No marketing tool has quite had the staying power of email marketing. When the latest marketing gimmick fails, you can still rely on email marketing to bring in some new business.
That said, if you’re still using the same email marketing strategy that you did ten years ago, you’re missing out. Modern spam filters have become very adept at sorting out spammy and malicious emails.
If you’re using a content template that you developed ten years ago, many of your emails are ending up in the spam filter. 54.68% of all emails as of September of 2019 were spam.
What’s more, if the person has had any security awareness training, they’re likely to regard emails from an unknown sender as suspicious. There are too many phishing attempts and viruses attached to emails to take the chance.
So, it’s clear that we need a new approach to email marketing. In this post, we’ll go over the top tips for updating your email marketing strategy for 2020.
It’s All About Your Audience
You now have to adopt a customer-centric approach when creating your emails. That means providing them with useful, relevant information. Blasting your audience with marketing messages that they don’t find relevant will land you on the spam pile fast.
Email marketing is no longer just about marketing. You have to improve the client’s life in some way. Blasting the little old ladies from the local church group with ads for erectile marketing cream, for example, wastes their time and yours.
Take some time out and segment your subscriber list before each campaign. Your aim is to group subscribers with similar needs together. There are many ways to do this. You could, for example, group them by:
- Age
- Location
- Income
- Marital Status
- Last purchase
- And so on
Find a way that makes sense to you, and then create a personalized email campaign for each group. Now take things a step further and do the same when creating non-marketing related emails. That new mom, for example, might love a short video showing her how to swaddle her baby.
That teenager might appreciate a review of the latest Xbox games. You get the idea – your content should fill a need in the target’s life.
Take things a step further by tailoring the type of content to the segment of the audience. That teenager, for example, might prefer a short video. Someone with a slow internet connection, on the other hand, might prefer text-based content.
Work on ways to get more information on your audience. The better you know them, the easier it will be to create killer content.
Limit the Number of Email Blasts that You Send Out
According to Statista, there were 3.823 billion email users at the end of 2018. At the end of 2018, we sent or received 281.1 billion emails. That’s an average of 73 emails per user per day. It’s no wonder that people are so quick to mark emails as spam.
It doesn’t matter how much useful information you pack into your emails. If you send too many emails, you’re spamming your audience. One email every week or two is an excellent way to stay in contact without bombarding your clients.
Use Content Created by Your Users
You can use any content your users create. It might be a video that a client sent in showing them using one of your products. It might be reviewed in text, video, or audio format. What about an unboxing video?
Showing your user’s content reinforces your brand image. You are demonstrating that you appreciate what they think. Just be sure that you get their permission before publishing it.
You don’t have to stick to content related to your products. What about video footage of a local fun-run, for example? Think outside the box with this one and ask your audience for submissions. You can make this fun by creating a competition.
Create Interactive Emails
Interactivity is essential today because it helps to keep readers engaged. Your standard email format is boring. If the text runs too long, people might even decide that it’s not worth reading. Maintain their interest by using interactive elements. These could include:
- An animated call to action button
- An interactive slideshow that the user controls
- Accordion features so that longer emails seem less intimidating
- Rollover links to highlight other features of the product
- Polls, surveys, and fun quizzes that users would find entertaining
Final Notes
By now, you’d have noticed a trend in this post. Your emails should be all about the audience. The days of sending out generic email blasts are over. If you want to get great results in 2020, you have to change how you approach your email campaigns.
Creating more targeted campaigns is more work, but targeted emails are also more likely to result in sales. By doing a little extra work up front, you’ll waste far less time going forward.
