If you are seeking to reach more customers and build a stronger relationship with them, chances are you’ve tried email marketing. It’s a convenient way to keep in touch with your clients and keeping them aware of your activities. Here are a few tips to use email marketing backed by interesting data on user habits.

Building your list

Since May 2018, gathering emails for marketing purposes has become more regulated. To be compliant with the GDPR, users have to actively agree to receive your emails. That means you must offer an opt-in check box (as opposed to opt-out) on any email capture forms you use on your website, and you also need to supply an unsubscribe link in the footer of every email. Appointedd’s online booking system keep you GDPR compliant as standard, so you have one less thing to worry about. Find out more here.

Mobile optimization

Smartphone sales have reached an impressive level, changing drastically the way users access their email during the day. More and more people check their email on a mobile device (smartphones and tablets). This has changed users’ habits and you should adapt to them. Take the time to research how to optimize your emails for mobile use. If building/adapting templates seems too complicated, you can have read through this article to have simple yet effective tips to make your emails more mobile-friendly.

Many marketing email campaigns remain not optimized for mobile use. By not being adapted to your customers’ habits, you are simply losing them. 69% of mobile users simply delete emails that are not optimized for mobile use. Worse, according to Magnetic mail in 2012, only 11% of email templates were optimized for mobile use when 48% of emails were open on a mobile device. You obviously want users to be able to open and read your emails, otherwise you are not going to reach many people, so make sure your emails are optimized for mobile.

Branding and social media integration

When you send email marketing campaigns, you convey a message and more importantly a perception of your business. You must keep in mind that people receive a lot of marketing emails (416 per month on average) and will probably go very quickly through them if they open them. You must make sure to convey the right image of your company. Try to keep all your channels consistent, in terms of color and display. If the landing page of your marketing email link looks completely different than the email itself, you are not helping to build your company’s identity; it will then be difficult to stand out and have the recipients of your email reminding and identifying you.

The same goes with social media. It is a good idea to integrate your social media pages on your email campaigns. It allows you to potentially reach more people and expend your emailing list. The simplest way remains to integrate buttons in your email allowing people to share your content or simply to access your diverse social media pages. It can also work well if you propose your customers to share offers or discounts to their relatives.

Segmentation

Depending on the size of your list, you might start to think about segmenting your email campaigns. This will require that your list is actually a little bit detailed (name, age, gender, location, subscribing date, etc.). If you have the time or the possibility to do this, it can actually be a good idea to sort out some statistics about your users. Where are they, what is the most represented age group, what kind of job are they doing…? There are many possibilities and this is great to have a better understanding of who your subscribers are. You will therefore be more able to understand their needs and wants and will be able to customize your email marketing campaigns according to that.

Not convinced yet that it’s worth it? Here’s a very interesting article from Mail Chimp showing the effects of segmentation in email marketing. We can observe that targeted campaigns obtain much better results than an average email campaign sent to a whole list. You will often read that only a small percentage of your customers actually bring you the majority of your revenues. The same principle applies here. Do you want to send 10,000 emails and have only a small proportion of them responding actively to your campaign, or only send 2,000 emails but have a much higher activity from the recipients since you took the time to analyze and target your customers? Email marketing allows you to customize your campaigns according to your customers profiles, do not miss that opportunity.

Published on 28 May 2014