The Best Email Marketing Tips for Creating Successful Campaigns

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Haven’t you heard? Email marketing is dead.

At least that’s what plenty of marketers will try to feed you. If you take a look at the statistics, you’ll quickly find out that this claim couldn’t be further from the truth.

More than 3.9 billion people around the world use email every day. This is a massive pool of potential leads that you can capture and convert. As for whether email marketing is a fruitful investment, you should consider the fact that for every $1 that you spend, email generates $38. What we’re looking at is an impressive 3,800% return on investment.

People who claim that email marketing is bereft of life should ask themselves what they’re doing wrong. Maybe they haven’t been using the right email marketing tips and techniques. It could also be that they just haven’t been applying these practices the right way.

Email marketing comes with many benefits when done right. It’s one of the best ways to connect with prospects, convert them into customers, and create strong relationships that can last for years. To save you from the clutches of those who want to bury email marketing alive, we’re going to help you learn some of the best email marketing tips for creating highly successful campaigns. The practices we’re going to cover are:

1. Creating and managing highly targeted contact lists

2. Personalizing your emails

3. Focusing on engagement

4. Paying special attention to subject lines and preheaders

5. Creating concise and properly structured emails

6. Designing compelling and contextual CTAs

7. Ensuring that your emails don’t get labeled as spam

8. Previewing your emails

9. Testing your emails

10. Using marketing automation tools

Creating and Managing Highly Targeted Contact Lists

For your campaign to generate the best possible results, you need a highly targeted list of recipients. You should create segmented groups based on factors such as:

Segmentation enables you to optimize your marketing campaign for every group of recipients so that you can provide them with highly relevant information. 

You should grow your contact list regularly. Aside from actively sending email campaigns, you can use tools that will enable you to generate leads passively. Our chatbot solution can help you in that regard. Implement it into your website so that it can answer your visitors’ most frequent questions or point them in the direction of someone in your company who can. It should ask for their names and email addresses in return, which will provide you with a steady stream of leads.

You need to inspect your lists often to ensure that all email addresses still belong to existing accounts. You’ll want to keep your overall deliverability at an optimal rate and make sure you’re not emailing a bunch of spam traps that can tarnish your IP reputation.

Personalizing Your Emails

Aside from creating highly targeted content for segmented groups of contacts, you should add personal elements to your emails whenever it’s appropriate. A lot of email marketing software enables you to extract personal details from contact lists and insert them into emails via shortcodes or automated personalization features. You can include details such as any contact’s:

• Name

• Job title

• Industry

• Location

• Company

This level of personalization is crucial because it caters to your recipients’ need to be treated as individuals valuable to your business. Most people prefer having the impression that they’re communicating with a human being rather than AI. 

Focusing on Engagement

The primary goal of your email marketing campaign may be to increase sales, but you should keep in mind that many of your subscribers are not your customers yet. About 50% of qualified leads on your contact list aren’t ready to buy from you. Many of them subscribed for news and updates, and need to be primed for a sales pitch. You need to engage them through a sequence of emails and work on building a strong customer relationship.

Find out what your recipients’ interests are and provide relevant and valuable content. Create a customer journey that your prospects will appreciate, helping them learn more about your company before deciding that they want to do business with you. Customer engagement is essential for earning their trust and loyalty.

Paying Special Attention to Subject Lines and Preheaders

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The email subject line is crucial for leaving a strong first impression. It’s the first line of text that your recipients see, next to your sender name and preheader. The way it works is like an enticing story title — it affects the person’s decision whether they want to read the story at all. Approximately 35% of all email opens can be attributed to the recipients’ impression of the subject line. You can try different styles, such as:

• Witty

• Direct

• Shocking

• Mysterious

Test different approaches and see what works best for your target audience.

Most email clients show preheader texts next to the subject lines. Use this section to improve the chances of your emails getting opened. If you don’t set it up manually, it will show the first line of your email’s text. A much better solution is to come up with a preheader that complements the subject line. Here are a couple of examples:

Don’t neglect your sender name. Using a person’s name can be both a good and bad practice. The name should be relevant to the brand and used consistently. This way, your recipients will appreciate feeling like the email was sent by a human being that they can relate to. If your name is unfamiliar to them, it should be followed by the company name. 

The company name alone works well, but you can improve engagement through relevancy — by using something like the title of the particular newsletter.

Creating Concise and Properly Structured Emails

Most recipients prefer short and concise emails because they have an apparent focus. Reading walls of text is generally seen as a waste of time. Lengthy copies are also seen as red flags by certain email providers’ spam filters. 

You should write your emails like you’re talking to someone in person. If you’ve got a lot of information to present, you need to structure your message to make it digestible. Keep in mind that many recipients scan emails for valuable information. 

Break the text into shorter paragraphs, making the keywords and crucial phrases stand out. Lists and bullet points make certain pieces of information easier to absorb. If your email contains images, don’t overuse them. They can segment and complement the content, but they shouldn’t contain key information. Some email providers don’t allow images, so the recipient might overlook fundamental aspects of your email, even if you introduce alt text. 

Designing Compelling and Contextual CTAs

If you want to drive your prospects to convert, you have to pay special attention to your CTAs. Every call-to-action needs to be attention-grabbing and compel the recipient to perform the action your email revolves around. You might want your contacts to:

• Go to your website

• Subscribe to your mailing list

• Purchase a product or service

• Go to your blog and check out your content

The CTA has to stand out from the rest of your content. As we’ve stated before, people tend to skim emails for valuable information, so the CTA should be easy to spot. You can achieve this with the proper:

1. Size

2. Color

3. Placement 

The average CTA is 47.9 pixels tall with the font size of at least 16px. You should use this information as a reference and not a prescription. The size of your CTA should fit your design and your audience’s preferences. This is why you should test different versions until you get it right. 

Colors can affect the way your recipients act, feel, and think. If you design a red CTA, it can incite a sense of urgency and excitement. To achieve the optimal effect, contrast it with the rest of the email’s design.

Many marketers will tell you that the best practice is to put the CTA above the fold. This doesn’t mean that it’ll work with your design and audience. The CTA should follow the general flow of the email. It mustn’t be too aggressive because your intentions will come off as pushy. If your content has a narrative, the CTA should come as a natural conclusion.

Keep in mind that some email clients won’t show your CTAs properly, so make sure to support them with alt text.

Ensuring That Your Emails Don’t Get Labeled as Spam

Creating a compelling email marketing campaign won’t matter much if it never reaches your recipients’ inboxes. You must ensure that your emails don’t get labeled as spam by your contacts or their email clients.

One of the most important practices is to abide by the rules governed by laws such as the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act. This includes:

1. Not using misleading information in your header

2. Avoiding deceptive subject lines

3. Making it apparent that your message is an ad

4. Providing your recipients with your physical address

5. Explaining how to unsubscribe from your mailing list in clear detail

6. Processing opt-in request in no more than 30 days

7. Ensuring that anyone who handles marketing on your behalf abides by the same rules

There are many different reasons why your recipients might label your emails as spam, and you can’t expect to prevent them all. You can ensure that your emails are as little spammy as possible. Here are some of the practices you should follow:

• Don’t use subject lines that are clickbaity, overly vague, or written in all caps

• Ensure that your HTML elements are formatted properly

• Don’t overuse images

• Be honest about who you are and stay true to your promises

Your emails will also be labeled as spam if you send too many at a time. Avoid bulk sending thousands of emails simultaneously and determine the best timing for your email blasts.

Previewing Your Emails

Once you’ve created your email campaign, make sure to double-check everything before you start sending it to your contacts. Verify all the links and see whether the personalization shortcodes work properly. 

You need to optimize your email for different browsers, and your recipients should be able to view it no matter what device they are using. Studies have shown that 78% of all email opens happen on mobile devices, so you have to use a responsive design. There are email marketing tools that enable you to preview what your email looks like in different email clients. 

Testing Your Emails

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The only way to know which aspects of your emails work the best is if you test them. Marketers most commonly use the following two types of tests:

1. A/B testing

2. Multivariate testing

A/B Testing

A/B testing is done by selecting two groups of contacts and sending them two versions of your email. The goal is to change a single aspect and see which variant works better with the test audience. You can test a wide range of elements, such as images, headlines, preheaders, subject lines, text layouts, personalization features, etc. 

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing focuses on finding the combinations of elements that perform the best. You can test different aspects of an element, such as the text, color, and positioning of a CTA. You can also see how different variations of elements work together, like your preheader, sender name, and subject line.

When performing these tests, you should determine what constitutes success. Depending on what you want to improve, you can focus on the:

• Open rate

• Bounce rate

• Conversion rate

• Clickthrough rate

• Unsubscription rate

Using Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation is crucial for every email marketing campaign. It enables you to streamline the majority of the marketing processes. This includes lead generation, list segmentation, email personalization, and other crucial aspects. Once you set most of the tasks on autopilot, you can focus on crafting eye-catching CTAs, compelling subject lines, enticing email designs, and attention-grabbing copies.

You’re in luck because we at Sell SaaS have got a solution for you. Our software bundle consists of a range of marketing tools that can improve your lead generation and outreach efforts. 

Our email campaign creator is a handy autoresponder tool that can help you create top-notch email and newsletter campaigns. You can do this in its easy-to-use online editor. Once you’ve set your emails up, you can schedule them or set up triggers for when they’re going to be sent. The tool also provides a tracking feature, enabling you to determine the deliverability rates of your email campaigns.

Other Tools That Can Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts

Take a look at some of our other tools that can complement your email marketing campaign:

Signing up for any of our products provides you with unlimited access to their features.

What makes our offer particularly attractive is the white-labeling part of the deal. You can brand and resell our tools at a price you set. 

You don’t have to pay anything to sign up and become our partner. Your only obligation is to share a percentage of the revenue with us. Our starting share is 40%, but if your sales are successful, you can earn up to 80%.

What are you waiting for? Sign up here and create an additional stream of revenue with your SaaS business today!