Almost every company practices email marketing. The question is: are we doing it right? Take a look at the following facts:

• 50% of the customers admit they loose confidence in the emails they receive from companies
• the number of people checking email on their mobile device has exceeded the number of people using their ‘old-fashioned’ computer for this purpose: 38% of all email is opened on a mobile device, compared to 33% for desktop and 29% for webmail (source: Litmus)
• Email bombardment is the number one reason for readers to unsubscribe (source: Hubspot)
• 59% of all B2B marketers think email marketing is the most effective way to generate revenue

Email marketing is a very useful marketing tool to maintain a long-term relationship with the customer. At least... if you know how to use it. You wouldn’t be the first one that thinks its emails are an extremely efficient and cost-effective way to distribute a message. To most recipients though, most company emails are just junk mail. How do you keep your audience engaged without irritating them? In this article I’ll show you five highly effective email marketing tactics!

1. Segment your target audience

One size never fits all! Everyone’s different, so what’s the logic behind sending one email to your entire audience?  Surprisingly, no less than 80% of the email marketers are guilty of doing this. Effective email marketing requires segmentation of the target audience,

the following elements will help you to define your segments:

• Demographics
• Geography
• Attitude
• Level of engagement
• The kind of content that appeals to the audience
• The kind of content the audience clicks on

  Segmenting your audience allows you to personalise your emails. This is very beneficial, since personalised email is thought of as the most effective kind.

2. Optimise your content by using A/B testing

A/B testing is a well-known but sadly little used method to optimise content. The reason for this is that A/B testing takes a lot of time, and as we all know: time is money. Optimizing content by A/B testing is absolutely worth the investment though. Moreover, A/B testing doesn’t have to be a complicated process at all:

1. Design an email with the focus on a particular segment
2. Save the original version. Then change some small details in the email like such as the subject or the Call-To-Action.
3. Now send the original version to one half of the segment, and the second version to the other half.
4. Analyze the results of both versions: which one scores higher on the open rate and Click-Through-Rate (CTA)?
5. Keep testing and optimising your emails.

  You’ll see that the more you make use of A/B testing, the better results you will achieve and you will optimise the performance of your email marketing. This article shows how to measure the effectiveness of your emails.

3. Create a mobile version for your emails

Smartphones are getting indispensable in our daily life. The graph below (source: Litmus) shows the increasing use of smartphones to open emails.  

In order to increase the readability of your emails, you must create a mobile version that meets the following requirements:

• The reader can only scroll vertically, not horizontally
• The links must be clickable
• The design of the email must be as simple as possible
• The landing page which the link refers to is mobile friendly as well

This blog clearly explains how to optimise the mobile version of your emails.

4. Integrate social media in your email 

I’m sure you’re familiar with the potential of social media. But did you know that integrating social media in your email marketing could increase the effectiveness of your emails? Not only the Click Through Rate (CTR) will increase up to 30% when your leads have the possibility to share your message,  having three social sharing buttons on your website will raise this figure up to 55%, as research points out. Moreover, social media is a great way to improve the quality of your emails:

• When readers decide to share your message, your audience will expand exponentially. This also increases the possibility to gain more fans on the social networks.
• Creating newsletters takes quite some time. RSS is a great way to compose newsletters automatically by selecting articles you recently published. Thiswill also addmore trafficto your blog.
• Twitter is an excellent medium to curate information. Use this information to write content for your own newsletters.
• Creating polls on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter provide you a lot of information. Visualize this data and use it as content in your newsletters.
• Everyone loves winning! Set up a contest on Facebook and promote it in your email.

5. Keep your prospects ‘warm’

Generating leads is one thing, ‘nurturing’ them is a different story. Sadly but true: a lot of your followers have lost their interest in you. Some unsubscribe from your emails, while others ignore your emails and throw them right into the trashcan. Learn about 5 ways to persuade the people who otherwise would have lost their interest in you:

1. Offer them a free trial
2. Persuade them by setting up entertaining Facebook contests. Don’t forget to implement these in the subject of the mail (most people don’t bother to open your mail unless the subjects looks appealing to them)
3. Take it slow! Research by Hubspot shows that sending emails too frequently is the number one reason for readers to unsubscribe. Give the reader the opportunity to decide for themselves: what’s the maximum number of emails he or she is willing to receive from you?
4. You might try to trigger them by setting a deadline: does the reader want to keep receiving your mails (opt-in) or not (opt-out)? It’s serves as some sort of wake-up call. Simultaneously it’s a nice opportunity to clean up your customer base: those whoreallyaren’t interestedin your products orservices canbe sweptoff your list.
5. Use the word ‘exclusive’ in the subject line of your emails. This word increases the open rate up to 14%! Naturally your email must contain valuable content. Otherwise you will loose the reader’s interest once again. 

What’s your golden email marketing rule?