E-mail marketing has been a reliable tool for generating leads and sales since the dawn of the internet. These days e-mail harvesting techniques are more abundant than ever. These lists are obtained by things like making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, requesting a free brochure or guide, signing up for a contest, or clicking on tabs for more information, just to name a few. You can even run collaborate contests with news publishers in your niche. It’s always best to legally acquire these emails through website sign ups, and even incorporate a double-opt in technique, which essentially verifies with the person that they meant to sign up.

Some companies and institutions will harvest e-mail addresses on their own via subscriptions and customer databases. Though there are certainly some that simply turn to the e-mail address list, which can be purchased by the thousands by third-party sources. You might be tempted to purchase an email marketing list. This is always a bad idea. Firstly, these lists are usually illegal to use, there are ICAN SPAM acts and others …. and if by some chance they aren’t illegal, just by using them they will have low engagement rate, and can even hurt your deliverability rate, this means the chance that the email will go directly to spam. Plus these have likely been recycled hundreds of times already and grown stale.

Assuming your lists are clean, then we want to ensure that we properly engage with the lovers of our brand by providing something of value to them at every stage. People get dozens of emails every day, and its ok to send daily emails, as long as they are not stale. So, don’t go and send the exact same offer 5 days a week. A good rule of thumb is to use your email blasts along side other marketing efforts such as writing blog articles or new website content related to your brand. This gives people something new and exciting related to your brand that they will want to learn more about, and by coming back to your website, they are more likely to remember you when they do need you, and purchase a product or use your services when the time is right.

With the right titles, and content e-mail marketing strategies can become a powerful tool for generating new leads and increasing sales volume. Though there is some art and science afoot when it comes to crafting a successful e-mail marketing campaign.

The Top Ways To Use Email Marketing

• Engaging subject lines & exciting expiring impulse offers
• Exit intent popups
• Cart abandonment series
• Remarketing customers
• Segmenting lists
• Regular engagement – daily, weekly
• Automation – welcome series, purchase follow-up

Engaging Subject Lines & Exciting Expiring Impulse Offers

The subject line is arguably the most important component of any successful e-mail marketing campaign. There are a few ways to capture a potential reader’s attention to get them to click on the e-mail.

Using a question in the subject line will encourage a potential readers to stop and think about themselves and the topic at hand. If it fits properly with the theme, you might want to also include an emoji to add greater visual interest and help the e-mail stand out from the rest of the messages in their inbox. Even something simple like “Don’t You Miss Me?” will inspire someone to open. Getting someone to open an email first is a battle in itself against the inbox war to stand out amongst the hundreds of other appealing offers that enter a person’s inbox. In addition, sending these offers at a specific time so it doesn’t get lost in the sea of emails is also crucial. Will your customers tend to open an email more on Tuesday at 7am as opposed to Monday at 2pm when they are in the middle of work, which surprisingly at work is when most people will open and engage with your email (even though they are probably not supposed to because they are supposed to be working!!!!), hahah!

Exclusive offers with a limited timeline can also be very compelling. Today’s savvy consumers are always on the lookout for things like clearance deals, expiring seasonal offers, and other limited-time opportunities. If they feel that the offer will always be available, a potential reader is less likely to click and convert. Often moving on and not coming back.

Exit Intent Popups

Exit-intent popups are usually timed or triggered to appear right before a person leaves a site or bounce to a different page. When used strategically they can be an excellent tool for gathering information, as well as a way to harvest e-mails.

Many will ask you to enter your e-mail address for access to exclusive content or a limited time offer. This might include things like offering a coupon or discount code, as well as things like the chance to download a free e-book. Some exit-intent popups will be strategically geared to encourage visitors to read reviews or watch testimonials from well-known influencers. In the case of an e-commerce site, an exit-intent popup might also be used to remind the person that they still have items in their cart or to direct them to a new site tool. The best place for this that will lead to the highest value is at the shopping cart page when people get gun shy just before they are about to hit the buy button to complete their site. Monitor their mouse movements, and just before they leave the site, hit them with a last-second discount offer that expires in 5 minutes, with an offer that is too good to be true that they don’t want to miss out on.

Cart Abandonment Series

E-commerce sites like Amazon, Target, and Walmart know that customers will sometimes add items to their cart while shopping. Then they get distracted, or become hesitant about making the purchase, and essentially bounce off their site entirely.

Smart e-commerce sites set up reminder e-mails to let people know that there are still items in their cart for purchase at a moment’s notice. When crafting these e-mail templates, it’s important to note time-sensitive things like the upcoming expiration date on a sale price, or the deadline for when priority shipping will no longer be available. This will go a long way toward encouraging the person to return to the site and complete the purchase before they miss out on the opportunity.

Remarketing Customers

Email remarketing is designed to capture and use information about customers to improve marketing results via a personalized email marketing campaign. When someone browses your website or an affiliate site, marketers can access navigation information using browser cookies. This is essentially a small file that closely tracks behavior for each visit.

This empowers marketers to generate highly targeted, high converting campaigns using the same principles found in retargeted ads. In this way, email remarketing can produce superior marketing results compared to traditional digital advertising on social media.

An effectively targets remarketing campaign gathers a plethora of data. This in turn helps re-engage customers, while achieving better click-thru results to ultimately drive more sales. Just like display ads, email remarketing ads make it easier for you to target your customers with specific products they’ve recently viewed. This also helps reduce cart abandonment rates and helps remind them of opportunistic sales that might be about to expire.

Use Segmented Lists For Targeted E-mail Marketing Campaigns

Open or non-segmented “E-Mail Blasts” tend to have a far lower response rate than segmented lists. Segmented lists are typically used as part of a personalization strategy to effectively deliver more relevant email marketing messages to subscribers based on key criteria. This includes things like their geographic location, interests, purchase history, and other important predetermined factors. If you understand a group of your customers always responds well to “red widget” email blasts, then let’s make sure we target them specifically with “red widget” type of offers.

Though mining this information during the process of harvesting an e-mail address sometimes requires a subtle approach. Things like survey quizzes, signing up for newsletter subscriptions, and purchase history can all be used to generate the data points needed to segment a list for a more targeting e-mail marketing campaign.

Regular Engagement Improves Targeting Strategies

Email marketing engagement is essentially a tool that helps measure how your subscribed contacts have been interacting with your targeted email campaign. Ideally, you want to examine their activity compared to how long they have been in your audience. You can then use this information to classify them on an engagement scale. You can break this information down further into who is clicking through and reading on a daily or weekly level.

Monitoring engagement gives you a good metric to assess who is more or less likely to convert. It’s also a great way to assess customer loyalty. You can improve regular engagement rates by creating dynamic storytelling content and using strong subject lines that are rich with keywords readers would potentially use in a search engine. Personalization and using segmented e-mail lists will also help increase conversion rates, as they make the e-mail feel like it’s less of a sterile “Blast.”

Use Welcome Series Automation To Capitalize On Sign Up Momentum

With a lot of e-commerce sites, most new sales come from new leads. A Welcome Series is a sequence of emails that are automatically sending people after they sign up to be on your email list. It is essentially a way to say “Hello” to a potential new customer, as it helps you capitalize on “Sign-up momentum.”

When someone signs up for your subscription offer, newsletter, or over e-mail marketing vehicle, they are already stating that they are interested. Your Welcome Series then becomes a vehicle for increasing awareness about your product line, your business principles, and other attractive aspects of your company. The overarching goal is to help convert questioning readers into satisfied customers.

Automated Welcome Series e-mails can also help reduce problems like cart abandonment. Many new customers will shop through your site checking out what you have to offer and noting the price. There is then the risk that they will bounce to a competitor’s site to compare prices and other things like shipping rates. Setting up automated Welcome Series messages that are spaced out in time keeps your product line in their mind and encourages them to come back and complete the purchase in their cart or convert their wish list into a sale.