Email Marketing Tips to Win 2023 (With Examples)
Economic crisis, death of cookies, and short attention spans—just three reasons you need email marketing tips to help you win 2023.
It’s the budget-saving, personalised, front-row seat to your target market that you’ve always wanted.
But here’s the thing.
Although many marketers are “doing email marketing”, few are getting the 4200% return on investment it promises.
Here’s how you can unlock email marketing’s abundant benefits. These are 10 tips you need to try, with examples.
1. Use Opt-In Only Lists
List integrity is top of the list of expert email marketing tips. No matter how tempting it may be, never buy a list.
This was a no-no before the POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act). It’s just lousy branding to email people who are not interested. But now, with POPIA and many other privacy laws (such as GDPR and CCPA), you cannot afford to send unsolicited mail.
Believe it or not, this is good news! You should consider gaining that consensual opt-in as the first step in a meaningful relationship with your ta rget. It shows that they trust you to send them valuable communication.
2. Keep Lists Squeaky Clean
Honour unsubscribes by removing those profiles from any active lists. It’s highly frustrating when you continue receiving marketing after specifically opting out.
Bonus email marketing tip: Use your unsubscribe page to your advantage. When someone unsubs, re-direct them to a page where they can select a reason for leaving. Ask permission to check in again in six months. It is a reasonable request and allows you to revive that lead later.
3. Segment Lists (Consider Activity)
The importance of customer segmentation cannot be stressed enough. In fact, we have an entire blog dedicated to Customer Segmentation (read it here).
To summarise, in this day and age, personalisation and relevance are essential to successful digital marketing. You can achieve either without proper customer segmentation.
Email marketing tip to win 2023: Keep tabs on activity and engagement after each send. See which users click which links to get insight into their preferences. For example, you may notice a poor open rate on webinar invites (but of the people who open the invites, there is a 90% click-through rate). This indicates that there is a large portion of individuals on your list who don’t care for webinars.
In this case, try sending an “update your preferences” email to your database to let users show you how to segment your lists better.
4. Personalise. Personalise. Personalise.
This is so important that it has to be said thrice. Personalisation is crucial. 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability (Google).
90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability—(Google).
Consumers corroborate, according to Segment.io. Their report says, “69% of consumers say they appreciate personalization, so long as it’s based on data they’ve shared with a business directly.”
If you want to know more about how to get personalisation right, read Why Marketing Personalisation Matters.
5. Nail Your Subject Line
What’s the difference between opened and unopened emails? The subject line.
When working on your email marketing, remember that you’re only one click away from the bin. So, here’s the email marketing tip you’d wish you’d known sooner.
Spend more time crafting your subject line than the rest of your email. It sounds bizarre, but your email subject line has one significant job—to get the email open. The rest of the content won’t matter if no one opens that mail in the first place.
Great subject lines entice the recipient and get past spam filters (higher deliverability).
- Keep subjects short and sweet—use active voice.
- Avoid spammy language (free, guarantee).
- Personalise where appropriate.
- Give a good reason to open the email.
- Use emojis; a picture is worth a thousand words.
- Humour is effective.
Pssst. Here’s another email marketing tip. Try to keep your content short too. The ideal length is 75-100 words. If it needs to be longer, that’s ok. But try never to exceed 250 words.
Triple score email marketing tip: craft and optimise your preview text. It’s just as important.
6. Use Visuals & Interactivity
We like images. Visuals are a great way to grab attention, evoke emotion, and communicate quickly. That’s the crux. When you have the privilege of making it into someone’s inbox, be mindful of their time. That’s why short emails are more successful, too. Most people find it easier to peruse an infographic than read text-only stats, even if they use the same amount of words!
Email marketing tip to live by: start with an 80:20 text-to-image ratio for deliverability and work your way up to 60:40 when you’re on the safe senders’ list to maintain readership.
Likewise, find ways to make your emails interactive. Consider embedding a video, adding gifs or other rich media.
7. Leeway with Links but Cut-Throat on Call-to-Action
Everything marketing activity should have one assigned purpose that leads to your overarching goals. You shouldn’t undertake anything if there isn’t a good reason for it. For example, starting a podcast because it seems like a good idea or running a digital advertising campaign just to “see where it goes”.
Each email should contain one specific call-to-action (CTA).
Direct your readers to do ONE thing. Too many CTAs can overwhelm readers, causing them to abandon the ship.
However, you can and should include relevant links like social media handles. Maybe the reader isn’t ready to take the desired action, but they could be keen to follow you and see what else you offer or deep dive into a topic (by clicking read more).
8. Test EVERYTHING
Analytics are crucial in helping you to create better emails. Don’t underestimate the wealth of information you can glean from your emails.
- A/B split test subject lines.
- A/B test placement of images.
- A/B test colours and placement of CTA.
- A/B test various CTAs.
- Test engagement with various types of content.
- Test to find the ideal day and time to send emails.
- Use heat mapping to improve layout design.
- Analyse the clicked links.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: Test the operability of your emails before sending them!
See how your emails are delivered via different email clients, on desktop and on mobile. Check to see that your subject isn’t truncated, your preview text makes sense, that your images load, and the fonts are compatible.
9. User Experience (UX)
It all comes down to this pivotal point. Clean, well-segmented lists; subject lines; images; a clear CTA; and testing—it’s all about user experience!
Whether B2B or B2C, today’s customers make decisions based on their experience, that’s why it’s worth investing in customer journey mapping. Such intelligence will also eliminate trial and error with your email marketing regarding copy and other content choices.
Email marketing tip mantra: You must keep your customer top-of-mind. It is, after all, all about them.
10. Secret Weapon: Competitor Benchmarking
It’s an elementary email marketing tip, but it is easily overlooked. Competitive analysis is one of the first steps when creating your digital marketing strategy, but it’s not a once-off event. It’s good to periodically keep tabs on what your competitors are doing.
Keeping up with your competitors’ email marketing strategy helps you with inspiration and acts as a plumbline. You can investigate if your competitors are talking about vastly different things to you.
Thoughts on 2023 Email Marketing Tips
What did you think of this list—was it on the money or missing something? Please drop a line with the subject: Email Marketing Tips Remarks with your thoughts. All comments are welcome.