The complete email marketing guide for 2020

Adding email to your marketing strategies can feel complicated—you’ll need to do everything from improving email deliverability to increasing conversions. Fortunately, you can streamline your approach to email by making a few simple adjustments. Over time, you’ll gradually learn more about the details of email marketing and understand what resonates with your audience.

This article will cover a few of the best ways for digital marketers to upgrade their email marketing strategies and increase performance on the most important metrics. Keep in mind that there’s no “best” way to manage an email campaign—different audiences respond to different kinds of content.

Build your email list

Even the best emails won’t lead to great results if you don’t have a strong email list, so this should be your first priority. It’s important to focus on quality as well as quantity, so don’t forget to remove inactive users from your list after a certain period of time.

Lead magnets are one of the most effective ways to give readers an additional reason to consider signing up for your email newsletters. A lead magnet could be anything from an e-book to a giveaway entry. Most internet users already receive too many marketing emails, so they often need an extra benefit to think about providing their contact information.

You can also increase your subscription rate by adding pop-ups, particularly exit-popups, to your brand’s website. Exit pop-ups are designed to appear when a potential customer starts to leave your site. Combined with a unique lead magnet, they can draw readers back in before they exit the page.

Of course, you can always use A/B testing to compare results with different email capture strategies. Rather than sticking to a single pop-up, for example, try out a few designs that lead magnets to see what works best. It can take a while to determine what your audience is interested in.

Write great newsletters

It goes without saying that the content itself is the most critical element in an email marketing campaign. Investing in engaging and valuable content is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate yourself from the competition and establish a brand image with your audience.

Updating your approach to email content starts with basic strategies like limiting text, editing for typos, and optimizing your messages for mobile devices. From there, you can focus on more advanced tactics such as long-form and exclusive content. Some email automation tools streamline these processes by making it easy to customize every detail of each campaign.

Again, part of improving your email marketing strategies is understanding which types of content are likely to connect with your audience. This requires a significant amount of customer data, and you may be able to achieve better results with a service dedicated to tracking audience information.

You can begin to build email content around audience preferences by developing customer personae that represent the typical customer’s desires and budget. Customer personae help you consider the audience’s point of view and market based on their needs. Audiences expect relevant, personalized content from their favorite brands.

Improve open rates

Just as you can’t achieve your email marketing goals without a strong list, you won’t make many sales if you can’t get readers to open your messages. Low open rates occur for a number of reasons, and they can prevent great email campaigns from getting off the ground.

The simplest way to start increasing open rates is to give readers more control over the types of content they receive. Rather than sending the same messages to everyone, let new subscribers input their own preferences. For example, they could sign up for different kinds of content or a certain frequency.

Giving users the ability to set their own parameters also has the potential to reduce unsubscribes. Rather than leaving entirely, they can simply deselect anything they aren’t interested in. Similarly, they could reduce their email frequency if they feel like they’re receiving messages too often.

Keep in mind that the subject line is the first thing users see in their inbox, along with your sender name and possibly the first few words of the message. It’s crucial to optimize each of these elements to maximize open rates and move readers through the sales funnel.

A/B testing is easily the most efficient way to identify your best sender name along with the perfect subject lines for each campaign. A reliable email marketing platform can be a worthwhile investment if it helps you achieve better results on each campaign.  

Turn more subscribers into customers 

Subscriptions, open rates, and click-through rates are important, but the end goal is always to make more sales. Unfortunately, turning subscribers into buyers can be one of the most difficult aspects of the entire customer journey.

While every element of your email marketing strategies can affect conversions, the call to action is a good place to start examining your practices. Calls to action generally include some kind of discount or another exclusive benefit that leads readers to open the email and take advantage of the offer.

You can also significantly increase sales by targeting users who add an item to their cart on your store but don’t follow through with the purchase. Most online shopping carts are abandoned, so converting even a small percentage of these readers can have a substantial impact on your bottom line.

Don’t forget that bringing customers back to your brand is at least as important as leading them to their first purchase. Customer retention can be just as challenging, but it’s almost always cheaper to sell to existing customers than to find new ones. Retargeting and follow-up offers should consistently play a role in your email marketing campaigns.

Try to combine your email marketing automation with SMS marketing activities. Send SMS for customers when they abandon their carts.

It’s impossible to perfect your email marketing strategies overnight, but small improvements on key metrics like subscriptions, open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate can make a real difference in sales. These strategies will help you optimize email content and lead more customers through the sales funnel.