10 Ideas to Make Your Email Marketing More Effective

If you’re not seeing the benefits of email marketing, you could be in need of new ideas. In this blog, we’ll discuss how to start email marketing for success and the different ways you can freshen up your approach.

Read on for effective email marketing ideas to drive better results in 2022.

1. Use Personalisation

People expect a high level of personalisation across their entire customer journey, from their initial contact with your brand through to the post-purchase experience. Personalisation is one of the best ways to build trust and establish an authentic relationship, so it’s not something you can ignore.

While 38% of ecommerce emails were personalised in 2019, that number blew up to 60% in 2020 (Hubspot). It just goes to show how important personalisation is to creating engaging emails that stay ahead of your competition.

You can start off small with personalisation, just by adding a ‘first name’ field that directly addresses your recipient. Then you could take it a step further, personalising parts of the content based on audience segmentation.

Segmenting your audience is an important step that will allow you to build specific nurture campaigns for different buyer types, and have these reflect specific stages in their customer journeys.

2. Create a Preference Centre

Personalisation can also come in the form of giving back control to the user and allowing them to tailor the relevance of emails reaching their inboxes.

By creating a preference centre, you let customers opt in and out of emails based on what they want from your brand.

Create options for topics like new product releases, company news, general marketing and so on.

Remember that customer needs change over time, so while they may not want your marketing emails now, they could want them in the future. While you don’t need to push the message, it shouldn’t be ‘set and forget’ either. Give your customers the option to change their preferences as often as is appropriate.

Top tip: a preference centre gives your customers a way to decline certain emails without having to unsubscribe entirely.

3. Customise Frequency

Increase satisfaction and minimise unsubscribes by tuning in to how many emails customers want to receive.

Start by collecting data in your customer relationship manager to see how often emails get opened, deleted and read.

These insights allow you to match the frequency of your emails to your audience’s interest-level.

Aside from boosting brand optics, it also streamlines your email strategy to cut time and costs associated with ineffective campaigns.

If you have a preference centre, this is a great method to allow customers to choose their own cadence and give them more control over their journey.

4. Be Mobile-first

Nearly 55% of global website traffic is generated from mobile devices (Statista), and yet too many businesses are not optimising email campaigns for mobile.

With users accessing emails anywhere and everywhere at all times of the day, optimising email campaigns for mobile can boost your results. This means shortening the amount of text, reducing the size of assets and keeping the mindset of a mobile user in mind – are they reading on-the-go, with minutes to spare?

5. Get Creative

Email marketing has been around for such a long time that it’s easy to get complacent.

But by reinvigorating your campaigns with new creativity, you can see an uptick in conversions.

Breathe fresh life into your email marketing ideas by including an engaging mix of secondary call-to-actions that link to exciting content for those users who are not drawn in by your primary call-to-action.

Enrich your message with different content structures to break up the text, videos and gifs.

6. Choose the Right Platform

Successful email marketing will depend on which platform you choose to run your campaigns.

Your marketing automation platform doesn’t need to be expensive or comprehensive, it just needs to match your business goals.

Choose a platform that collects the data you need and integrates with your other marketing platforms and tools. We’ve done a platform comparison here that should help with your choice.

7. Drive ROI

A lot of businesses think of email marketing as a way of keeping audiences in-the-loop.

But email is a powerful tool for driving return on investment (ROI).

Use email marketing to nurture leads to purchase and keep them as long time customers. This might mean shifting your content strategy from engagement and capturing attention to addressing key challenges or barriers to entry in their customer journey.

8. Measure Your Results

We’ve helped a lot of clients optimise their email marketing campaigns simply by measuring their results.

It sounds simple (and probably obvious), but this is an often neglected habit that takes campaigns from average to great.

But make sure to identify and measure the metrics that are most important to your ROI. A robust and comprehensive reporting strategy that gives you the insights you need to make decisions about your campaigns is invaluable.

 9. Sync Other Channels

The best email marketing campaigns are run as part of a multi-channel strategy.

This means using email alongside other channels for campaigns that reach audiences in multiple ways and create a seamlessl cross-channel experience.

Rather than using email in isolation, try it as part of a comprehensive multi-channel strategy to improve your campaigns.

10. Split Test

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, lets you see what’s working for your audience by comparing two approaches side by side.

It’s a rigorous, almost scientific method but it’s also very easy to do.

You can use split testing on email campaigns, and many other elements of your digital marketing linked to your email campaigns, like landing pages.

Conduct a split test by creating two almost identical emails and changing just one element keeping all others the same.

For example, you can split test subject lines, CTAs, assets, send time, personalisation… the list is endless!

Email marketing ideas

The great thing about email marketing is that it’s scalable to suit your needs at any time. You can scale campaigns up or down based on your budget, goals or even buying seasons.

These ideas will help you make the most of your email marketing as an effective channel to connect with and support your audience.