E-mail marketing can take many forms. You could do an educational “how to” series, or you could bring news to your e-mail list subscribers, whilst adding a little spin of your own. The important thing to be aware of is all of the different e-mail marketing strategies out there so that you can offer variety to your list and increase your open rates. Some strategies are not as popular as others because they require more of your time, but if you do utilize them then the results can be fantastic.
Segmentation Of Your List
Not everyone on your list will have equal interests: they will differ in age, gender and a variety of other factors. Thus, marketing to them all via a generic approach would not be the best way to go. For example, let’s say that you have a men’s product that you want to advertise to your list. Doing so will come across as spam for the women in your list and some of them may even unsubscribe as a result. It would be better to only advertise the men’s product to the men in your list because in the long run that will keep the unsubscribe rate down. As Chris Hexton from Marketing Land suggests, the segmentation that you do needs to be in relation to your business:
If you don’t do any segmentation right now, then the place to begin is by picking the most relevant attribute for your online business and using this to split your emails into two.
Also, if you want to perform some split testing and you don’t want to do something that may cause catastrophic unsubscribe rates then you can do the split testing for a particular segment of your list. This way, if the split testing goes wrong it only affects a small portion of your overall list.
Use Mobile Friendly E-mails
There are statistics floating around that suggest that almost as many as half of all e-mail opens are done so via a mobile device. This means you must make your e-mails mobile friendly, and you can do so by creating them in a one column format and increase the font size so that readability is improved. Mobile e-mail opens could account for almost half of your sales and for this reason alone you cannot afford to ignore the customizations that are needed for your e-mails to be mobile friendly. Most mobile gadgets nowadays are good enough to convert webpages and e-mails into a readable format, but as a precaution you need to do what you can on your end to make sure that anyone opening your e-mail via a mobile device can do so without encountering any problem.
Inactive Subscribers
Some subscribers might have very low open rates, and almost never click on the links in your e-mail messages. However, you might be able to get them to change their tune if you send them a specialized e-mail. For example, you could give them a free ebook or a sample of your product, something a little extra that your entire list isn’t getting to make them feel special and as a result they might become better engaged with your future e-mails. An expert from Bufferapp.com explains that you only have 90 days to get your subscriber to engage:
The average inactivity for a list is 63 percent, meaning that once someone joins they are less likely to ever follow-up with your follow-up emails. Email marketing firm Listrak goes so far as to identify the first 90 days as the window for turning a sign-up into a devotee.
Therefore, go the extra mile to please your list subscribers during the first few months so that you can reap the benefits later on in the form of increased sales.