In our years as designers, developers, and marketers one of the things that has remained the most valuable to business owners is email marketing. In the majority of our marketing clients, email is pulling in at least 30% or much more of their yearly revenue. So we thought we’d share with you some of our most actionable tips for better email marketing. 

Tip #1 Test Your Email Subject Line

A good rule of thumb is to run your email subject line by 3-5 people before you send it out. That will help you determine whether it will work in some way. Those people also might have suggestions on ways to improve it.

A great resource for this is: (https://coschedule.com/email-subject-line-tester)

Tip #2 Check To Make Sure Your Emails Are Mobile Friendly

In most email sending software systems, they offer a mobile-friendly preview. ALWAYS check the mobile preview after creating your email. If you don’t you may find that some elements of your email have moved around to undesirable or confusion positions for your customers. 

Tip #3 Look At Your Email Reports & Know Your Data 

After each email that you send, set a time to do a report analysis. Look at the data and work to glean information about the email that will help optimize future emails. For example: What links were clicked most? This helps you find the most highly liked content. Do this in a myriad of ways with the data, then write down your findings in a notebook or other location. Always be improving. 

Tip #4 Try Different Email Times Or Maintain The Same (Braxton Brewing) 

Until you know your audience like the back of your hand, try different send times. If you try a bunch, you’ll soon be able to dive into the data and learn the best send times for your people. 

Want to learn more about email send times? Check out our recent video on the subject. 

Tip #5 Provide Value Bombs ALL DAY

In your emails, try to balance being salesy and providing value. A good percentage to use is 80% value, 20% sales. Or even fewer sales. People are easily sold on value too. In your emails, include links to other 3rd party content, or your blogs. Anything you can think of that would help people will make them want to be a part of your tribe that much more because you did something for them. 

Tip #6 Use the A/B Testing Feature

All email providers provide A/B testing services. At least all the good ones do. This is another data point that you should always be using to find out what subject lines work and what interior content is the most effective and causes click-through rates to rise. You don’t have to use this feature in every email, but I would encourage you to try it in quite a few to help you learn more about your customer’s likes and dislikes. 

Tip #7 Match Subject Content & Internal Email Content

This is key to avoiding people bouncing out of the email. If you bait someone with a juicy subject line and then turn around and give them a boring as heck content set inside the email, they are going to leave. Then the next time you do a cool subject line, it will fall on deaf ears. 

Write your email content first and then write your subject line, this will give you the most effective click through to your website success. Once the content in the email is done, it’s also easier to write the subject line anyway. 

Tip #8 Steal Other Ideas

See a creative sale email on Black Friday? Or even just an email that catches your eye mid-week? Take the general format and try it out with your audience. It may or may not work, but it will be well worth it to try. If it caught your eye, it will probably catch others’ eyes as well.

Tip #9 Setup Email Flows + Automations Early (Money Makers) 

My two favorite email marketing software companies are Klaviyo and Mailchimp and they both offer email automation and flows. These essentially are strings of automatic emails that go out to help you avoid having to do it manually. This could be an abandoned cart email, or a list of 5 emails that go out in order, welcoming you and educating you about the brand. Start early on these because they essentially mean automatic money without you having to do that laborious sending.

Tip #10 Use GIFs

GIFS take a single photo spot within your email and allow you to tell an entire story. If one image is worth 1,000 words, why would you not use a GIF and tell a bigger story? Use the GIF to show a recent project finished, a product doing what it’s meant to do, or even all the photos of your team to introduce them to your clientele. Be creative. If you need help creating a GIF, try Canva! 

Thanks for reading! We love sharing our email marketing tips with you. If you’d be interested in a one-on-one email marketing consultation with our team, we’d love to chat and even buy you lunch. Learn more about our marketing services or contact us to take the next step.