Email marketing is dead. The end of email is fast approaching. Email as we know it may go the way of dinosaurs. And yet, here I am writing an article to tell you why email, despite what you may have thought from this subject, is still a valuable tactic and should be included in your multi-touch sales strategy.
Email marketing is still a valuable tactic, yet we still overlook it as an important way to continue to grow and maintain customers and business relationships.
Among over four billion email users, 99% check their emails daily. With this fact, brands and companies should not give up using innovative email campaigns to keep their audience up-to-date on timely news, product releases, and other content that helps you drive sales and retain customers–which leads us back to our question:
“Is Email an Endangered Species?”
We have the answer for you and it might just surprise you!
Many industries are talking about email marketing being dead, but in reality, it isn’t as effective as it used to be unless you make it. While the technology has changed, sales professionals still need to keep it up-to-date and ensure the content is relevant to their audience.
Before you ditch your email marketing campaign, let’s look at what statistics has to say:
- 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months, based on HubSpot Research’ Global Survey from Nov – Dec 2019
- Over 70% of marketers believe email marketing generates “good” or “excellent” returns as a marketing channel based on 2019 Email Marketing Census survey
- 87% of B2B marketers reported email is one of their top free organic distribution channels as it is easy to distribute blogs, webinars and events specific to people who could be interested in that particular piece of content.
Let’s say, for example, your previous email isn’t working–that’s okay! Put yourself in the situation of the user reading your content. Have you ever had the experience of clicking on a link to see if there was information that you needed? Did you find what you wanted? Or was the message communicated well? If not, it was at least worth taking the time to check if your email marketing strategy and content is extinct.
“Email Hasn’t Landed on the Endangered Species List Just Yet.”
Let Go of These ‘Dead’ Email Practices and Apply What Works Best!
How to Write Outstanding Emails That People Actually Look Forward to Receiving.
Email isn’t dead–maybe we’re just misusing it. When running an email marketing campaign, assess and re-evaluate your strategy with these ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’:
DO NOT: Send long, boring and ‘cold’ emails.
Email is more than just sending out your campaign. It starts before readers open the email, and if your subject line isn’t enticing or sounds too templated, they’ll move on to the next one. Worst-case scenario, readers will immediately delete it. Here is one of many tools that can help you with creative email subject lines.
If you’re like us, you’ve had that moment where you’re writing an email and think to yourself: “Is this going to get read? Will anyone even care?” We’ve been there. But don’t worry—we have a foolproof plan for making sure your emails get read, and it only takes three easy steps.
Step 1: Put the most important information at the top of your email. People are busy, and they’re looking for reasons to stop reading an email. Make it easy for them by putting your best stuff up front.
Step 2: Don’t be a subject line hog. It’s not just that shorter subject lines perform better—it’s that they’re more likely to get opened. And if you’re not getting opened, you’re not getting read. And if you’re not getting read, your message is falling on deaf ears.
Step 3: Use visual media whenever possible—images make it easier for people to understand your message!
DO: ‘KISS’ and personalize your emails.
This is arguably the most important part to any email. Consider your audience, personalize your subject line, and make it count. The emails are not about you but the person you are reaching out to. Think about the simple term: KISS, “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Keep your email short, keep it sweet, and focus on the problem you can help them solve. Customers can sense salespeople from a mile away – always talking about themselves, so it’s time to revamp and personalize. Tailor the messages to your recipients, alleviate their pain points, offer them what they want, or share how you can help solve the problem.
A study found out that prospects open less than 24% of their emails. That’s why today I’m going to teach you the secret how to simplify your email marketing strategy that gets results: brevity.
- Emails between 50 and 125 words have the best response rates at just above 50%, according to Boomerang. So why not send short emails then? The reason I’m so adamant about keeping your email message to a minimum is because you are competing against other companies using these same tactics. And even if you were the only one sending out an email, you would still want to keep it concise and as focused as possible. There are times when length does matter, but that’s for another post…
- Avoid writing in the “corporate-speak” zone. If you are stuck in a rut and can’t seem to get your writing out of the “corporate-speak” zone, then do I have a guide for you! Don’t let the words trip off your tongue and fall on your recipient’s head. Make things easy for yourself and your readers by keeping things simple. This study found out that e-mails written at a third-grade reading level had the highest response rate. So what does that mean for you? It means you should be writing e-mails like an elementary student, maybe even using the word “like” in your business e-mails, because apparently people respond to that.
- Personalize! Including their name in the subject line of an email can boost clickthrough rates by as much as 90%. This is because personalization makes people feel valued, which increases engagement with content that matters to them personally.
DO NOT: Send bulk emails to ALL.
We’ve all hit that ‘unsubscribe’ button at one point! We all know that bulk emailing can be a great way to send messages to several people at once, but did you know that it’s also a really bad idea? We listed down reasons why you should avoid mass sending of emails:
- You can’t do the math without accurate and specific performance statistics. If email marketing is important to your business, it will become essential for you to measure the results of your campaigns. Having a generic email performance data is like driving without a dashboard. You know, one of those things that tells you what’s going on with your vehicle? The speedometer? The gas gauge? The oil pressure? It’s like that. Without metrics, you have no idea how well your email marketing campaigns are performing or what needs to be adjusted—and that means it’s impossible to make the most of a platform designed specifically for email marketing.
- Email blasts are great until they are prone to risks for your business. Before sending an email blast, ensure you’re compliant with any data protection laws that might apply in markets where you have email subscribers. With GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM Act in effect, we highly recommend that you check and follow consumer rights, email sending policies, and laws. We also recommend “warming” up your email list, sending only a couple of emails over a 30-day period to ensure your domain doesn’t get blacklisted. Another approach is to use another domain URL to send your sales sequences to keep your primary domain safe.
- Let’s be honest, it annoys people (and potential prospects!) Sending too many emails is a big turn-off. It might seem like common sense to most people, but you’d be surprised how many brands are guilty of sending way too many emails. If you’re receiving too many emails from one company or person—or even worse, if they’re all the same person—it can be a major annoyance.
You are not alone. The truth is that when you send out so many emails that it becomes annoying to recipients, one of two things happen:
Either (1) people will unsubscribe. Need facts? 34% of those surveyed consumers say they most commonly unsubscribe from email lists because “emails come too often”,
Or (2) they won’t open your emails at all.
The first option isn’t great; the second option isn’t great either. So what do we do? We take a cue from our audience and scale back on the frequency of communication. Instead of sending out five emails per week, we’ll send just three—and instead of sending them every day, maybe reevaluate if sending email once a week is enough.
DO: Know your audience and segment them.
Your email might not be able to capture every audience in your market. With the right messaging and knowing your market well, you can apprehend those who’ll be the most lucrative clients for your business. If you look closely at your email inbox, you might notice one thing: your emails all look like they were written by the same person.
It’s not just a hunch—it’s science. A recent study found that personalized subject lines alone can boost open rates by as much as 26%. That’s a huge difference! But even if you send out different subject lines, or use some other trick to try and make your emails stand out in the crowd, it can be hard to get people to take action.
Market segmentation will help you identify who these individuals are and what they care about so you can communicate directly with them. Below are the four basic types of segmentation to efficiently segregate your audience:
- Demographic (Who)
Demographic segmentation looks at identifiable non-character traits such as age, gender, ethnicity, and inferred knowledge. For example, a business trying to increase sales to women over 35 could run a targeted email series for this demographic. - Psychographic (Why)
To understand your target market, you need to be aware of the psychographic characteristics that make up their personalities. These are subjective characteristics that include emotional states, values, beliefs, attitudes and lifestyles. It’s recommended that your brand has your buyer personas developed which can help with your audiences psychographic characteristics. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. - Geographic (Where)
Use geographic market segmentation to effectively split your audience based on where they are located. You can use this when the location of customers plays a part in their purchase decision including their region, continent, country, city, or district. Geographic specific segmentation also allows you to create a shorter email list to ensure you are hyper targeted in your outreach approach. - Behavioral (How)
Behavioral segmentation focuses on the actions of your contacts. Behavioral data is used to gain insight into what content people are viewing, how and when they respond, how long they stay on your site and campaign success. Setting up specific lead scoring based on behavioral data also plays a large role in action-based segmentation. Behavioral data can be collected using marketing automation tools such as Hubspot to capture how users in your CRM are interacting with your brand.
Grow Your Leads Through Email Marketing Automation
By improving the customer experience within your email marketing campaigns, you can help your subscribers and potential clients be more engaged with your products and services. Whether a small company or an enterprise, you have a lot of opportunities to use email marketing for prospecting. Through RocketReach, you can get relevant email leads to work on your email marketing strategy and make a massive difference in your overall emails.
If you see what I did there, well done. If not: the key takeaway is obvious: be smart when tailoring your email correspondence. Remember, start by identifying one key variable that sets apart sections of your audience. From there, you can adjust your campaigns to address their different needs—even minor changes to your emails can mean they’ll resonate better with recipients, leading to higher engagement and more conversions.
