Email marketing can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses. After all, you want to stand out enough that you get noticed, clicked on, read, and interacted with. To maximize the effectiveness of your efforts, it's beneficial to approach your email marketing by following a few key best practices.
Let’s talk about some of these email marketing best practices that your business can and should utilize the next time you take advantage of this particular marketing medium.
Time it Right
Let’s start with one of the easiest elements to control… when you send out your marketing messages.
It is essential to remember that you are communicating with busy individuals. Therefore, a single email at the wrong time is merely going to be a blip on their radar. It’s also important to realize that the best time tends to fluctuate depending on the industries you are marketing to, the type of client persona you are targeting, and these trends even change over time. Some trial-and-error will help you determine when your email marketing gets the most traction, so make sure you’re paying attention to any patterns that pop up.
Some Times Have Proven to Be Effective in the Past
Depending on your strategy, you can capitalize on a few reliable trends and tendencies. For instance, many people check their email first thing after arriving at work and preparing their morning coffee. Others may wait until just before their lunch break, while others will burn time before work by checking their inboxes.
In any case, ensuring that your messages are delivered between midnight and 8 AM will help you get as many successful opens as possible.
Another time that many find effective is during the mid-to-late afternoon/evening lull, when most of the day’s activities have already been attended to. Perhaps people are simply looking to switch up their workplace activities as a bit of a break, but the time block between 3 and 7 PM often yields decent open rates.
To determine what your audience prefers, try sending the same email to different members of your audience at various times and see which is more effective. Modern business email platforms and professional service automation software can help you manage this process. In any case, you need to track how well your different email strategies perform, as informed by your open and click-through rates.
Experiment with Different Days of the Week
For a long time, the standard practice for email marketing was to send messages during the central days of the workweek—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Lately, however, this has leveled out significantly, making it essential that you utilize multiple days of the week to send your messages.
It is Crucial to Pay Attention to Your Audience’s Response
Nowadays, very few businesses have an audience that completely and totally agrees on every preference. Schedules vary, trends change, and numerous factors can influence habits that impact the effectiveness of your email marketing.
This makes it essential that you try different things to identify what works best for your specific audience. The important thing is that they know you’re there and are less tempted to turn to a competitor who is communicating with them more actively.
Don’t Be Afraid to Get a Little Personal
Generally speaking, there are two types of marketing emails, each serving a distinct purpose in your marketing communications.
You have the branded, less personal emails that work to reinforce brand awareness by sharing things like newsletters, promotions, changes to your hours, and other things like that. These are not meant to help you build a relationship, and that’s fine. They are intended to be informational above anything else.
You also have the more personal emails that come directly from someone in your business, as in, from that individual’s company email and not a no-reply address. These messages can and should feel more casual and friendly than your more heavily branded communications.
Let’s say you wanted to push the sale of Widget X over the summer months. A more personal email dedicated to that goal may look something like this:
Hello [firstname],
I hope you’re as ready for summer as we are! However, nothing puts a damper on summer fun faster than [problem that Widget X solves].
We want to make sure that this isn’t something you have to deal with. That’s why I’m reaching out! My team and I put together a little cheat sheet to help you get ready for [problem] so it doesn’t turn your summer into a bummer. You can check it out here [this is where you share the link that brings them to your website to download the resource], and you can also give us a call with any questions you might have.
Seriously, please don’t hesitate to reach out—we want you to have as much fun this summer as possible!
This kind of email is brief, to the point, and welcoming. The more granular and well-vetted you get with your lists, the more personal you can be.
Keep Up with Your Lists
Hopefully, this would be second nature to you, but it’s still worth mentioning: you need to make sure that your all-important contact lists remain fresh and accurate. Otherwise, your messages won’t match the audience you’re sending them to.
This is where granularity is also your friend. Let’s say you have a group of customers taking advantage of Widget X, but haven’t yet utilized the complementary Component Y. This group should be its own list. Likewise, customers who haven’t adopted Widget X should be grouped into a separate list, as should those currently using both Widget X and Component Y already.
The point is that each list should be specific enough that creating an email directed to its contacts would be straightforward and relatively simple.
The same applies to your prospective customers and clients, as well as anyone who is a member of the local chamber of commerce (assuming your chamber permits this type of marketing segmentation, which is something you will want to verify). Basically, identify the reason you may want to send someone an email, and create a list that reflects those contacts who align with that reason. Naturally, many of your contacts will likely find themselves on several of your lists.
Try and Try Again
Hopefully, you’ve caught on to a pattern throughout this discussion: effectively using email marketing requires some level of experimentation to really work for you.
No two audiences are going to be exactly alike, which means you need to identify any changes that need to be made in how you communicate with them—whether that’s when you send a message, how that message is presented, how many emails you send, how well your list is maintained, or any other tweaks.
Modern marketing is all about trial, error, and revision, so a lack of immediate success in no way indicates that your efforts were a failure.
We Can Help Advise Your Business Marketing and Supply the Tools to Manage It
Contact us to learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals, or schedule a meeting to discuss your needs. Reach out at (607) 433-2200, or check our schedule to see what we have available for you.
