Email mar­ket­ing con­tin­ues to be one of the most effec­tive strate­gies that bring the biggest ROI across all mar­ket­ing channels.

The aver­age click-through rate for email mar­ket­ing is between 1–3% – com­pared to social media at a whop­ping 0.07% aver­age, that’s already a huge difference.

While some skep­tics pro­claim year after year that email mar­ket­ing will be dead by X or Y year, there has been no evi­dence that email mar­ket­ing is los­ing trac­tion or effec­tiv­i­ty. If any­thing, it’s only been steadi­ly growing.

It’s been esti­mat­ed that about 254.7 mil­lion peo­ple will be using email by 2020, so there’s no bet­ter time to jump on the train and lev­el up your email mar­ket­ing game.

Email Marketing Best Practices for 2020

There are already a few email mar­ket­ing strate­gies out there that you can dig into deep­er for your over­all lead management.

These might include how to start get­ting sub­scribers when you’re start­ing from scratch, get­ting in front of oth­er people’s audi­ences, or even using SEO to dri­ve traf­fic to your opt-in land­ing pages.

But if you’ve already start­ed your email list and aren’t see­ing the results you want, read on to dis­cov­er 7 of the best email mar­ket­ing prac­tices that will sky­rock­et your list growth this 2020.

Think Mobile First, Laptop Second

Whether it’s lead gen­er­a­tion or lead nur­tur­ing, you need to think about the pre­sen­ta­tion of your emails.

Because most inter­net users now access web­sites and apps – includ­ing email – on their mobile devices, it’s best to think mobile-first when design­ing either opt-in forms or email content.

When opti­miz­ing design for mobile devices, con­sid­er break­ing long para­graphs into short­er ones, with no more than 2 or 3 sen­tences each.

Make sure images, if any, scale prop­er­ly on a mobile device. If you have any click­able ele­ments on your email, make sure they’re visu­al­ly obvi­ous as well, as mobile users don’t have the lux­u­ry of using hov­er effects to dis­cov­er links or click­able content.

Think Mobile First, Laptop Second

Minimalist Email Copy and Design

Min­i­mal­ism used to be a design choice reserved for lux­u­ry brands but today, it’s becom­ing the norm across indus­tries and markets.

Even email mar­keters should opt for more min­i­mal­ist designs. Some brands using email mar­ket­ing can ben­e­fit from uti­liz­ing more white space. Some­times images speak for them­selves and only need text to help read­ers flow through dif­fer­ent sections.

Per­son-based brands like blog­gers and free­lancers can still get away with more text-based newslet­ters, but it wouldn’t hurt to include min­i­mal brand­ing ele­ments – such as email head­ers or brand col­ors – through­out their email blasts.

When in doubt, a quick lit­mus test to check whether your copy and design are min­i­mal­ist enough is to skim over your own con­tent. Do you use too much walls of text with­out enough para­graph breaks? Do you have too many dis­tract­ing images or GIFs?

Personalize Your Content

Per­son­al­iza­tion can add an extra human touch to your emails. Even in as ear­ly as set­ting up your lead mag­nets, be sure to include form ele­ments that can cap­ture your vis­i­tors’ first names. Your email mar­ket­ing provider will be able to use this infor­ma­tion later.

You can also per­son­al­ize the con­tent you send out to your email list through segmentation.

Use a com­bi­na­tion of tag­ging and link trig­gers to find out your sub­scribers’ inter­ests, then seg­ment them accord­ing­ly. You can, lat­er on, use these seg­ments to send cus­tom con­tent that’s rel­e­vant to their interests.

For exam­ple, an online busi­ness coach might have a seg­ment for Email Mar­ket­ing Tips. Using these tools from their ESP, the coach can send more of these tips to read­ers who have shown inter­est in the top­ic before, either through clicks on blog posts about the top­ic or in-email polls.

This human touch pays off in the long run. Because audi­ences now can switch media chan­nels up to 27 times per hour, you need to hold their atten­tion. Hav­ing per­son­al­ized email greet­ings in your email copy and con­tent that is rel­e­vant to read­ers’ inter­ests can keep view­ers engaged much longer.

Doing all these can lead to less unsub­scribes since your read­ers will find your con­tent per­son­al and rel­e­vant. And if all that isn’t enough, con­sid­er these sta­tis­tics on per­son­al­iza­tion based on a 1,000-person study:

  • 90% of peo­ple find per­son­al­ized con­tent appealing
  • 80% are will­ing to do busi­ness with a per­son that cre­ates per­son­al­ized experiences

Automate Your Workflow Process

Automa­tion is the future for email mar­ket­ing and sales. Accord­ing to eMar­keter, B2C com­pa­nies that use automa­tion have seen con­ver­sion rates as high as 50%.

Luck­i­ly, most email ser­vice providers have some kind of automa­tion fea­ture for send­ing out drip emails or trig­ger-based tag­ging and seg­ment­ing, so you can already be well on your way to imple­ment­ing this step.

Using autore­spon­ders, you can send out a series of wel­come emails for new sub­scribers, for example.

Make A/B Testing a Habit (and Not Just for Your Subject Line)

If you’re not already A/B test­ing, or split test­ing, your emails, make this a pri­or­i­ty right away.

When most peo­ple hear the sug­ges­tion to A/B test their emails, they only think of the sub­ject line. While this is def­i­nite­ly a great ele­ment to test which would get bet­ter open rates, that should only be the beginning.

Con­sid­er test­ing your:

  • CTAs (“Check it out” vs “Buy now”)
  • Per­son­al­iza­tion style (using their first name vs their last name)
  • Images
  • Email lay­outs

Over time, you get to know just what kind of emails your sub­scribers are more like­ly to open and, more impor­tant­ly, click through.

A/B test­ing emails will def­i­nite­ly take some time and effort before you can start see­ing the results, but if you can enjoy bet­ter open and click rates with all your emails in the future, then it’s a prac­tice well worth it.

Include User-Generated Content

Email’s con­ver­sion rates for sales are already much high­er than social media’s, but you can up your chances of seal­ing the deal by includ­ing user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent in your emails.

90% of con­sumers have report­ed that see­ing user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent influ­ences their deci­sion to pur­chase. What this points out is the long­stand­ing truth that peo­ple trust oth­er peo­ple – even if it’s peo­ple they’ve nev­er met.

To lever­age this for your own mar­ket­ing, encour­age cur­rent users to share their tes­ti­mo­ni­als or expe­ri­ences with your prod­uct or ser­vice. This can be either a review or a sam­ple or use case with them using your main offer.

Action cam­era brand GoPro makes the most of this strat­e­gy well. Their YouTube chan­nel is ded­i­cat­ed to fea­tur­ing videos from their con­sumers using their GoPro cameras.

After all, who bet­ter than their cur­rent users and fans to show oth­ers what great things they can do with a GoPro?

Consider Adding Dynamic and Interactive Content Elements

An inter­est­ing trend we’ve noticed with new­er web­sites and land­ing pages is the focus on sim­ple, sta­t­ic ele­ments. For email, on the oth­er hand, we can expect to see more dynam­ic ele­ments right in our inboxes.

Some exam­ples have been brands doing in-email sur­veys where read­ers don’t have to leave their inbox­es to leave feedback.

Slid­ers, search bars, social share and CTA but­tons, and even image gal­leries can all help in keep­ing your run-of-the-mill email more engag­ing. Hav­ing read­ers engag­ing with your email not only keeps them hooked to your con­tent, but it also serves a deliv­er­abil­i­ty pur­pose too.

Level Up Your Email Marketing in 2020

Whether you’re new to the email mar­ket­ing scene or not, there are always ways to improve the way you com­pose and deliv­er emails to your list. By imple­ment­ing these best prac­tices out­lined above, you can get more sub­scribers opt­ing in to your list and be on the way to turn­ing them into rav­ing and engaged fans.

SOURCE: Influ­en­cive