6 Email Marketing Tips That Will Actually Make a Difference

Let’s not mince words: Email is a must!

It’s got one of the best ROIs of any digital marketing tactic (if not the best). It’s affordable, easy to manage, and optimize. Pretty much everyone, from New York subway singers to goat herders in Angola, check their email.

In January of this year, the researchers at Marketing Sherpa asked 2,057 American adults “in which of the following ways, if any, would you prefer companies to communicate with you?” Seventy-two percent of the respondents said they preferred email.

The second most-preferred way to hear from companies was postal mail, at 48 percent. What about hearing from marketers on social media? It was found that only 17 percent of people want commercial messages through social media sites.

The following are some email marketing tips to help you get started:

1. Just start.

Email is many things, but it’s not a fast fix. While you could buy an email list to get started, no good email marketer recommends purchasing lists. Why? Buying a list will get you terrible results, blow most of your budget, and lead you back to where you are now. You’ve got to build your own list.

Fortunately, this really isn’t so hard. There are dozens of ways to build a list, and even more tools to do it with. For example, the free tool SumoMe works with WordPress and other publishing platforms, as well as with all the major email service providers. It’s an all-in-one list builder that lets you create:

• Opt-in boxes
• Lightboxes (a.k.a., popups.)
• Sliders
• Feature boxes

An opt-in box is the form people fill out to opt-in to receive what is being offered. Usually it’s got a name field, and an email field, plus a submit button.

A lightbox has an opt-in box in it, but it pops up and grays out the background. Yes, these can be annoying, but they’ve also earned some small business owners up to a 1375 percent increase in opt-ins.

This is an example of a lightbox. Lightboxes are also called pop-ups and interstitials.

Another way to get more email addresses is with a slider. Sliders are like lightboxes, but they slide in after the user has scrolled down the page a bit. If you just can’t tolerate a lightbox, a slider is a good alternative.

The last option is a feature box. This is an opt-in box that’s on the home page of your site, right above the scroll line, usually taking up the full width of the screen. After lightboxes, feature boxes typically get more opt-ins.

2. Track your results.

Management icon Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets improved.” This statement also applies to email marketing.

Your email service provider can give you information on how to find and interpret your email marketing reports. If you’re a Google Analytics enthusiast (or your webmaster is), look into using UTM codes in your emails to track click-by-click actions after people get to your site.

Look for what is working best for you; sometimes just dropping the bottom 20 percent of results is the easiest path to big improvements.

3. Send a welcome email.

This is an email you send after a subscriber has finished the opt-in process. It “welcomes” them to your list.

That welcome email (or series of welcome emails) will get more clicks, opens, and engagement than any other email you will ever send that subscriber. The welcome email is kind of your 15 minutes of fame with each new subscriber. Don’t blow it.

Most small businesses, however, do blow it by never sending a welcome email, missing a huge opportunity.

Use a welcome email to tell your subscribers:

• What kind of content to expect in your emails
• How often to expect your emails
• How to connect with you on social media
• Basic information about your store, business, or services that they should know

Also consider pointing them to the most popular content on your site, or to a few of your best-selling products.

4. Personalize.

Personalization gets subscribers’ attention. Have you already been collecting peoples’ names along with their email addresses? If so, it’s time to step up your game and start testing personalized emails, even if it’s only someone’s first name in the subject line.

Just don’t forget to check your emails before you send them. Here’s an example of a failed email:

5. Make your emails mobile friendly.

Seventy-five percent of mobile email users will unsubscribe from an email list if the emails don’t look good on their devices.

Making your emails mobile-friendly isn’t that hard, fortunately. Here are the basics:

• Use a single column design.
• Make body type at least 16-point font size.
• Make headlines at least 22-point font size.
• Make calls to action and button big–44 pixels wide and tall, plus 10 pixels on all sides (to make room for misclicks and clumsy thumbs).
• Use preheader text that describes your email and entices the reader to open.
• Short subject lines of about 35 characters are best.

Here are two email messages viewed on an iPhone 6 (the most widely used device for mobile email opens):

6. Don’t overmail.

Want to know the number one reason people unsubscribe from email lists? It’s because they get too many emails.

Here’s proof of that from a survey TechnologyAdvice Research conducted in March of this year. The survey asked 472 U.S. adults, “For what reasons have you marked a business' emails as spam?” This is how people answered:

So how much is “too often?” Good question. Here’s another study that may answer that.

Earlier this year, Marketing Sherpa asked people how often they wanted to get emails. As you can see below, weekly emails won out, but if that’s too much, sending monthly emails is a good start.