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Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: we’re living in tough times. Some days, it feels hard to get out of bed, let alone think about your business. But now may also be a good time to rethink how you’re reaching your customers — and use one of today’s most underrated marketing channels: email.
Yes, email still works. In fact, recent studies show that brands typically see an average return of $42 dollars for each dollar they spend on email marketing. With that mind, I recently went down a rabbit hole of research and spoke with an email marketing expert — Joshua Chin, founder and CEO of Chronos Agency — to learn more. He shared five tips to build an email list and help your business during these surreal times.
1. Don’t Email More Than Once Per Week
We’re each coping with this pandemic in different ways. People are worrying about the health and sanity more than their inboxes. It’s important to be mindful of that and not email more than once per week. “Studies show that 49% of your customers are happy hearing from you on a weekly basis, but that means that 51% don’t want to hear from you that often,” Chin warns.
“Sending emails too often is one of the leading reasons why brand emails get marked as spam, and that could cause future emails to other customers to get flagged by spam filters.” He continues to explain. “If you’re running multiple email campaigns at once, you could accidentally bombard your customers with several emails in a single day.”
To avoid this, Chin recommends using frequency capping, which sets a limit on how many emails subscribers receive from you during a set time period. As a result you will likely increase your open rates and avoid people marketing your content as spam.
2. Use “Double Opens” To Increase Clicks
If at first you don’t succeed, try again - but this time with a different subject line.
“Just because someone didn’t open their initial email doesn’t mean they have to miss out on that message entirely,” Chin says. “One of the best ways to increase your click rate is to use the ‘double opens’ strategy, where you send the same message to people who didn’t open it the first time, but with a new subject line.”
Of course, make sure to keep the first tip in mind by waiting at least a week before sending the second email. When done right, this “double open” strategy can increase your open rates by 30%, according to a study from OkDork. This also gives you the opportunity to A/B test subject lines to better understand your customers when it comes to drafting your next message.
3. Don’t Forget About The “Preview Text”
We already know about the importance of the subject line, but too many marketers don’t spend enough time thinking about their preview text (also called the “pre-header text”). This is the small snippet of the email that’s visible in a receiver’s inbox before they click to open it.
"Preview Text" is the snippet right after the Subject Line
Preview text can be 35 to 140 characters (depending on whether your viewer is opening on mobile or desktop), so it’s important to use it well. This text should complement your subject line, giving readers a better idea of what to expect when they open the email. Here’s the analogy I like to remember: reading a great email as going to a great restaurant. The subject line is the appetizer, the preview text is the cocktail, and the email itself is the main-course. If you mess up the first two parts, there’s a chance your customer won’t stick around for the third part.
4. Use First Names
Dale Carnegie once said: “A person's name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Yet, most marketers forget to include that in email marketing. They start their messages with “Dear All,” or “Hey Everybody!” Rookie mistake.
“Try to collect subscriber’s names when you get their email addresses,” Chin explains. “Then put their name in the subject line or body text of an email. It grabs their attention in a way a generic message never would. You can become even more effective when you adjust the emails they receive based on past interactions with your brand.”
Research from Experian backs this up: personalizing your emails can lead to a six-fold increase in your recipient’s likelihood of taking action. Despite this, many marketers fail to fully personalize their content and miss out on the potential of their email list.
5. Focus On Abandoned Cart Users
This tip is geared towards e-commerce sites, but given how many businesses are moving online due to social distancing, I thought it would be worthwhile to include. When it comes to e-commerce, there’s nothing more frustrating than having a high abandoned cart rate. This means your customers are interested enough in your products to put them in their virtual shopping carts, but not interested enough to buy. In fact, the Baymard Institute estimates that an average of 69.57% of all online shopping carts are abandoned.
So what’s the solution? You guessed it: email marketing. Email your customer as a reminder of what they left in their cart. Research from Omnisend found 46.1% of people open “abandon cart emails” and 35% end up making a purchase. Better yet, businesses who sent three follow-up emails (with the time constraints we covered above), increase their conversion rates by another 69%. When done right, email can be both powerful and welcomed to a customer who had already put your product in their shopping cart.
For more marketing tips, connect with me on LinkedIn or subscribe to my YouTube channel called Admazing where we analyze the world’s best and worst advertising campaigns. Until next time, I hope you found these tips helpful especially as we navigate these tough times together.
