There’s nothing better than a new season for a refresh and a changeup, and this can be made even more effective with a little forward planning.  Although returning notoriously low conversion rates, email marketing remains a key tool in the marketer’s toolbox.  It’s a solid, reliable way to connect with your subscribers, relay information – without a character restriction – link them through to all of the content or products that you desire and keep them engaged with your brand. And with just a few email marketing tips, they could be in even better shape for your summer campaigns!

Spring is definitely upon us and while you’ll have your email campaigns more or less planned out for this season, summer is fast approaching, but still giving you enough time to up your game for those summer email marketing campaigns, because as you know, marketing plans start well ahead of the event itself.

Email Marketing Tips:

Mix it up:

Don’t let your emails become stale.  It’s easy to stick with a format that seems to be working for you but, you can keep the good while refreshing along the way.   Change the segments that are getting the least click-throughs and conversions and mix it up with new ideas. 

Depending upon the frequency of your emails, could you interchange the purpose of them, for example focusing one on products, and one on both internal and external content, giving the reader value; you could have 2 or 3 different email formats per month.  By changing the contents of the emails, your readers are less likely to get bored with your emails and continue to open up!

Analyse:

To do the above, you really do need to be taking notice of your analytics, for each email that goes out, look at your open rates and click-through rates – what is working and who is clicking or buying, or getting in touch?

If you can identify who is interested in which parts of your offering then you’ll be able to segment your lists and tailor your email marketing campaigns to each of those audiences, encouraging a higher conversion rate. If you can do this now, you’ll be able to get your segmentation and tailored content inline for the start of your summer campaigns.

Use your Subject & Preview:

Inject a little fun and enticement here, without – and this is important – being spammy!  You could use buzzwords from within your email, or topical indicators (see below), you could include a few emojis ????to catch the eye, and then include a little more information and enticement again within your preview!

Stay on topic, it’s not customer-centric or good practise promising something in a teaser which is either not there or very tenuously linked (think how annoying clickbait stories are in this manner)!  Your subject line is an important component to your campaign, do not rush this as you might a subject header to your colleague, ‘Tuesday’s brief’ – this needs to draw in your customers!

Stay Topical:

This would be one of our overall marketing tips, to span your whole marketing strategy.  Marketing, including your email marketing, involves planning around relevant items and events, while this might be seasonal – very relevant for fashion, food or travel brands, it might also be topical for your industry or news related.  You do need to stay on brand – so if you’re running a fashion brand, there’s probably no need to get in too deep on the topic of Brexit, or vice versa, a recruitment brand needn’t pass comment on the attendees of London Fashion Week – however, if you come across a story or an angle which crosses both your industry and another, you might find you gain more or different traction here, and if you manage to include such successfully, include it in your subject line to encourage unlikely openers. 

Grow Your List:

Continue to grow that list! Your lists will be continuously fluctuating in size, this is near unavoidable – however, if you have built your audience organically from scratch, they’re much more likely to stay with you long term as long as your content continues to give some value.  If you’re losing x amount weekly then really you need to be adding more than this amount weekly to continue to grow your audience.

Some great ways to do this include encouraging sign up wherever you have a strong following eg. Twitter or Instagram, capturing addresses on your landing page, blog page or product pages, or adding some content of value with ‘restricted access’ unless visitors sign up to the mailing list.

Give Value:

Most of the above have mentioned this last point. Giving value to your customers and subscribers is really the best way to keep them hitting that open button and not the trash button!   Consumers need a little more from their brands than they used to, so peddling your deals and products is just not going to cut it, tap into their interests using your analytics and give them the content they have shown you they like.  Of course, the aim is still to create leads and sales, but customer engagement and the customer journey are so important in 2019!