Email marketing allows brands to establish and strengthen relationships with their audience. Regularly sending relevant and valuable content helps build trust and loyalty, making customers more likely to engage with the brand and most importantly, is a key owned revenue-driving channel. Marissa Jimenez, Retention Marketing Lead at Parks Projects, shares her best practices garnered throughout her 10+ years spent working in email, SMS, loyalty, and referral for agencies and brands.
Automated Flows, Campaigns, and Where to Start
Your automated flows are the foundation of your email marketing and can generate nearly 60% of email revenue–start here. Automated flows are sequences set in motion by a specific trigger and include one or more steps. These are usually a series of messages that are constantly humming in the background hitting your customers at the right point in time with the right message.
Consider prioritizing the following series:
- Welcome Series: Your welcome series should be carefully crafted to nurture users in a comprehensive and engaging manner. Through this long-form communication outlet, you have an opportunity to educate them about your brand's ethos, mission, and core value propositions that set you apart and make your brand unique. With a "set and forget" approach, your welcome flow (and other automations) require less production effort compared to traditional campaigns, allowing you to focus on building strong connections with your audience.
- Abandoned Cart & Browse Abandonment: Tailored to each user's actions and preferences, this sequence reflects their specific interactions with your brand. By responding directly to their actions (leaving without checking out, viewing but not adding to the cart), you create a more personalized and relevant experience. These emails often achieve higher open rates and click-through rates (CTRs), as they strike a meaningful connection with the recipient on a personal level.
- Repeat purchase emails: By closely monitoring your user’s journey, you can gain insights into the ideal timing for a repeat purchase. Analyze the natural purchase cycle of each user and identify opportune moments. By crafting personalized emails showcasing products aligned with their initial purchase preferences, you are encouraging repeat buying behavior. These targeted emails boast an impressive conversion rate, approximately three times higher than regular campaigns, as they resonate directly with the recipient's interests and needs.
Conversely, a campaign is a one-time email or SMS send to a predetermined list or segment. These must be manually scheduled to be sent at a fixed point in time. A few examples of campaigns are seasonal promotions, educational blog content, or new product launches.
- Seasonal Promotion: Create special campaigns for holidays and seasonal events and consider offering themed promotions or messages. If your brand does offer discounts, promotional emails are great for driving immediate action and boosting sales.
- Educational: Educational newsletters help position your brand as an authority and keep your subscribers (especially those who have already converted) engaged.
- New product launches: When you’re launching a new product, leverage email to introduce the new product to both customers who haven’t purchased and those have, who may be interested in the latest offering. When promoting your new product, Marissa recommends embracing a less transactional approach and infusing storytelling into every campaign. Take your audience on a journey sharing the origins and evolution of the product. By aligning the product within this narrative, you create an authentic connection with your brand, weaving storytelling into the fabric of your campaigns. Showcase unique elements of the product that resonate with your mission, giving customers compelling reasons to join in and support your vision.
Each campaign, regardless of type, should highlight your brand ethos, fostering a meaningful relationship with your audience and showcasing the true essence of your brand.
Best Practices For Improving Open Rate
With the recent IOS privacy changes, measuring open rates has become more challenging, as a significant portion of users' activities remain unidentified. Nevertheless, the available data still holds value. However, Marissa advises it’s crucial to interpret it with caution. To navigate these changes effectively, continuous testing is essential. By consistently testing and analyzing audience responses, you can gain insights into their behavior and preferences, ensuring you remain attuned to your evolving audience and make data-driven decisions. To boost your open rate:
- Grab Attention Concisely. Stand out in the inbox by crafting thoughtful and engaging subject lines. Test different send times to optimize for higher open rates. Consider adding emojis to add a touch of personality and catch the eye of recipients.
- Avoid bait-and-switch tactics. Use a sender name that is easily recognizable and reflects your brand identity. Consistency in the sender's name fosters trust and familiarity among your recipients. Similarly, don’t bait the user with a subject line that doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the email.
- Experiment with various angles. Tailor your content to suit the interests of different audience segments, making your emails more relevant and personalized to their specific needs. If a certain value prop isn’t resonating, take a different approach to better understand what resonates with different cohorts.
Best Practices For Improving CTR
- Ensure Consistent Branding. Align your email design with the branding of other marketing channels, such as your website, social media, and ads. Maintain a cohesive visual identity to reinforce your brand image.
- Visual Storytelling: Consider different product presentation styles, including flatlays, models, lifestyle shots, user-generated content (UGC), and studio images. Bring your products to life through captivating visuals.
- Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Incorporate clear and compelling CTAs in your email design strategy. Place important CTAs above the fold to increase visibility and encourage action.
- Embrace Simplicity: Keep your email templates clean and simple. Let the product and copy take center stage, allowing them to speak for themselves. For significant moments or events, consider enhancing the design to create impact.
- Mobile-First Design: Optimize your email design for mobile devices, prioritizing mobile responsiveness. With more people checking emails on mobile, a mobile-first approach ensures a seamless user experience.
- Targeted Audience: Analyze your click rates and assess if you're targeting the right audience. Segment your email list based on preferences and behavior to send more relevant content to each group.
Tactics to Grow Your List
- Onsite Pop-ups: Onsite pop-ups can be highly effective in growing your email list. By offering valuable incentives or content, such as exclusive deals, discounts, or downloadable resources, you can entice website visitors to subscribe to your email list.
- Omnichannel Promotion: Leverage various marketing channels, including advertisements, to drive traffic to dedicated landing pages where visitors can opt-in to your email list. Additionally, use your social media platforms to regularly promote your email list and encourage followers to subscribe.
- Email and SMS Integration: Maximize your reach and engagement by utilizing both email and SMS marketing in tandem. Send messaging from your email list to your SMS subscribers, providing them with first access to exclusive offers, product launches, or important updates.
Send Frequency
- Provide Frequency Options: Allow users to choose how often they want to receive emails. Some users may prefer to receive all emails, while others might opt for a weekly or monthly volume. Giving them control over their email frequency enhances the user experience and fosters a positive relationship.
- Healthy Sending Frequency: Generally, sending emails 2-3 times a week is considered a healthy balance. However, the optimal frequency may vary based on your specific audience, content, and industry.
- Be Consistent: Maintain a regular email schedule to stay top of mind with your audience. Consistency builds trust and keeps subscribers engaged. At the very least, aim to send emails weekly to maintain an active presence in your recipients' inboxes and maintain an engaged list.
- Consider Your Products and Audience: Tailor your email frequency based on the nature of your products and the preferences of your audience. High-demand products or time-sensitive offers might warrant more frequent emails, while certain niches may benefit from less frequent, but highly targeted and personalized communication.
Preferred Email Service Providers (ESP)
Klaviyo is great - best for small to midsize businesses. It has an intuitive interface, relevant reporting, smart segmentation, and the option to layer in personalization as best as you can. You can also develop pop-ups and integrate SMS within Klaviyo. Other ESPs to consider include Braze, but does require heavy coding.