Email Marketing Strategies in 2021
According to Digital Marketing Association, every dollar a company spends on email marketing, they make about $40 in return. The study was conducted in 2010 and they say the return reached about $42 in 2019. Approximately nine out of every ten marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically. 81% of small businesses rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention. The average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. Email marketing is an incredibly profitable marketing tool you don’t want to miss. In this blog, we will explore the basic marketing strategies that are effective in 2021.
Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one method of digital marketing strategy. Email marketing includes both sales promotion contents and informational and valuable content to receivers in order to maintain good relationships with existing or prospective customers. Please refer to our past article about email marketing to read more about different types of emails.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the most orthodox, but still a very effective marketing strategy in 2021. According to the study by Campaign Monitor, approximately 3.8 billion people have email accounts in the world in 2019, which is equal to half of the global population and the number is still increasing. The average open rate for email marketing should be between around 15-25％. By utilizing the tips in this blog, you should get better results from email marketing for your business.
Build Email List
How can I build email lists? Email marketers can give several incentives which encourage users to sign up for email lists.
- Free whitepaper
- Free ebook
- Seminar
- Discounts
- Free shipping
- Online contest or giveaway
- Social sharing button
You can create an email list of hot leads by offering free whitepaper or ebook, and seminar information because those people are already pretty interested in your products or service. For the company that offers those documents and seminars, it often takes time to capture new customers depending on the size and popularity of your company. So, firstly capturing an email list and nurturing them through email, in the long run, is important. If you are an online retail store, you can give 20%discount for the first purchase or free shipping.
Avoid Being Spam or Promotion
Some people still buy email lists hoping they can save time and money to make efforts to capture emails. But, should you do that?
Don’t buy email lists
You should avoid buying an email list from a third party without getting consent from users. It seems like you can shortcut the time and energy acquiring new emails by purchasing the lists, it might cost you more in the long run. Email algorithms consider your email as spam or promotion if receivers continuously don’t open your emails. It is no wonder that your email list has a low open rate because they are not interested in your business and rather, they think your emails are spam. Once email metrics determine your email has a low open rate, your email will be more likely to go into the spam or promotion box than emails that have a high or moderate open rate. In the worst-case scenario, you get punished for buying personal information without consent.
Opt-In & Opt-Out
Single Opt-In
Single opt-in requires a customer to enter their email address only one time in the signup box on your website.
Double Opt-In
Double opt-in requires the extra step of sending a confirmation email after customers sign up for emails on your website. A company only adds that email address to their list when the customer clicks on the link in the confirmation email to make sure he or she wants to be added to the email list.
Because of the ease, you can capture more emails with single opt-in than double opt-in. GetResponse says, “Marketers generally see about 20-30 percent faster list growth when they use single opt-in.” On the other hand, double opt-in can have less few of emails than a single opt-in but leads to a higher open rate and engagement than the counterpart.
Opt-out
Opt-out is giving an email subscriber a way to unsubscribe from the email list easily.
Maintain your Email List
Like I mentioned in the previous section, sending emails to someone who hasn’t opened your email for so long is meaningless, or rather it might affect your email quality. To avoid decreasing your email marketing performance, update your email lists every 6 months or 12 months. It is better to remove email addresses that have never opened your emails when you scrub your list.
Segmentation
Segmentation in email marketing is dividing your email lists into smaller groups according to their similarities so that you can approach each segment more effectively and efficiently.
How to Segment?
- Location
- Company size
- Or, anything important for your business
Segmenting based on how the customer previously interacted with your company or brand
- Past purchase history
- Lifecycle stage
- Customer Loyalty
Creating and sending triggered emails for specific behavior help you take action to your customer’s needs. According to Campaign Monitor, 77％ of email ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.
Send Contents That Are Valuable to Receivers
The average office worker receives about 120 emails a day. 40 out of 120 emails require them to respond. The rest of the 70 emails are just vying for attention. Standing out from the crowd is the most challenging part of mail marketing strategies.
Subject Line
- Make it sound interesting and different from others
Many people don’t have enough time to open all the emails they receive. Your email will end up going to the delete box without being opened. Make the title something interesting and avoid the keyword that everyone uses in the subject line.
- Show what the email is about in the subject line
Don’t stand out by having a clickbait. Clickbait might cause a high bounce rate which means users stop reading your content because they think the content is worthless or they feel the content is not what they expected to read. A high bounce rate affects your email quality as well. 69％ of spam reports come from the subject line itself.
Content
- Personal message
Creating email content that is personal to receivers. Add the recipient’s name and customize messages according to their past activity with your business.
- Contents that can improve users’ lives
Contents that might interest users can be free gifts and coupons, a recommendation of similar products they purchased recently, recommendation of new products from their favorite brand, trending items in your store, a notification that their favorite restaurants will be reopening inside dine, recommended restaurant to be booked for Mother’s day or any ideas you can come up with.
- Update or changes of your business
You can send emails about any updates or changes of your business such as changing company locations and hours and update the awards a company wins in the competition.
