Email marketing is still one of the most effective channels for marketing for businesses today, though it has undergone some changes.

A study by Experian, established that personalized emails deliver 6 times more transaction rates than generalized email marketing.

When properly used, email marketing has the ability to leverage sales, generate new customers and help maintain the existing customers. The best reason to should choose email marketing is in its ability to generate the highest return on investment as compared to other digital marketing strategies.

However, in order to benefit from email marketing, you should develop an actionable strategy that will help increase your customer base and encourage loyalty with your customers.

To help keep your customers and audience interested with your products and marketing efforts, the following email marketing strategies should be adopted at all times;

1. Make personalised messages

Personalised email marketing isn’t sending an individual email to every single customer or potential customer, but using customer data to create a personalised message.

Companies such as Amazon use personalised email marketing to make customers feel like a part of an organisation and improve their customer experience, e.g. Amazon addresses do not include “Dear customer‚” but rather ‚ “Dear Angie (your name)”.

Personalised email marketing is not just a way of informing customers about your brand, but it’s a way of signaling to your customers that they are valued part of the business. Therefore personalised emails are quite effective in maintaining and attracting new customers. To generate revenue through email marketing, personalised emails should be a priority. Here are a few tips for running personalised email marketing;

• When subscribers are signing in, ask for information that you can use to know them feel better and engage with them.
• Use a real reply-to email address. If you use emails that cannot be replied to by the customers, you eliminate their ability to engage with your brand.
• Provide contact information to your subscribers. There is always a sense of satisfaction among customers from knowing they can get in touch with a brand.

2. Improve market segmentation

For an email marketing campaign to be effective, you must develop ways to segment your market. Segmenting your database has such crucial importance due to its ability to make an email campaign more targeted to the audience. For instance, if you want to promote your products to customers located 40-mile radius to where your business is, then market segmentation is your best solution as it offers the best way to inform the customers about your products by creating a segment of people living 40 miles from your business and simply sending the emails to them. Such segmentation can easily be done by CRM software.

Segmented email marketing is efficient as compared to generalized sending of emails to customers all over the country or continent while only targeting audience 40 miles to your location. Thus, segmentation reduces marketing costs and ensures that your marketing efforts are organized to ensure you get much more revenue, leads, transaction, and more customer. The following are ways to segment your email marketing in order to maximize returns;

• Account-based marketing/ segmenting by company size; the revenue levels of a company determine what projects they want to be involved with. Responses increase you send emails to companies that will be interested.
• Segment by industry: determining what industry you want to promote your product or services helps get return on investment
• Segmenting companies by sales cycle: the sales cycle determines what services companies want. Through segmentation, you will get to know what they want making marketing campaigns effective.

3. Create mobile-friendly emails

61% of all marketing emails are opened using a mobile device and revenue per email for mobile devices is four times higher than desktop.

Since 2012, this percentage number of subscribers opening their emails with mobile devices has increased by 49% signifying the growing importance of making mobile-friendly emails.

Most people after getting off the bed check their phone for calls, messages, and emails. If the emails you sent are not optimized for mobile devices, the users will likely delete them and unsubscribe. The following are ways to make your emails mobile-friendly;

• Ensure the subject line is short: by doing so, mobile device users will be able to know what the email is for, this makes it easier for them to follow-up and reads the rest of the message.
• Use one column template: the use of multiple columns results in readers/recipients not being able to navigate the template. By using a single column, emails are compatible and straightforward.
• Your emails should be below 600 pixels wide: to avoid mobile users having issues when viewing emails formatted for large screens, ensure that your emails with is 600 pixels or less.
• Use small images on the email- most mobile device users still use 3G connections. Thus ensure that the image can load as fast as possible as delays may prompt the user to skip the email.
• Run compatibility tests: the best way to know how good your emails are working to run tests. Litmus can help with this, with a fee they can run comprehensive tests for your email.

4. Test various factors to help you optimise

Testing helps the email marketing campaign team make a practical decision which helps improve the performance of the marketing efforts.

While the subject line is the most tested email marketing component, other components such as where the email is from (from address) which can either be person’s name, company name or the CEO, marketers can also test Plain text vs HTML campaigns, and Long Vs short emails.

By running such texts, the marketing team is able to identify what works and what doesn’t, enabling them to prioritise and direct their resources to email marketing areas that are most productive.

5. Automation of email marketing campaign

Unlike newsletter and individualised emails that are created and sent to a list of people at once, automated emails campaigns are set up once and then automatically sent to individuals when certain triggers are met. For instance, when an individual signs up to your website, they automatically receive an email to inform on how to get started to ensure they become frequent visitors or customers. Such emails would be time-consuming if they were created manually and sent to every person who signed up, email automation makes it possible to automatically send a welcome email to anyone who signs up to your site.

Email automation simply works when basic triggers are meet i.e. when a certain event happens an email is sent; this makes it an effective tool that can be applied with the limit of users’ imagination to improve customer experience. below are circumstances when you can set automated emails;

Welcoming new subscribers people usually subscribe to your website because they have an interest in what you are offering even though they may have not made a decision to buy. The best way to develop relations with such visitors is to send emails to persuade them to subscribe to your email list. After subscribing, you can send an automated email to welcome them and offers them offers available for new subscribers. Welcome automated emails are very come and come minutes after subscribing to new websites.

Increasing sales online business attracts new customers using free trial hoping to get potential customers to try their products and ultimately become paying customers. however, before individuals using products or services on trial convert to paying customers, they need to realize the value of the product. To encourage customers to undergo the conversion and realize the value of your products, regular automated emails are helpful.

Calling subscribers to action subscribers can sign up to your website but fail to complete their profile or fail to order the product you are offering. Automated emails are the best way to inform them of the associated benefits and remind them to order your products.

Getting feedback from the customers developing a product that your customers want is not an easy job. However, getting feedback from your customers after they consume your product help determine how you can improve your products. automated emails help in gathering feedbacks after customers purchase products in an easy and faster way thus prompting quick actions.

Informing customers of imminent expirations your business must make efforts that help retain the existing customers. According to a survey by Bain & Co, increasing customer retention by 5% increases the company’s profitability by 75%. To avoid losing the customer’s business, you should send an email campaign informing customers when their subscriptions are expiring. Automated emails can easily be set to automatically send messages to all customers with upcoming expiration.

Sending birthday surprise message to customers the most common type of automated emails are birthday emails. While done properly, birthday emails show that your business cares about the customers and offers an opportunity to increase sales by giving birthday offers that encourage the customers to make a purchase.