Top 5 tips to improve your email marketing

Email marketing offers one of the best returns on investment (ROI) in the online marketing world. Therefore, if you’re selling something then you should be using it, fact.

The statistics vary, but the rough ROI for email marketing is around £20 to £1 spent. Whatever the value is that you find, it’s almost guaranteed to be one of the best ROIs for your marketing type. But remember that email marketing is one of the cheaper forms of marketing, so whilst your ROI might be higher than other forms, it doesn’t mean that the total sales from it are the highest, remind yourself of what ROI means.

Top 5 tips to increase your email marketing success:

• Create good subject titles. For email marketing to work, people need to open the email to read all of the amazing content that you’ve written for it. With the average email open rate of 20-30%, there’s obviously something that means people delete your email without reading it. The way to stop this is to entice them in. Online company Not On The High Street recently sent an email titled “Warning – this email contains a picture of a dog wearing a bow tie”. Now whilst I have absolutely no need for a dog wearing a bow tie, I was intrigued and opened the email anyway, thus increasing the chances of conversion for NOOTHS.
• Use seasonal messaging. “Struggling with Father’s Day gift ideas?” Now this is one I’m sure a lot of people are struggling with right now (if you’re not, it’s on Sunday 21st June so you should be!), so if that lands in your inbox then you’re more likely to open it that if it was a more generic message.
• Send a follow-up email after someone’s made a purchase. This doesn’t have to be a sales-related email, but the best way to maximise this opportunity is to give them a special offer because of their recent purchase (free delivery if you purchase again in the next two weeks, 10% off if they recommend a friend etc.) and also to ask them to review their recent purchases. Testimonials and reviews have immense power for customer conversion so encourage recent customers to leave you some.
• Incomplete purchase reminders. If you have an online store on your website and people can add things to a shopping basket then it’s quite likely that every now and again people add things to their basket and leave your site without checking out. There are a number of tools that you can use to send automated reminders to people to remind them there’s something there, or to ask them if they need any help and thus help them to complete their purchase.
• Reward loyal customers. If people have signed up then they’re interested, reward them! Pizza Express do this by finding out when their email subscribers’ birthdays are. Then just before their birthday the subscriber receives a special voucher if they dine around the time of their birthday, easy but effective.

If people are subscribing to request more information from you by giving you their email details to ‘find out more’ or to sign up to your newsletter then they’re already interested, you’re basically (mainly) offering people who are interested in your business an easy way to convert into a customer. Remember, NEVER buy an email database. Firstly, those people might not have said that you can have their details (check out the Information Commissioner's Office for information on using people’s data) and secondly, they’re unlikely to be engaged with what your business is offering.

Let us know if we can help set up your online shop, set up an email capture system or help with email marketing: hello@webfwd.co.uk