Email Marketing is Not Dead: 3 Ways to Own the Inbox

Anyone with an email address is all too familiar with the frequent influx of marketing messages. Even if you closely follow the brand and love receiving helpful information or great deals from stores and services, constantly weeding through promotional emails every day can become tedious.

This desensitization has made those in digital marketing wary of the effectiveness of email. After all, consumers can follow their favorite brands on their own schedule, thanks to social media and other forms of inbound marketing. However, recent research from Econsultancy showed that email continues to generate some of the highest ROI among different marketing initiatives. According to results from the brand’s Email Marketing Industry Census 2014, companies attribute 23 percent of their total sales to email marketing campaigns, compared to 18 percent in 2013.

1. Segment appropriately

Clearly, email marketing remains an effective source of engagement – provided that your brand is equipped with the latest tactics and best practices, of course. Here’s what you need to incorporate in your email marketing messages to ensure that they’re compelling.

Without the right audience, a perfectly crafted message loses its effectiveness. Consider the group of professionals who could benefit from your service, and think of a message that would be appropriate and engaging to them. For instance, a discount on a specific service could be especially interesting to past users. Tailor a message to those who have exhibited a previous interest in the offering, and you’ll likely notice higher engagement than if you were to send the same message to those who have never engaged with your service.

2. Use interesting subject lines

Before your email message is even read, however, you need to attract the reader with an engaging subject line. There are many ways to tweak subject lines for the best possible engagement. In fact, countless educational resources are devoted to this seemingly minor aspect of an email. The HubSpot Blog recommended keeping subject lines short and sweet, and even using the recipient’s first name to further personalize the message and grab his or her attention. You should also consider adding deadlines for deals offered in the subject line to increase urgency.

Regardless of the strategies you try out on your own email marketing initiatives, it’s important to perform A/B tests on each of your campaigns. After all, subject lines aren’t universal. A message that generates major open rates for one brand could completely crash and burn for another product or service. Testing provides you with hard evidence of what works and what fails when it comes to your specific audience.

3. Consider marketing automation

Without marketing automation software, it can be quite challenging for a marketer to track every download of a promotional product and generate a personalized form of outreach. Forbes reported on a service designed to revamp email marketing so that a series of automated messages are sent to a site visitor who provides his or her email address. The emails are personalized and seemingly sent from a person account. According to the source, it’s been a successful way of engaging leads and guiding them through the conversion funnel. Incorporate this strategy into your own email marketing campaigns.

For example, there are ways to set up a process where everyone who downloads a whitepaper explaining your services gets a follow up email. You can craft the message and decide how many hours or days pass before the prospect receives the email. It’s even possible to set up a series of messages that send to each person according to a predetermined timeline. With the right tools, you’re able to make the computer do your work for you.

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