also, email filters are looking out for words in capitals and will block emails that contain a title without any lower-case letters.

5. Be Controversial

Don’t have a mainstream opinion about a current, trending story. That’s boring, and the audience has probably read the same arguments about a dozen times. So, what makes you different from them? Nothing.

Instead, take the opposite approach and be a little controversial. You could gain a little virality and be seen as someone with an original point of view.

6. Send Your Email At The Right Time

While people know that email messages don’t disappear, the evidence does suggest that emails have higher open rates at different times of the day. For many B2C organisations, the best time to send an email is often between 8 pm and midnight. But that doesn’t mean that’s right for your audience; you need to do A/B testing for your business’ audience before settling on the best time.

You should also look at what day to send emails. Some evidence suggests Tuesday to Thursday, but other evidence states that the weekend is a good time for sending emails.

7. Don’t Use A Brand Name For Sender Details

Just using a brand name for your sender details is going to reduce your open rate. Instead, you need to look at using an individual as the spokesperson for the organisation.

Conclusion

Getting your emails opened is important. It helps improve sales and can grow your business without too much expense. You can improve your open rates, and therefore your sales by using some of our tips above.

How do you maximise open rates? What time and day do you send your emails?

Let us know in the comments below.

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The Benefits Of Not Doing Your Own Email Marketing

Email marketing results can be better when you outsource

Many businesses outsource their email marketing hoping to get better returns on their marketing investments and grow their business. In fact, with the ROI of email marketing making it one of the best digital marketing sales channels, outsourcing your email marketing could be a great decision to make.

Here are some of the benefits of outsourcing your email marketing and having a professional digital agency do the work for you.

1. Save Time

While email marketing is cost effective, it can still take a significant amount of time; especially if you aren’t particularly skilled at email marketing. Your time could be better spent servicing your customers.

There are two main benefits of spending more time on your customers. Firstly, you can provide a better service to your current customers and therefore delight them more, improving your customer retainment rate. The second benefit is that you can improve productivity, allowing you to serve more customers and increase your potential income.

2. Better Result Analysis

Do you know how to read the email reports you get? Very few people do. That’s why it’s helpful to get a person who knows how to read email statistics to look at them. They can tell you who’s a non-responder on your email list and should be sent a re-engagement campaign or removed, and they’ll help you determine who’s ready for the next stage in your sales funnel.

This can help you save money and pick up sales that you otherwise wouldn’t get. A typical example of this would be seeing a customer open an email and click through to a sales page several times but not buy. A professional digital marketer should tell you about this behaviour, so you can call the lead and see if you can help them.

3. Better Designs

Everyone judges a book by the cover and your emails are no different. Professional digital marketers can design captivating emails for you to use that will attract your audiences and generate sales.

They will even know what the best copy is for your email marketing campaigns. This will include subject lines, preheader text, body copy and call-to-actions. These can make all the difference to the results of your campaign.

4. Reduce Mistakes

Errors made on email marketing systems are one of the biggest reasons why email marketing results aren’t what they should be. However, a trained and experienced email marketer will be able to spot mistakes and correct them before email campaigns are sent.

Fewer mistakes also gives a more professional image for your brand.

They will also help you to maintain your email marketing within the legal constraints of your country. A breach of the digital communications law can lead to heavy fines.

5.  Greater Consistency

When you set expectations, customers will want to see you match them. This can be in the design of your emails, the timing of your emails or the frequency. If you do your email marketing yourself, it’s easy for you to forget your email marketing during a busy week or accidentally set it for the wrong time.

Any outsourcer will keep consistency in mind and are likely to help you stick to deadlines.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing avenues for your brand. Not only is it cost effective but it can achieve more sales than any other digital sales path available. However, some businesses are missing out because they aren’t utilising the skills, knowledge or experience of professional email marketers.

Hiring an email marketer might just be one of the best investments your business makes.

Have you hired an email marketer? How did they improve your results?

Let us know in the comments below.

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7 Powerful Email Marketing Strategies That Convert Readers Into Buyers

emails on phone

How can you make more money from your emails?

Email marketing may be one of the best ways for you to achieve sales but it doesn’t mean your business will automatically make sales just because you are utilising it. Instead, you need to carefully plan your business’ email campaigns and generate an interest in your offers. This is done through careful design and the use of psychological triggers.

Here are our seven powerful email strategies you can use to convert your subscribers into loyal buyers.

1. The Time Of Day You Send Your Emails

Sending emails later in the day can be an effective way to encourage sales. Some people state that 8:00 pm to midnight is a good time. Mainly because decision fatigue is higher in the evening which often leads to greater impulse buying.

However, if you are a B2B business, this might mean your email is lost overnight. Instead, consider sending your email about 4:00-5:00 pm.

2. Urgency

There is nothing more worrying to a buyer than potentially missing out on an offer or business advantage. That’s why it’s important that you include some urgency within your offer to encourage the reader to act fast.

There are several ways you can do this, for example:

  • Have a limited edition.
  • Limit the number of people who can buy your product or service.
  • Limit the time the offer is available.
  • A combination of the above.

3. Personalise But Not With Their Name

You might think that using a subscriber’s name is one of the best ways to grab their attention, however, research has found it can harm your sales. This is most likely because it is overused and easy to implement, so it has little value.

Instead, you should use other identifying data to relate to your subscribers and get them to pay attention to your brand. An example would be an automatic email that identifies a recent action on your website.

4. Create Killer Subject And Preheader Lines

The subject line of your email is the first thing that people are going to see in their mailboxes. The preheader line is the next thing they are going to see. These two lines can make or break your email’s results.

If you don’t have value and urgency to your email, and don’t let the recipient know what the email is about, your open and click through rates will likely reduce.

It’s also important to consider the length of the subject line. Anything between 70-90 characters won’t get great results. Subject lines above this will get more opens and subject lines longer than this will get more click throughs generally.

5. Entertain And Educate

You should try to minimise your email’s selling, and instead, try to email your audience on a regular basis with informative content that makes them smile. This helps to show your personality and you can use other marketing content like blog posts, YouTube videos or short courses online to expand on your message.

It’s important to use autoresponders in your campaigns as this can lessen the strain on your business to create content on a regular basis.

6. Don’t Forget Mobile Users

While you are creating emails, it is important not to forget that more than half of your email subscribers will be using mobile devices like tablets and phones to read their mobiles. If your mail doesn’t look right on their device, then you aren’t going to make a good impression.

Ensure your emails are optimised for mobile and look at it on different devices. Some tricks can be found here.

7. Utilise Weekends

You might have packed up for the weekend, but the internet hasn’t, nor have your subscribers. Studies have shown that compared to weekday emails, those sent on Saturday and Sunday do perform better.

Though ironically, Thursday seems to be the day where the largest orders are made, and Wednesday is when the cost per transaction is lowest.

Conclusion

When was the last time you sent an email that got you results? Try adding a few of our tips above and see whether they can help you improve your business’ email marketing campaigns. It could help you grow your business without the need for substantial investment.

Have you tried our tactics above? What were the results?

Let us know in the comments below.

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How To Get Your Emails Opened And Clicked

How to get more opens and click through rates.

Sending emails to your subscribers is only half the battle; you should also ensure the recipients are opening and acting on your mail. This can be trickier than you might think. Open rates vary between industries and even demographics, yet there are common elements and tactics that can usually help you improve your statistics.

So what tactics do we recommend for improving your open rates and click-throughs?

1. Personalisation

How do you get your audience to care about your message? Make the message about them with personalisation. This can be done with a simple insertion of the recipient’s name; though that isn’t always enough.

Sometimes you have to try something more advanced, such as sending campaigns that are segmented based on subscriber behaviour or demographics. The more specific the information to the reader, the greater the chance they will take action.

2. Pre-header Text

Sometimes a subject line isn’t enough for your audience to act; they need more information. While information within the email is probably sufficient, some mail browsers aren’t going to display this. Instead, you need to use pre-header texts.

These should be about 100 characters long and give detailed information about what is included in the email including a strong call-to-action.

3. Use Powerful Call-To-Actions

A call to action is the tool you use to ensure your audience takes further action. However, too many small brands don’t use the best call-to-actions when encouraging readers to carry on the purchasing journey. For instance, many use ‘click here’ which is overused.

A call-to-action should have three parts to it:

  • Urgency (so the user doesn’t wait for fear of missing out).
  • Definition of the action to take (so they know what to do).
  • Value (so they know what their reward is going to be).

Without these elements, call-to-actions are pointless.

4. Mobile Friendly

More than half of all emails are now opened on a mobile device. If your email isn’t optimised for mobile devices, which includes phones and tablets, then you can lose out as when the customer gets to a desktop, they’ve received other emails which they want to deal with.

Some of the major issues with emails on mobiles is the image size. If it is too big then it will consume time and data limit on mobile devices. Limit images to the proper size, no more than 600 pixels wide, and minimise their memory usage.

5. Send Your Emails At The Right Time

Different audiences will read and respond to emails at different times. If you don’t send emails at the right time, then you will find that less emails will be read. There are numerous studies into when the best time to send emails is; however, they rarely agree.

The only way to ensure you are sending your emails at the best time for your audience is to test. This should be done via split testing, where two times are tested and the result analysed. This should be done several times with the best time from the previous test pitted against a new time.

The test should also be done with regards to day. Some brands find that weekends are better than weekdays.

6. Be Concise

Try to limit your emails so they are only about 150-200 words long. This gives the audience enough data to make an informed decision but isn’t too long that they get bored while reading the message.

If your content needs more information, try linking it to a landing page where users can read more.

Conclusion

Your emails are the best marketing platform you have. They consistently have the best return on investment and you can monitor direct results.

However, that doesn’t mean your campaigns will automatically be great. You will need to optimise your campaigns to ensure audiences are opening and responding to your campaigns. Use the tips above to help guide you to improve your email campaigns and get the best results.

Do you have any email marketing tips? Do you optimise your emails for mobiles?

Let us know in the comments below.

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Email Marketing Agencies – How They Impact Small Business

email agency worker

How an email agency can help or hinder your small business.

There are numerous email marketing agencies who will readily offer their services to your brand, either to run, or support, your email marketing campaigns. However, their effectiveness and usefulness to your business is something that is not consistent across the industry.

When at their best, email marketing agencies can propel your business to the next level. The worst can cause your brand significant issues.

So how can email marketing agencies help your company? What are both the good and bad aspects to consider?

The Good

Email Agencies Can Improve Results

The best agencies use experienced and qualified email marketing experts. They’ve been in the industry for several years and know what tactics, designs and content works best for which audience.

They also have skills you might not possess such as HTML coding, which can help you get more out of your email marketing campaigns.

They Save You Time

How valuable is your time? Could you be doing something that is more valuable to your business, like servicing clients while a professional takes over some of the other specialist tasks? Work out roughly what you earn per hour and how long it takes you to run a single campaign to see what the difference is in the valuation.

Better Analysis

While you might think about open rates and click through rates – you might not realise what statistics are best for which campaign. A professional email marketing agency can give you a proper run of results on your campaigns and provide you with a true assessment based on pre-determined and realistic goals.

Advice

Due to their experience and knowledge, a good email marketing agency should be able to give you the best advice. This can range from what offers you could make, to how you can create a good campaign for your audience over the long-term. This advice can be worth gold dust.

The Bad

Ruin Your Reputation

Email agencies can sometimes be less than reputable with their tactics. This is normally due to the fear of having to prove themselves on every campaign. They could convince you to buy email marketing lists or get your mail server blacklisted by sending too many emails in a short period.

You need to check your agency on their tactics and ask how long it will take to send out a set amount of emails. And you should never buy an email marketing list.

Costly

Some email marketing agencies are expensive, especially when you have a business that requires you to call your best responders and continue the sales process. Also, it’s likely you haven’t been too consistent recently in emailing your prospects. Therefore, the time from the start of your engagement with the agency to your first sales could be a few months.

You Lose Control

By outsourcing your email marketing, you will lose some control, even if you are actively involved in your email marketing campaigns. This can be frustrating, and at times, you might have emails that go in the wrong direction to what you were planning.

How To Mix The Two

Remember there can be positive aspects to hiring an email marketing agency. However, you might want to use an email marketing service like Fluttermail to send emails through, and ask an agency to design the email with your guidance.

This way you get the benefits of the agency, without any negative aspects. It is important you collaborate with your email agency and let them know what services you want to offer on which week, and the direction you want to go in.

By setting goals for your email campaigns you can better control the service and the results.

Do you use an email agency? What are the benefits for your business? What are the costs?

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