7 Must-Have Features of Email Marketing Software

If you run an e-commerce business, you need top email marketing tools to grow the business. These are tools that have relevant and effective features for email marketing. Email marketing is one of the most effective and affordable ways for e-commerce businesses to build customer relationships and increase revenue. With tools for automation, segmentation, and real-time reporting, the best email marketing software makes sending the right message at the right time easier than ever. And, that can be really good for the growth of your business.

Just like other business technologies, email marketing software must meet specific standards and must-have features for them to be suitable for purpose. Email marketing software vendors are very much aware of the expectations of marketers. But because email services are highly competitive, nearly all software vendors provide customizable templates, one-to-many messaging, contact segmentation, and opt-in and opt-out management. However, the following seven must-have features must be considered when comparing different email software to choose from and customize.

1. Sign-Up Forms and Pop-Ups: Do not fail to look for customization and mobile-friendly tools that can help you with this. This is because your business really needs email marketing software that can help grow your list. They must have the right tools to build and add landing pages, forms, and pop-ups to your e-commerce website. 

2. Visual Email Editor: You must try to carefully compare design tools by ease of use, mobile responsiveness, and template variety. These are tools that will help create and customize emails using templates, drag-and-drop builders, or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interfaces.

3. Contact Segmentation: Segmentation is hugely important in email marketing effectiveness. You therefore need tools that can help you to group your email subscribers by activity or traits to improve campaign results. Be sure to verify that you can filter contacts by behavior, such as opens or purchases.

4. Basic Personalization Fields: Settle for email marketing tools that at the very minimum, they should be able to automatically add your customer's name or product details to the email body.

5. Performance Tracking Dashboards: Metrics are hugely important to track email marketing success. Therefore, you must look out for key email campaign metrics like the open rate, unsubscribes, and the click-through rate. Make sure the dashboards are easy to understand and that they’ll allow you filter results by segment or campaign.

6. Prebuilt Automation Workflows: Look for workflows that require minimal editing because they are automated. Such software will enable you to use ready-made email sequences to welcome new subscribers or send cart reminders.

7. Unsubscribe and Compliance Tools: In the software market, the best email marketing systems handle opt-outs automatically and ensure GDPR and CAN-SPAM compliance. Look for these tools. Check and be sure they provide a one-click unsubscribe and auto-update contact status.

EndNote

Significantly, email service providers aren't all the same. This is expected. From their numerous products, you may have tools designed for local or service-based businesses but lack behavior-based automation that is critical for e-commerce brands. The good news however is that most email marketing platforms offer core capabilities, such as contact management, templates, and basic automations. But these platforms still vary significantly in areas like artificial intelligence (AI)-powered segmentation, advanced workflows, and scalability for small-to-mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Exactly why you cannot afford to overlook the foregoing features as must-have features in any email marketing tools you choose to deploy.

Best 25 Techniques to Get Free Advertising for Your Small Online Business

Most small business owners are always operating on a very tight budget particularly for advertising. This is why they always look for cost-effective ways to promote their products and reach new customers. Online, the most cost-effective way to promote products/services is by way of free ads. However, knowing exactly where or how to get free ads is always a huge challenge for most small business owners. I believe this article can hugely benefit such small business owners. If you are in that category, following are 25 of the best techniques that can help you to advertise your products/services for free and to reach many more new customers.

1. Word-of-Mouth: This is one very effective technique many business owners tend to ignore to their own disadvantage. Smart small business owners can always effectively leverage their social networks to encourage customers to spread the word about their businesses to their friends, associates and family.

2. Affiliate Marketing: For free ads, you can effectively partner with affiliates who can widely promote your products/services to their own various audiences at no ads cost to your business. Even with this free service, affiliates are only entitled to a commission on any sales they generate.

3. Social Media: You can create a social media presence on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. This will enable you to reach a much wider audience and get more new customers mostly for free.

4. Content Marketing: If you can consistently create high-value and impactful content and share multichannel, your business can reach many people online. This is more so if the content is packaged in form of blog posts, videos, infographics, and more and shared to your target audience.

5. Email Marketing: If you build a responsive email list over time, you can send regular newsletters or promotional emails to keep customers engaged. That helps to give your business a wide exposure and at minimal costs if any.

6. Community Involvement: Another great way to get free ads for your business is by community involvement. You can participate in local events, sports derbies, charity road walks, sporting and athletics events, community clean ups to get free ads for your business, In addition, you can support any other community initiatives which can help build brand recognition and goodwill for your business.

7. Cross-Promotion: You can partner with complementary businesses and businesses in your niche to promote each other’s products/services to your various audiences. This helps your own brand exposure a great deal.

8. Online Directories: To get free and unlimited exposure for your business, you can submit the business to popular online directories like Google-My-Business, GMB, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.

9. Online Contests and Giveaways: If you occasionally host contests or giveaways on social media or on your website/blog, you can attract more new followers and effectively engage your current audience. That translates to good exposure all for free.

10. Google Maps: If you make sure your business is listed, up-to-date and accurate on Google Maps, it can improve real visibility for the business. That enables the business to attract many more local customers.

11. Business Blogging: Blogging is readily the most popular form of content marketing among small business owners. If you can create a blog on your website to share your small business news, promos, discounts, price adjustments, industry insights and helpful tips with your audience, your business benefits from free ads as a result.

12. Web Directories: You can submit your website/blog to online Directories like Best of the Web to improve your website’s SEO and increase visibility for free for your business.

13. Influencer Marketing: If you partner with influencers in your niche or industry, you can more easily reach their diverse and wide audiences. That way, your business can gain unrestricted exposure through sponsored posts and or collaborations.

14. Networking Events: If you want free exposure for your business, you can choose to attend Networking Events or join Networking Groups to meet potential customers and business collaborators.

15. Referral Programs: If you have being in business for a while, you can get free publicity if you encourage satisfied customers to refer friends, associates and family members in exchange for discounts and or any other incentives.
 
16. Guest Blogging: You can become a guest blogger and get wider exposure on the websites of popular and reputable blogs. If you consistently write impactful guest blog posts for other websites, you can showcase your expertise, get more attention and attract their readers to your business.

17. Business Directories: When you list your business pages in online business directories like Dun & Bradstreet, it can improve visibility and attract new customers to your business.

18. Free Samples or Trials: You can selectively offer free samples or trials of your product/service to attract potential customers and generate word-of-mouth buzz for your business.

19. Video Marketing: If you have the right skills, you can create engaging videos about your business/products and share them multichannel particularly on popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or other popular video platforms.

20. Mobile Marketing: From anywhere you find yourself and you have a smartphone, you can use SMS marketing, push notifications, or mobile apps to reach customers on their mobile devices. It greatly enhances exposure for your business at just the minimal cost of an SMS.

21. Press Releases: PRs are very effective tools to get free publicity for your business. You can carefully write highly informative Press Releases and distribute them widely and multichannel to announce new products, services, or your business milestones. If your PRs get to journalists and popular media outlets, they receive unrestricted publicity which enhances visibility for your business.

22. Public Relations: You can carefully package your business story or expertise and pitch it to media outlets like newspapers or even podcasts. If they publish, it earns your business free publicity in the bargain.
 
23. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You can technically optimize your website/blog for search engines to improve your chances of appearing tops on their SERPs. Your business will benefit from increased visibility and good organic traffic as a result.
 
24. Online Forums: You can actively participate in online forums or groups related to your industry to establish your expertise in your chosen field. That’s one great way to freely promote your business in the forums and to forum members.
 
25. Online Reviews: If you encourage customers to leave positive online reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook business page, it can significantly boost your online reputation at no cost to your business. That equates to free publicity for your business.

6 Tips for Higher Email Marketing Engagement

Email marketing may be “old school” but it still remains one of the most effective marketing tools available to digital marketers. It produces great results in matters of engagement. In digital marketing, engagement can mean different things depending on the circumstances and the marketing channel. For instance, on social media, engagement involves such common activities as likes, comments, and clicks but in email marketing, a simple act like opening the email begins the engagement chain. Further actions on the email like a click, conversion, subscribing and unsubscribing are further acts of engagement. Most digital marketers always want to keep email engagement high for effective marketing reasons. This they do by diligently working to craft impactful emails with high quality content, managing their email lists well, segmenting their email lists, personalizing their email content, keeping a keen eye on their analytics data to know the performance of their emails.

If you market with emails, following are some useful tips that can help you to make your email marketing efforts as effective as possible to drive engagement higher.

1. Keep Things Really Light

Business can be fun and not war. There is no reason therefore for email marketing to be overly serious. Experience shows that your emails are more effective when crafted on a lighter mood and even with some touch of fun. That way, they tend to engage your audience better and with many beneficial marketing results in the bargain. What this means is that when your emails are simple, easy-to-read and a bit entertaining, they engage better. You must therefore endeavor to pay special attention to keeping everything positive and on-brand with a bit of humor in your email marketing.

2. Make Your Emails Mobile-Responsive

Google now reports that about 60% of internet data is attributable to mobile devices particularly smartphones. That means most people are now doing business online from their mobile devices. Therefore, making your emails mobile responsive can directly increase their effectiveness since most people now access their emails on their mobile phones. Email mobile responsiveness may be the default for most platforms and websites, but you must always make sure it is so. If not, taking deliberate steps to make your emails mobile responsive can be great for your marketing engagement. Therefore, when creating an email marketing campaign, never fail to check to make sure the mail looks just as good on smartphones as it does on other devices like desktop or tablet.

3. Pay Special Attention to Welcome Emails

Because welcome emails can be of great help to build a solid relationship with your customers and solidify your branding, you must pay special attention to them. Welcome emails are very effective when used correctly and at the right times. Most customers expect to receive these emails, the reason the emails always have much higher opens and clicks than other emails. Welcome emails help to increase user engagement since the email recipients can have a sustained willingness to interact with your business. To ensure this, you must take adequate care to make your welcome emails simple and visually appealing. Be sure they get right to the point at issue and they provide recipients with whatever you are promising them. If you can take further steps to have your welcome emails personalized for each individual recipient, so much the better.

4. Experiment Widely

In email marketing, there are no one-size-fits all kind of messages. The reason you must experiment widely with several versions of messages to see what works and what doesn’t. You can engage A/B testing in your experimentation efforts if you are trying to increase email marketing engagement. A/B testing allows you to send out two different versions of an email while changing up things like images, layout, and headers to see which performs better. If you craft your emails to be brief, evoke curiosity, factual and with a bit of humor, they tend to be more effective in catching the recipients’ attention. That helps to increase your marketing engagement.

 

5. Personalize Your Emails

Email personalization is a major factor in email marketing and engagement. When you personalize your emails to each recipient, it significantly helps your engagement. You can personalize your emails by mentioning your customer’s name, pet name or nickname or his right titles where necessary. By using analytics to understand his buying habits, you can craft your messages to directly address marketing issues of concern to him. Such personal touch can make your recipients more likely to share their experience with others. Doing so can directly help to increase your email effectiveness and even ROI. Great for marketing engagement no doubt!

6. Deploy Effective CTAs

Sending an email is one matter, getting your recipients to make the right responses to it is another. For marketing engagement, the response of your recipients to your emails is most important. That is where good call-to-action, CTAs, come handy. Making people click on your emails is virtually everything. That is the engagement that is really helpful in your email marketing campaigns. Therefore, exploring all credible ways to get people to click on a button/link becomes a marketing priority. An effective CTA can adequately address that issue but you have to be really creative about the CTAs to enhance their effectiveness.

4 Resourceful Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing Revenue

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn revenue online particularly if you’re a content marketer. It is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants market their products/services and they earn commissions for their efforts. What affiliates do in the process is to promote affiliate links/codes to products/services in their content particularly blog content. When users click on these links and make purchases, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. Depending on the type of affiliate program and the products/services involved, the commission rates can vary from 5% to 30% of the sales value.

Below are 4 actionable tips on resourceful ways to increase your revenue through affiliate marketing.

1. Publish In-Depth and Impactful Blog Posts

You cannot do affiliate marketing successfully without content marketing. Blogging comes in very handy in that quest. Most successful affiliate marketers are good bloggers. It is through the in-depth and impactful blog content they publish regularly they are able to widely promote affiliate links to help them generate sales and earn commissions. Through this content, they widely promote affiliate links which if blog readers click on and make purchases, they earn commissions. Most marketers generally agree that good blogging significantly increases affiliate marketing sales. For this reason, the topics you blog about must be relevant to your niche, well researched and written to make them impactful on readers. That is the type of content that attracts readers in significant numbers. The more blog readers are attracted to your content, the higher the chances that some will click on your affiliate links and even make purchases. These purchases earn you good commissions.

2. Create and Post More Video Content

Due to the rise in smartphone technology and the increase in the use of smartphones to access the internet, there is increasing popularity in the use of videos as marketing content. Most people in the world now own and hugely depend on mobile devices for their daily activities. Many of these people prefer watching videos instead of reading content on these devices. Human beings are visual beings. The reason short videos have become highly popular marketing tools. Even on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram the use of videos as marketing tools is the mainstay of these hugely popular platforms. On these platforms, affiliate marketers can create impactful video content in form of demonstrations, online courses, reviews, how-to tips, promos and giveaways to attract the attention of customers. This content is produced in a combination of pre-recorded videos and live streams designed to get people to engage with the products/services they’re marketing and even to lure them to purchase products. If well produced and used correctly on these platforms, affiliate marketers can rely on video content to grow their social media channels, generate affiliate revenue, and increase their website engagement.

3. Market with Eye-Catching Emails

Email marketing may have been around for a while but it is still a very effective marketing tool for affiliate marketers. Aside being cost-effective to use, they’re easy to deploy to thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. Emails are thus some of the best marketing tools to get leads, conversions and even customers. You can easily use email marketing to connect with your subscribers and promote affiliate products to a very wide audience. If you regularly send well-crafted, eye-catching, segmented and personalized emails to recipients, the marketing returns are amazing. That impacts your affiliate marketing revenues positively as well.

4. Set Measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

If you want to have a good picture of and understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, just track your Key performance Indicators (KPIs) diligently. KPIs are important metrics that help every affiliate marketer to monitor and to gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns. Expert marketers recommend for close monitoring important metrics like conversions, time on page, and revenue by traffic, retention rate and so on. If you have a standard marketing website, you can easily access these metrics and even more by reviewing the Google analytics tools on your website. To maximize your earnings and revenues, make sure you monitor your KPIs diligently to see if and how your marketing strategies are helping your business to grow. 

10 Powerful Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Email Campaigns

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing strategy. It remains one of the most effective ways to promote your online store, build mutually beneficial relationships with customers, nurture leads and generate sales. If you are currently working on a strategy to boost your email campaigns, following are some 10 vital email marketing components you really need in that strategy.

1. Design and Use Automatic Welcome Messages

Welcome emails are usually a good intro particularly for new subscribers. They are automatically sent to new subscribers when they sign up or purchase a product. You can also send welcome emails to existing customers who haven’t logged in for a while. In all these messages, the design and the messages they convey are very important. This must be taken into consideration when crafting the messages. Messages like “Welcome! We hope you like our product” or “Your account has been activated” or “Welcome back, it’s been quite a while” are some great messages your welcome emails can convey. Welcome emails can even be more effective when personalized and targeted. They directly prove you’re not sending out mass emails but only mails that are specifically tailored to specific customers. Welcome emails are a great way to build trust with your customers and making them to get used to receiving your emails.

2. Personalize Your Emails

Personalized emails are usually more effective emails. Sending personalized email messages to potential leads helps to boost response rates. Aside from giving your email subscribers a sense of connection with you, personalizing your emails makes them feel less like spam. They get better results as well. The key to successful email marketing is knowing exactly who you want to send emails and which messages resonate best with each group of recipients. Once you are able to identify what works and what doesn’t, you can better tailor your messages specifically to your audience for good results. You can customize each individual email message by adding links to products or pages on your site where interested email recipients can access your products or get to read more information on your website. Doing this helps to increase the opening rate, the click through rate and with fewer and fewer mails ending up in the spam folder.

3. Segment Your Subscribers

Subscriber segmentation is an effective marketing term which experienced marketers do take advantage of to make their emails more effective. As a marketing technique, it simply means arranging your subscribers into groups based on their interests and behavior so that you can send them more relevant content, offers, and other marketing messages. Marketers can effectively use this technique to create multiple versions of their emails, such as a welcome email, a thank you email, and a follow-up email for instance. Therefore, if you segment your subscribers well enough, it can help build trust and long-term interest for a business. This is as a result of your being able to present them with the right information or offers they actually want to receive and can help meet their needs. Segmentation is thus an important and integral part of an email marketing strategy which allows marketers to directly target their audience with personalized and highly effective emails.

4. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly

Google now reports that over 60% of online data is attributable to mobile devices particularly mobile phones. Now that’s some really huge chunk of data. This means that many more people are doing business online with the use of mobile phones and that includes sending and receiving emails. So, making your emails mobile-friendly has become really crucial in this age and time. If for instance you want to promote sales or discounts with your emails, optimizing the emails for mobile devices makes the content easily viewed on these devices. You can optimize your emails for mobile devices by resizing key elements on the emails such as keeping the images/photos/graphics small, using small sizes of fonts and margins and placing important links at the top of the page for easy visual access.

5. Time Your Emails Very Well

Determining the right time to send emails to customers usually depends on several factors. The most important of these factors is when last the customers visited your website, what action they took while on the site and whether or not they completed any transactions. This info you can easily glean from Google analytics data from your website. You can determine what days of the week bounce rate is higher, when email open rates are low or high, what time of the day, morning, afternoon or evening this happens and so on. Armed with such vital insights, you can correctly determine when and how best to send out your emails to customers for maximum effects and results.

6. Always A/B Test Your Email Content

Testing your emails before sending them out is to determine what works and what doesn’t. You can take advantage of A/B email testing software to test the effectiveness of your email content. Through A/B testing, you can split-test different versions of your email content to determine which one performs better. So, A/B testing of email content is about the best way to improve the open rates. The version that works best is usually the one that attracts customers more and consequently responsible for more sales.

7. Regularly Delete Your Non-Responsive Email Addresses

For most online marketers, their email subscriber list is usually a very valuable marketing asset. That makes it essential for them to manage the subscriber list well. The aim is to be sure the email list is responsive. You can easily determine this when your email sending reports indicate which mails were neither clicked nor opened.  When for instance you click “send” on your email newsletter, your list will contain all subscribers who did not open the email. It is always best to use the unsubscribe page to remove/delete all the people who are ignoring your emails from your email list. To do this professionally, you can use email management tools to help you eliminate the consistent non-opens. These tools are also handy to help you manage your subscribers and decrease the time spent on the repetitive task of managing your email subscribers list.

8. Always Include Your Own Responsive Email Address

Having your own responsive email is one great way to nurture a great relationship with your customers. If your customers can reliably and quickly reach you if and when they want, it can keep such customers coming back over and over again to do business with you. Once your email recipients can’t find a reliable channel to send any follow-up emails directly, your emails may all end up in their spam folders. To avoid such scenario, make sure to always put your reliable email address in the footer of your emails where customers expect to find it. Business is all about effective communication and if seamlessly done, it helps build trust with customers. If customers are aware that they are communicating with real people, it helps to put them at ease to do good business. That helps to build trust faster.

9. Utilize Your Email Analytics Well

Email marketing campaigns without analytics data is like marketing in the dark. You can therefore utilize your email analytics data to improve your campaigns. Through such data, you can get correct insights to check your email bounce rate, open rate, clicks, and the number of unsubscribes. It can also help you to determine how to send emails at different times throughout the week, testing subject lines, changing your CTA, and testing other creative variations. These are very vital info you can effectively use to rejig or to redirect your email campaigns at any point in your marketing campaign. Your email analytics helps you to accurately measure results from your email marketing campaigns. If you fail to measure your marketing results correctly, it is pretty difficult for you to have much reliable data on which to base your future decisions and to design your next email marketing campaign.

10. Utilize AI and Email Automation

Artificial Intelligence AI and automation help to eliminate repeat actions and increase efficiency in email marketing. Once you’ve taken the pains to craft good content, next is to automate their delivery. With the use of efficient automation tools like Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, you can program the timing of their sending and even to a segmented audience. That helps to increase your email effectiveness. These tools really help to make automation in email marketing easy and simple. The tools are smart enough to allow you create automated emails based on triggers. The common triggers are when someone opens your email, clicks on a link, or purchases something from you. The tools help to eliminate the drudgery of having to manually send out emails. Even if you are dealing with a multitude of different subscribers, these smart tools help you to save time without diminishing efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to promote your online store, build relationships with customers, and generate sales. What you really need is to come up with creative and effective ways to construct emails and send them out for maximum effects. The foregoing tips have been well tested and they can help you to achieve your email marketing goals. However, it is your creativity that is most important if your desire is to use email marketing to increase sales and create long-term customers.

Useful Tips to Draft High-Converting Emails

Email marketing has been around for quite a while yet it is still very popular with online marketers. This is because email is not only easy to use, it is cost-effective as well. Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing strategy. It remains one of the most effective ways to promote your online store, build mutually beneficial relationships with customers, nurture leads and generate sales. To get these results from your marketing, you must be sure your emails are well-crafted to make for easy reading and understanding. So, if you are currently planning your email marketing campaign, here are some top notch tips that can help you to get started.

Regularity: Email marketing works best and is most impactful when the mails are sent regularly. In crafting email messages therefore, this must be borne in mind and taken into consideration. If emails must be sent regularly, say about one or two mails per week, adequate care must be taken to avoid spamming. Generally, people respond much better to frequent emails than infrequent ones.

High Quality Content: Your email content must be of high quality, informative, educational and even entertaining to make it impactful to the readers. The message must be sufficiently relevant to directly address the needs of recipients. Poor quality emails usually end up in the trash bin even when the recipients manage to open them.

Brevity: The shorter email messages are, the higher the chances that they’ll be read. So, you must always endeavor to keep your emails short, concise, to the point and very brief. Long emails usually put people off reading them. Marketing experts recommend emails in the range of between 50 to 200 words.

Social Proof: The internet is full of many skeptics and doubters. This is why you need social proof in your emails when drafting them. Social proof helps convince readers that your offer is legitimate and worth their time. The right social proof you can use in your emails include sharing links or information from industry experts, positive testimonials from customers and or influencers who are using or have used your product.

Captivating Visuals: Generally, most people love visuals, more so if used in marketing messages like emails. If you use high quality and captivating visuals in your emails, they are more impactful. In drafting your emails, you must endeavor to include very high quality images/photos of your products.

    
Call-To-Action, CTA: People usually do not send emails for fun. They send them mostly for a business purpose. If you do not tell people what to do next after they read your emails, generally, they do nothing. Most people always want to know where to go or what to do next after reading your email content. That is where a clear and concise CTA becomes very relevant when drafting the content of your email. These days, most people access their emails from mobile devices. So, you need to provide a clear CTA at the end of each email. These CTA links can lead to a product page, a promo page or to a recent content produced on your website.

Last Line

Email marketing is a very effective digital marketing technique. No serious marketer can afford to do without emails if they want to do good business online. Crafting great emails and sending them correctly to the right recipients at the right time is a great way to get the best out of email marketing campaigns. 

Awesome Email Marketing Tactics

Despite the abundance of digital communication channels that are currently available to online marketers, email remains their preferred choice to stay in touch with customers. Email is typically popular with marketers because it is cost-effective to use and has excellent ROI. With just to touch of a computer button, can send an email to hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. When it comes to sending marketing messages therefore, it is really difficult to beat email in terms of ease of use, cost of use as well as effectiveness. The reason it is usually a first choice among marketers in matters of communicating with customers.

To get the best results from your email marketing strategy and increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, the following tactics can be of help.

Understand the Purpose of your Emails

Never send an email if you have not fully conceptualized its purpose. You must decide why you are sending it and what action you expect the email to get the recipient to take. That simply is the purpose of the email. If you don’t have a succinct and convincing response after sending an email, you can reconsider the purpose and resend it or you cancel the mail outright. Without a clear purpose, it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of an email. Technically, if many email recipients understand that every email is pertinent to and helpful to them, they’re usually motivated to open and read the mails. By doing so, it increases the open rates of the mails and thereby fosters a sense of trust among your email recipients.

Compose Mails with Strong Subject Lines

Without strong subject lines, it is pretty difficult for emails to have the desired impact. Successful email marketing campaigns directly benefit from having strong email subject lines. No matter how great the email content is, if the subject line is weak, not much good can come out of it. Aside crafting your email content very well, you can cleverly use emojis to lighten the tone. This plus the deft use of power words can get your subscribers to react to your emails. They help your subject lines with a little more flair as well.

Control Email Volume

You must be careful with email spamming. The higher the volume of emails you send, particularly if the mails are going to everyone on your email list, they may appear like spam to recipients who have no interest in the subject matter. For this reason, instead of sending emails to everyone on your list each time you mail, you should send well-tailored emails to interested parties only. By doing this, only recipients who wish to receive your emails will see them. This helps to maintain a healthy deliverability and even readability. You can enhance your email deliverability if you carefully send tailored emails to various list segments. That helps to keep the email volume down and the possibility of spamming greatly reduced.

Send More Specialized and Segmented Emails

If you want to foster closer relationships and more trust with consumers, it is best to communicate with them by delivering customized and segmented email sequences. Such emails carry a more effective marketing message whose purpose usually attracts reactions from recipients. Such distinct and customized email sequences that inform, entertain or even amuse consumers usually elicit desired responses from them. They are more effective marketing messages as a result. Using strictly more of such messages can protect them from spam.
 
Customize Emails Based on Customer Personas

It is smart marketing to have clear customer personas you want to direct your marketing messages. Before crafting your emails, have in mind who it is meant for, what time of the day they’ll like to receive the mail, where are they on the globe and what problems can you resolve for them. If you understanding these foundations of marketing well enough, they can help your email marketing strategy a great deal. Emails that get to recipients based on their peculiarities and needs are usually more effective. Clear customer personas help that process a great deal.

Personalize your Emails

Personalization also helps emails to be more effective. Every human being has a craving for recognition. If you craft emails with personal touches directly relating to whom the recipient is, it shows recognition and many recipients like that. Personalized emails may take more time and care to craft though because of the individual personal details like nicknames, bragging rights, peculiar slang and favorite quotes, but it is always worth the while.
 
Email for a Clear Purpose

Every email must have a clear purpose of what you intend it to achieve. This is in addition to a unique layout and a clear and concise subject line. When drafting an email, what you want it to achieve should be uppermost in your mind. You can add other touches to ensure the mail is opened and read by the recipient. An unopened email is a wasted email. Real trash to be precise! Every recipient of your email must discover something new and intriguing enough to get them to take action. If your email manages to give recipients something that is worth their while if they read it, it spurs action.

Time your Emails Appropriately

Timing your emails appropriately is essential to their success. When you choose the timing carefully, it can boost the open and click-through rates of your emails. Good timing may also cause recipients to better interact with your content and even share it widely on social media to their own audience. It is smart email marketing therefore to make use of all the resources at your disposal to ascertain you craft and release your emails to your email recipients at the appropriate times of the day.

Email with your Thought Leadership Pieces

Yes you are a marketer but don’t ever make the mistake of making your emails just sales pitches. That strategy can even put off many recipients from reacting to your expectation. What works best is, instead of obviously trying to sell something to your target audience in your email, you can share your expertise with them. That way, you can establish your authority by linking to an article you wrote for a business publication or on your blog.

Always Test and Re-Test Your Emails

You can hardly know the type of emails that get results unless you test and re-test your emails and measure the results. You can test several versions of your email marketing campaign to determine which version gets the best results. You can also split-test several marketing tactics/techniques until you find the one that connects best with your audience.

Improve your Email Send Time

If you send email newsletters, the frequency of sending them out is very important. So too is the best time of the day to send them out. Do a bit of research to find out what’s most suitable. The content you are sending and your audience disposition must be carefully weighed to determine the frequency of your emails. Email marketing campaign’s timing and frequency are mightily crucial here. If done right, it enhances the likelihood that your emails will be opened by your recipients.

Wrapping Up

Emails remain preferred choices among digital marketers for effective communication purposes. Emails do nicely for your marketing campaigns if they are well written and sent in a timely manner and at the right frequency. If you manage to avoid typos, errors, bounces, and other issues that could affect their effectiveness, they deliver good results. Habitually testing and re-testing your emails on the go can help you with that. By testing many iterations of the same email campaign, you can through your subscriber’s reactions determine which emails best serve your purpose.

Essential Email Verification Tools that Boost Deliverability

Many online businesses always employ email verification tools to scan through their email lists and weed out invalid email addresses. This is because they know from experience that adding contacts to your email list is one thing, but cleaning and maintaining it is something entirely different. Once your email list is clean, it goes a long way towards determining the success of your email marketing campaigns. If you want to clean up your email list as many marketers are wont to do from time to time, email verification tools come in very handy. These tools if well deployed in your verification process help in no small measure to increase email acceptability, reduce bounce rate and increase ROI in your email marketing campaigns. Discussed below are the most essential email verification tools that can help boost the deliverability of your emails to your marketing audience.

 

Clearout

Clearout is one tool that promises almost100% accuracy, Presently, Clearout features among the top-tier email verification tools in the market. Clearout’s bulk list email verification process can upload up to a million addresses at a time and instantly. Its instant email verification services help marketers to lower hard bounces, expand their reach, and significantly help to boost email deliverability rates. Clearout is additionally equipped with its own in-house auto-suggest feature which helps a marketer to steer clear of committing typos and spelling errors in email addresses. In terms of costs, Clearout offers both, the pay-as-you-go plan as well as a monthly subscription plan. The investment in this tool is well worth it when compared to returns. It is highly recommended. You can access Clearout at URL: https://clearout.io/

Mailfloss

Mailfloss is automatic email verification software that helps to keep your email list free from invalid addresses, thereby ensuring that your email campaign’s ROI remains unaffected. It is possible to integrate this tool with several email marketing service providers. By using mailfloss, you can verify your email list in bulk and in an efficient manner. What is unique about mailfloss is that, unlike many other verification software solutions that eliminate misspelled addresses outright, mailfloss resolves common typos and syncs them with your email service provider automatically. This it does automatically on daily basis. Since it automates the process of email verification, it enables the marketer to allocate greater time to other aspects of their business promotion. Marketers have access to free trial plans and paid plans when they opt to use Mailfloss. You can access Mailfloss location at URL: https://mailfloss.com/

NeverBounce

NeverBounce as the name implies is one of the most user-friendly email verification software solutions out there on the internet. It may be relatively new to the market, having been officially launched in 2014, but it has quickly worked its way up through the ranks to prove to be one of the most reliable email verification tools out there. The tool now has a stellar reputation for meticulously checking for and eliminating hard bounces, spam traps, and addresses that mark emails as spam. It offers three distinct services of bulk email list cleaning, real-time email verification and automated list cleaning. The platform which promises almost 100 % email deliverability can be effectively integrated with some of the very popular platforms like Marketo, MailerLite, HubSpot and Mailchimp. NeverBounce tool has two kinds of payment models which are pay-as-you-go pricing and subscription plans. You can access NeverBounce location at URL: https://neverbounce.com/

ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce tool is a top-notch email verification tool that ensures all the effort you invest in your campaigns is rewarded generously. It has an added advantage of integrating seamlessly with all major marketing email platforms in the like of Mailchimp, Cloudflare, MailerLite and HubSpot. This tool is quite efficient and has a commendable accuracy rate of nearly 100%. Besides efficiently identifying inactive contacts, ZeroBounce is also incredibly effective at eliminating abusive addresses and spam traps. You need to pay monthly subscription costs to be able to use this tool. You can access ZeroBounce location at URL: https://www.zerobounce.net/

GetEmail.io

GetEmail.io is powered by big data and machine learning algorithms. The tool is quite reliable when it comes to weeding out defunct and invalid email addresses thereby enhancing their deliverability. Email address verification occurs instantly on this platform courtesy of the comprehensive email database it possesses. It offers a free and subscription options. The free offer is only available to a new user to test the app and get a first-hand feel and look of the tool. You can access GetEmail.io location at URL: https://getemail.io/

Last Line

You must carefully select and use the right email verification tools if you want to succeed in your email marketing campaigns. The foregoing outlines the best of such tools in the business. We hope the multiple options discussed above can be of help to you in your email marketing campaigns. Good luck!! 

Tested Email and Search Marketing Techniques for Small Business

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique. It has been around for quite a while but because marketers still hugely depend on it, it does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. It is hugely cost-effective as well and very easy to use too no matter your marketing experience. Marketers who always operate very tight marketing budgets are encouraged by the fact that when they consider ROI, email marketing generates about $36 for every $1 spent. Now that is an awesome return when compared to other marketing techniques. Doubtful if you can find any more cost-effective small business marketing technique than email marketing.

The only drawback is that you’ll need to build a credible email list first. That can take quite a while but it is worthwhile in the long term if you can diligently build one and segment it for effective marketing purposes.

Here are some email marketing techniques that can help give a boost to the email marketing program of your small business, irrespective of your marketing experience or the product/service you are marketing.

Email Automation

Email automation helps marketers to save time and resources if done right. Manual email marketing entails a lot of work and patience. By using email automation tools, marketers can set up automated campaigns to message the right customers with the right message at the right time and with the right effects. These tools can also be used to set up an automated campaign to send new subscribers a sequence of and well-timed emails. They come in very handy too to create an automation that helps to cross-sell products to current or previous customers.

Email Newsletters

Because email newsletters are simple to use and usually get good results, they are about the most classic email marketing techniques out there. With regular email newsletters, marketers manage to keep their customers up-to-date about new products, discounts/coupons and even promos. If well designed and crafted, they help to keep customers engaged and encourage them to interact with the brand. Effective newsletters must contain among others some vital info such as up-to-date Discounts and promotions, New product launches, Upcoming events, The latest content/blog posts and some selected personal info about the people behind the brand.

Promotional Email Campaigns

Promotional emails are best used to reward your subscribers and get them to visit your eCommerce store or website. They usually contain a lot of call-to-action to entice recipients to open the mails. If for instance your email is offering a “Free Shipping” coupon or up to 40% discounts on products, these alone might be all the customers need to kick start and even finish their shopping from your store. Free shipping offers and discounts are two of the most significant factors influencing email recipients to open promotional emails.

Search Marketing Techniques

With the deepening of the internet, promoting and marketing products has taken on a different hue. This is the advent of search marketing where search engines play a dominant role. These days, search marketing has become an absolute essential for the survival of any online business. The days of Yellow Pages and asking your neighbors where to find the nearest grocery store appears to be gone for good. You can now just whip out your smartphone anywhere anytime and ask Google just about anything and you get answers instantly. Thanks to the power of the internet and search engines like Google. Search engine techniques are many and varied but below are some of the techniques that are very popular with marketers.

Google-My-Business, GMB

GMB is an online business mart where you can market about any product particularly to local audiences. Google easily takes you to eCommerce stores in your local environment if you search for businesses “near me.” For this reason, you can easily search for phrases like “Salons near me,” “Gyms near me,” “Grocery near me,” “Plumber near me,” and so on. Such phrases are searched millions of times every year and your business gets thrown up by Google if it is optimized for local searches. Without proper SEO and marketing, your business won’t appear in such search results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website, social profiles, blog posts, and product pages to rank for specific keywords. It is usually a long-term strategy that takes a big-time commitment to put in place. If properly done, it will help drive free organic traffic from search engines to your website/blog.  SEO comprises many different activities on your website which include but not limited to:

Creating quality content
Decreasing bounce rates
Improving retention rates
Earning backlinks
Structuring the internal links
Increasing the loading speed

Voice Search Marketing

The use of voice search marketing increased with use of mobile devices in marketing. This has made voice search to really grow in popularity. Search engines on their part now have improved algorithms to do voice searches. With that, more and more people now talk to their voice-enabled devices every day particularly for marketing and scheduling purposes. But, optimizing for voice search is slightly different from optimizing for text search. For best voice search results, a marketer must endeavor to create content that answers questions in a conversational tone. You can do this correctly by first finding out questions that your audience frequently asks and you supply the answers in a conversational tone.
 
Search Engine Marketing, SEM

SEM is the process of purchasing ad space on Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs. These ads are typically the websites listed on the top, bottom, and sometimes the side of your Google searches that have the word “Ad” next to them. You can pay to have your site show up for certain search results and get in front of your target audience. When your ad ranks high on SERPs, it gets better noticed by searchers using the keywords your ad is optimized with. That’s where SEO gets really important in search engine marketing.

How to Become a Top-Shot Affiliate Marketer

If you have you dreamed of becoming an affiliate marketer, what are you still waiting for? You may have been held back by doubts, but then so is everyone just trying to start out. There are challenges though but experts say he challenges are not as daunting as you may be led to think. What an affiliate does is to simply help a product merchant to generate sales and he gets paid commissions for his efforts. Really simple I suppose? Even at that, the process may scare some people enough as to prevent them from taking desirable steps to get things going. Affiliate marketing can really be worthwhile in the long term. Presently, over 80% of businesses rely on affiliate marketers to help push their products/services on the internet. Now, that’s one huge chunk of business worth getting involved in. If you want to get started and even become a top-shot affiliate marketer with time, do not ignore the following.

Be Conversant with Trends

As internet trends change, affiliate marketing techniques tend to change with it. Just like many other internet businesses, affiliate marketing is hyper-competitive. If what you know and what you do are not in tandem with the trends, you can easily get muscled out of business. In such a hugely competitive business environment, getting a firm handle on trends can give you competitive advantage. Granted trends may come and go but if you know what is now and what is just coming up, you can use that knowledge to your marketing advantage. Remaining current gives affiliates the much needed impetus to continue to engage a healthy consumer base. A healthy customer base means more business, more sales and more commissions earned. Affiliate marketers can take advantage of social media trends in combination with evolution in SEO techniques to deepen their online visibility. More online visibility also means more traffic and more business.

Pay Good Attention to Product Reviews

If you want to be a top-shot affiliate marketer, you must build a reputation for yourself as a reliable and dependable reviewer. As online shoppers are increasing by the day, so is their increasing reliance on reviews as a direct influence on their shopping activities. Nearly 80% of online shoppers admit reading reviews before making purchases online. Many tend to trust reviews as much as they would trust a word-of-mouth recommendation from friends and family. That’s one great way to leverage on the power of the internet as a business medium. If you establish a trusted base for yourself as an affiliate marketer, your audience will always come to you to get reliable information on a range of topics and product niches. Inevitably, that helps to enhance your ability to make money from affiliate marketing.

Test and Re-Test Your Marketing Techniques

Testing your marketing techniques using online tools helps you to know what works and what doesn’t in your marketing campaigns. A/B testing is about the most popular test among marketers. You may also choose to use some multivariate testing synonymous with websites. It is not advisable to rush into anything from the outset without enough testing. Begin your testing by switching certain elements in your marketing campaign then collect and collate the requisite data. Through such data, you can pinpoint exactly which features are helping or hindering your sales efforts. You can run same tests on the affiliate marketing channels you are using to determine suitability for the types of products/services you are marketing.

Take Advantage of Lots of Online Sources

The more of these online sources you can take advantage of, the better for your affiliate marketing activities. What matters most is what you know how to do and what works for you among the several ways you can use to reach your audiences. You can write quality content as blog posts on your website and on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube together with influencer images on Instagram. The aim is to reach a very wide and diverse audience as fast as possible since these platforms host billions of unique users daily. If you have a reliable email list built up already, an email marketing campaign has its own unique merits, just as text messages, Skype and freebie marketing on Google-My-Business and elsewhere.

How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

If you are a digital marketer and you are presently not using email marketing as a major part of your digital marketing campaigns, you are missing out on a vital and hugely effective marketing tool. Statistically, email has more users than social media, so it is a very popular marketing tool with most digital marketers around the globe. You cannot have an effective email marketing campaign without the right strategy. Your email campaign strategy cannot be right if it does not allow you to open a direct and efficient channel of communication with your customers. But first, you must take quality time to diligently build a credible email list.

 
Even though building a reliable list of email contacts can be quite challenging, without it, you cannot hope to have any successful email marketing campaigns. If however you manage to get it right, it can yield great results for your business down the road. Here is what helps the process to make your email marketing campaigns effective.
 
Consistently Craft High-Quality Content

No matter whatever else you do, your email campaign will not yield any worthwhile results if you do not produce high-quality content very regularly and consistently. Such content even if written or visual must be optimized for emails to enhance its readability. In digital marketing, content is king. The better it is, the more traffic it attracts. The more traffic it attracts, the more leads, conversions and sales you get. It is good quality content that keeps your audience engaged. The content you create is effective if it is created around things and topics within your business’ niche. That is the kind of content that helps to attract more traffic and even sigh-ups.
 
Optimize your Website

You can integrate and optimize your website with strategically placed sign-up widgets and pop-ups.  If your email list is credible, the more email contacts you have, the more emails you can send and the more audience you can convert. To be sure your emails will be effective, you can do A/B testing on them. This test is about the best way to optimize, try out different widgets or pop-ups to get more signups. With Google analytics tools, you can closely monitor and track your progress and customer responses to your email campaigns. The insights from these tools can provide you the vital info you need to redirect, tweak or rejig your marketing strategy and campaign as needed. 

Sign-up with an Email Service Provider

Aside the risk of falling foul of sending unsolicited emails, signing up with a reputable email service provider is usually great for email campaigns. A good way around sending unsolicited emails is to make sure you have express or implied permission from the recipients.  Permission is deemed implied when you currently have some kind of relationship with the contact. Express permission implies that even if you have no previous relationship with the contacts, they have permitted you to send them your marketing emails. When you optimize the user’s points of contact on your website and social media handles, permission is deemed obtained from all sign-ups/subscribers to regularly receive emails through that window.
 
Automate Your Emails

This helps to create and use drip emails effectively. It is hugely effective for timing the release of emails. It comes in very handy to send out a planned and well-executed series of emails that can keep your customers sufficiently engaged. Once you have an automated drip campaign in place, you do not have to worry anymore about sending your emails manually. The automation takes charge as programmed and you’ll then be able to send your emails at the right times and in the right forms. Anytime anyone signs up on your website, automation systems once in place will begin to send them a set of emails at programmed intervals. The info from your analytics tools will enable you to determine what works, what needs changing or what needs modifying for better effectiveness. Your email marketing campaigns tremendously benefit from these efforts.

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

In this age and time, even though email marketing has been around for quite a while, it still remains one of the best online marketing strategies small business owners can use to grow their businesses. It is not just cost-effective to use, it still gets some of the best results when compared to other means of digital communications online. It characteristically gives very good returns on investment for small businesses. This is why many small business owners never fail to leverage on emails for their marketing campaigns.

Here are five effective email marketing strategies any small business owner who wants to quickly grow their small business needs to adopt.

1. Personalize Your Email Messages

For maximum effectiveness, it is advisable to personalize emails. That however does not mean sending a specific message to everyone on the email list of your subscriber base. Not at all! What it means is to creatively use customer data to create and send a personalized message to your customers. Such messages resonate better with customers and they tend to get the best results. Email personalization simply aims at creating an excellent customer experience by allowing customers to build good relationships and trust with your business.   When emails are personalized with customers’ names, subject lines, customer needs and location, they are usually very effective at conveying marketing messages. Consequently, such emails do help to enhance some increase in the email open rates, conversions and increase in sales.

2. Optimize Your Email Messages for Mobile

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of online traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s a very huge chunk of traffic. A very large chunk of marketing emails are now opened via mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, sending emails to subscribers who regularly use their phones to access messages is just not enough. You need to optimize these massages for mobile devices. When your messages are optimized for mobile, it helps to minimize the chances of trashing, unsubscribing or deleting such messages. Sending mobile-friendly messages that are optimized for the mobile devices can lead to increased conversions and sales. One great way to optimize your emails for mobile devices is by using a responsive email template. Such responsive templates are usually created to automatically work on users’ screens for ease of viewing. These templates will allow you the sender to have a preview of your messages exactly how they’ll appear to your recipients. You’ll see in advance how your emails will appear when viewed on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. As more and more people now do business out of mobile devices, optimizing your emails for mobile has become a very good email marketing strategy.

3. Segment Your Subscriber Base

If you segment your subscriber database, it helps to make your email marketing campaigns more targeted to your audience. Better targeting means better effectiveness of your emails. You can therefore use segmentation as a personalization approach to deliver relevant email messages to your subscribers. With segmentation, your messages will get to them according to their interests, buying history, geographic location, gender, age, and so on. With segmentation, a marketer can effectively address the specific needs of the subscribers and facilitate customer satisfaction. For this reason, it is not advisable for all your subscribers to receive the same email content. What works best is that by segmentation, they should receive only messages that are relevant to them and their needs. Doing otherwise helps to increase the chances of many of your emails ending up in trash bins.

For maximum effectiveness, below are some of the best ways to segment your email list:

Content-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation based on data gathered regarding specific contacts. Such data may relate to the pages customers visited, the content they downloaded, tools used to download content, and so on.

Behavior-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation relating to audience behavior on your website. Here you craft emails by taking into account how long the audience takes on a web page, the pages viewed, and the frequency of their visits.

B2B Email Segmentation: This is segmentation based on B2B integrated relationship. Most businesses typically are different entities and have their own unique requirements and expectations. For this reason, you must deliberately craft emails for each business category. Such emails should target, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, IT specialists, Administrative Assistants, and so on.

Localized Segmentation: Yes, most small businesses are local. The reason there is an imperative for local segmentation. This type of segmentation is fairly common among many small businesses because it allows them to target and directly market to the local market around their base of operation. If for instance as a small business owner you are organizing a seminar or doing sales promos, sending emails to people within your locality and its environs helps to increase your reach a great deal.

4. Routinely Test Your Emails

Email testing helps to provide the requisite data to guide you in making practical decisions to improve your email marketing campaigns. For practical purposes, it is best to routinely test your email templates, the home page and landing pages to see how they pan out with the right elements of email marketing campaigns. The elements you need to test in your emails are subject lines, call-to-action CTA, messaging, personalization, design, sender name, and the target audience. These are the elements that are instrumental as to whether or not your subscribers will even bother to open your emails or the mails end up in the trash bin. Routinely testing emails can help to better promote your brand image and create an exceptional subscriber experience for your business.
 
You can rely on automated tools to do your email testing. These tools allow you to easily check the appearance of your email for both desktop and mobile users. Automated tools are also handy to check for grammatical and spelling errors that could put off some recipients. Emails also need to be checked for the proper display of images, font sizes and graphics displays that may need adjustments.

5. Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC

Usually, online reviews are like product recommendations from friends and can influence the customers’ buying behaviors. One of the most effective ways of encouraging engagement in email marketing campaigns is asking for customer reviews. Reviews are a great user-generated content, UGC. You get quality UGC when you allow your customers unfettered interaction with your brand. It is one very effective way to influence prospects to buy from you. You can better use UGC to convince customers to buy than other forms of inducement such as the brand/products photos/graphics.

Positive reviews and testimonials are a valuable means of social proof in digital marketing.  Customer reviews can also help to greatly enhance your UGC email marketing campaigns since many customers tend to trust the reviews they access online more. This is why reviews can also be helpful to generate more leads. Some reviews may however not be positive. That’s ok. Even negative reviews and testimonials are also helpful UGC. Experienced marketers can use negative reviews positively by responding to them to demonstrate their commitment to meeting customer needs as needed. 

Wrapping Up

It is proof positive that email marketing can be a very effective way to generate leads and build customer loyalty. With the right strategies in your business as outlined above, you can increase your customer base and do better business. The effectiveness of these strategies is not in doubt even though marketing trends keep changing rapidly. A way around that is to continuously test the relevance of these email marketing strategies with a view to identifying the very best and most suitable for your business. The strategies that work best for your type of business should be used more.

Email Marketing Tips for Current Trends in Communication

Digital marketers are increasingly relying on emails to do business. Because more and more people are taking to shopping online, marketers are also increasing the volumes of emails they are sending. This is partly to be able to reach out and accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs and to reach more people restricted by covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue even when the restrictions begin to ease off.

To sustain the current email marketing trends, these here tips can become very useful to email marketers going forward.

Using AI to Optimize Email Strategy

Email marketers can benefit from more effective emails if they skillfully deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, to optimize their email strategy.  With AI, marketers can easily and accurately analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. Marketers can for instance utilize smart online tools to analyze consumer’s purchase habits and interests. By optimizing the email sending time with these tools, marketers can identify a more suitable angle for their emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

AI can help out to make your emails more captivating and readable thereby reducing the numbers that end up in trash bins. They help to accurately identify your customers’ needs thereby providing the much needed Intel to shoot them the right emails. CRM systems come very handy to make these processes much easier and time saving.

Personalizing Emails

Marketers can leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate well with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. You can use online smart tools to accurately gather customers’ data. From this data, you can analyze their interests and preferences so as to design, craft and deliver more personalized emails that directly speak to their wants and needs. With that personalization, the emails tend to be more effective. These days, many more people are craving personal connection. Many consumers want to feel valued so they respond better to direct and personal touch from marketers. Therefore if you strive to personalize your emails, they help demonstrate your personality and care. That way, more customers can read your emails and really feel connected with you. It helps them to build trust in you as well as your brand.

Using More Interactive Emails

You can engage your customers better if your emails are interactive. The interactive elements in an email don’t have to be too complicated. They can be presented in form of clear and clickable CTA buttons, polls/surveys and quick quizzes to showcase products and or services. The idea is to remove boredom and to give customers the room to help lead the process. This way, customers may really feel that they’re being given options to take their own decisions. Whereas what smart marketers do is to make use of their customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. Such specially customized customer journey tends to convert more sales for the marketer.

Respecting the Privacy of Email Recipients

Customer awareness is now helping to place more emphasis on their privacy. Marketers must beware of this and respect it particularly on how customer data is being used. Trending now and going forward, focusing on customer-data privacy is hugely essential for any digital marketing business. Data privacy regulations may vary from one country to another and all require the right observances, respect and compliance. For this reason, marketers must constantly review extant legislation regarding data privacy with a view to ensuring their email campaigns are in full compliance at all times. If there are any changes in these regulations, as it happens from time to time, marketers must inform their customers of these changes and letting them know how their information will be protected. Doing so helps to increase customers’ trust in your business.

Incorporating User-Generated Content, UGC, in Emails

In digital marketing, UGC is any form of content created by the users of goods and services. The primary source of this content is user feedback. Incorporating UGC into your emails is one great way to increase consumer’s trust in your product/brand. UGC is free and unforced content making it highly convincing and believable. So, if you include customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product/service in your emails, your emails resonate better with your recipients. Customers’ feedback is so impactful that it is said to influence over 90% of consumers to make their buy decisions. To get more UGC, you can cross promote your products/services on social media. That is one great way to gather more user reviews or photos. Many social media users are always happy and tend to appreciate your brand more when they too see their own reviews shared publicly by your brand.