You have great branding, fantastic products and a hard-working team, but if you are not engaging your audience with email marketing through every step of the customer life-cycle, you are likely to fall short of your goals. Email marketing can be highly effective or highly ineffective depending on how you execute. In the domain of email marketing, success really comes down to engagement. Let’s discuss some tips about how you can execute your email marketing excellently so you can crush your campaigns.

Always Provide Value

Make sure you are delivering value with every email that you send to your audience. The recipient should see value in these emails because if they don’t they are going to unsubscribe or worse, they are going to mark your emails as spam. So make sure that every email delivers some kind of value to that user. They should also know who you are. This starts with making a first impression by welcoming every new customer or newsletter subscriber. You can also do this by segmenting your lists based on your audiences behaviour. For example, if you are providing two kinds of content, let’s say copyright and social media, make sure you have your lists properly segmented and you are sending out product focused content that relates to each list. Your audience should know who you are and they should see value in every email they receive from you. If you start there, you will always find success.

Keep It Short and Sweet

Keep your emails brief, and simple. Many people look at their emails on their phones, so make sure any emails you send out look good on mobile phones. What I recommend is a nice Hero image with a call to action, and then just little blurbs of information in the email with headlines that link to more pages such as your website, your social media pages or your landing pages. Keep your emails short and to the point. You shouldn’t really have more than 100 words of content. Overall, simple, clean emails with clear call to actions and links to additional content on your website work best. But start it all off with a really nice Hero image with a design that is eye catching making sure that it is mobile friendly so that it can shrink down on the mobile phone and still be readable and look great.

Subject Lines

Subject lines is what people see initially whenever they receive any emails from you. This is really what is going to entice them to open your email or not. Make sure that it has a catchy subject line, one that captures the readers curiosity, but also keep it short. Ideally the sweet spot is between 30-50 characters. The reason being is because on mobile phones where most people are checking their emails, that’s about all the real-estate that you can have. Anything longer than 50 characters long will truncate the subject line so they won’t be able to read the rest of it. Put the meat of your subject line in those first 25-30 characters so they are enticed to open the email and see what you have to offer.

Send Emails On The Right Day And Time

Studies show that the best days to send emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays, followed by Wednesday. According to broad statistics, sending emails during the middle of the week lead to higher engagement rates. That being said, speaking through my own experience, as far as open and click through rates are concerned, I find that Sunday night is the best day and time to send email newsletters to my audience. In any event, try experimenting with the days and times you send your emails out in alignment with your business objectives. For example, if you are running a weekend sale, sending an email at the end of the business day on a Friday might work better than sending one on Wednesday or Thursday. Or using my own example, if you are planning a webinar or an event during the week, Sunday evening could be the best time to capture your audience’s attention and get them to visit your event page or add the webinar to their calendars.

Analyze The Data

You should always be making optimization and changes to your email content, times you deploy your emails, and subject lines based on data. Every time you send a campaign, look at the data afterwards to see what percentage of people opened your email, but also how people interacted with it. Look for things like click-through ratios or unsubscribe rates. The data will help you test different things and give you an idea of whether you are effectively communicating with your audience with email or not. Over time, the data will drive you to certain conclusions such as the best day and time to send your emails, how to word your subject lines and what kind of content really drive your engagement rates up. Never rush into changes without analyzing the data first.

There’s a lot more I could say about email marketing but if you are looking for a place to start, begin with these 5 tips and over time, watch your engagement rates, leads and above all sales go up. Before I go, I should mention GDPR and how it impacts your business, especially if you have subscribers in the EU. Even if that is not the case, it’s a good idea to follow these ten best practices as far as how collecting, safeguarding and using your customer data is concerned. Did I miss any absolutely essential email marketing tips that you can’t live without? Please do point those out in the comments section below.