5 Ways to Enhance Your Email Marketing Efforts in 2021s

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of engaging new and existing customers with your business. Unlike many other digital marketing channels, the email has the ability to engage with target customers on a host of levels.

It doesn’t matter whether you choose to educate and solve problems for users, give them incentives to use your goods or services, or reward long-time customers for their loyalty; email can help to keep your brand at the forefront of the minds of your target demographic. Nevertheless, without a strategic approach to your email marketing campaigns, you will be doomed to fail.

There is always scope for improvement when it comes to email marketers so, with this in mind, here are five easy ways for marketers to improve the effectiveness of their messaging in 2021.

1. Personalized Email Messaging

It has been said that just 5% of all online brands adequately personalize their emails. That’s a shocking statistic when you consider that personalization is considered key to brands’ short and long-term success online.

One of the main reasons why brands lack personalization within their email marketing is that they simply don’t know how to implement it or what to personalize. It takes more than just a personalized name to get your customers’ juices flowing.

One of the most effective ways to personalize emails is to segment your target users into customer “personas”. Using the multitude of data you have on each customer, it’s possible to group users based on their website behavior, their buying history and such like.

By creating these personas or identities, it’s easier to write content that is emotive and appeals to customers best.

2. Use of Interactive Content in Emails

There has been a huge rise in the amount of interactive content included in email marketing campaigns. Interactive content requires users to take action by clicking, swiping or interacting and can improve click-to-open rates and create user engagement.

This could involve polls or surveys, asking your customers to take part in an interactive survey or review. In turn, these can help show your customers that you care about what they think.

Today’s consumers want to be entertained - no matter what digital channels they are using. That’s why videos and GIFs are that much more enticing and interesting than static content.

One of the most effective interactive email templates is the kinetic email, which combines CSS and HTML to help brands create elements of a landing page that users can interact with within an email.

3. Social Media Integrations to Target Lapsed Customers

Social media accounts and email marketing campaigns have a symbiotic relationship, as they are both designed to improve customer engagement and loyalty. It’s been basic practice for many years now to embed social media links to brand accounts within emails, but some brands are going one step further with the way in which they fuse their social media and email marketing.

Some brands are choosing to run competitions on their social media accounts that can help to grow their email lists too. For instance, social media followers may be asked to sign up for company newsletters to enter a competition, giving brands valuable data in the process.

It’s also possible to import email lists to social media accounts, with Tailored Audiences and Custom Audiences available to target on Twitter and Facebook respectively, making it possible to retarget ads to customers, especially lapsed customers that may be enticed back with discounts.

4. Dynamic Content in Emails for Higher Engagement

One of the key ingredients for a successful and, ultimately, profitable email marketing campaign is relevancy. For emails to be hyper-relevant to target customers, each message must be personalized and dynamic.

There are dynamic content tools for email marketers that can help brands to personalize emails in terms of imagery, localized subject titles, localized offers, products, calls-to-action, and even localized messaging, based on customer data.

Ultimately, the key to effective, dynamic content in email marketing is to go above and beyond for your customers, delivering them with new experiences straight into their inboxes.

5. Optimizing Your Emails for Mobile

More than two-thirds of email campaigns are now opened on mobile devices. Mobile-optimized email templates are no longer a nice-to-have, they are a necessity.

If you are still finding your feet when it comes to designing and writing emails for mobile consumption, here are a few pointers to help keep you on the right track:

• Keep your email subject lines to no more than 30 characters – that’s the maximum most mobile devices will show within a recipient’s inbox.
• Don’t write-off the importance of the pre-header text. In busy, cluttered email inboxes, engaging pre-header text can provide context to the value of your email and improve click-to-open rates.
• Position calls-to-action (CTAs) at the heart of your email. CTA buttons should be no smaller than 44x44 pixels to ensure optimum clickability.