7 starter strategies to up your email game

A recent email marketing report found that 37% of brands are increasing their email budget. This is good news for email marketers everywhere—and for those in the C-suite—because even after all this time, email’s ROI continues to prove itself.

But before you also increase your email budget, you’ll want to be sure you have the right strategies in place. These seven starter strategies are my favorites to focus on no matter what industry you’re in.

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start): When your customer sees your email in their inbox, everything that happens next relies solely on the subject line.

It should grab their attention without begging for it.

It should spark curiosity while being clear.

It sometimes feels like it’s hard to get right (hello A/B testing), and that’s why it’s crucial to understand who your audience is and what your goals are for this one single email. Your audience’s demographics and psychographics come into play here, so keep that in mind when writing a subject line that will resonate with them.

And, depending on your goals, you’ll want the subject line to reflect them, too. Are you trying to sell something? Do you have an exciting announcement? Are you educating them? Are you inviting them to an event?

Bottom line: Get to the point, make it fun and keep it on brand.

In my eight years of email marketing, I’ve never had a different response to this other than “It depends.” But after realizing that’s not anyone’s favorite answer, I’ve also learned to follow it up with “Ideally one.”

At DS+CO, we used to send out a monthly email roundup. We shared news, announcements, awards and articles. And we saw great results—open and click rates were high and subscribers looked forward to it. But we’re here to provoke progress, so why not see if we can do even better? We shifted to a weekly email that focuses on one piece of content and decreases the number of CTAs. As expected, we saw an increase in open and click rates. But to me, the real win was showing up in our subscribers’ inbox more consistently.

Now, in some cases, a roundup makes sense. One of our clients hosts a big event each April, so the emails leading up to that share “know before you go” information—things like the schedule, who’s attending, concession locations, where to buy merch, ticket info and more. There are a lot of little things we want our attendees to know, but we don’t want to bombard them with 10 emails in one week. So wrapping some of this information into one email makes sense. Subscribers can choose which actions to take based on what they need and want.

As a general rule, keep your email short, with 1-3 sections. There are exceptions, but more on that later.

This one’s mainly for all my e-commerce marketers out there. If your customers go through the checkout process but get cold feet and leave just before paying, they’ve abandoned their cart. You can hope they remember or decide to come back, but the better option is to help them get there.

Most e-commerce platforms have the built-in ability to send simple automated email campaigns based on a trigger, like leaving before completing checkout. The abandoned cart email (or campaign if you want to get ever more strategic with it) is always one of the top emails opened. Even when a consumer knows they left, they can’t help but open these emails to see what’s inside. And on that note, give them a discount and watch your conversion rate increase.

These emails are great for the customer experience. They can simply click on the CTA and continue where they left off. They’re personalized, quick to create and automated so they do the work for you.

And again. Segmentation matters to your subscribers. It’s time to get your database organized and group your subscribers based on their actions and behaviors. Things like:

• Purchaser or non-purchasers
• Demographics (age, location, income, industry, job role, etc.)
• Psychographics (values, influences, interests, motivations)
• Behavioral (engagement with your website, emails, social media, customer service and offerings)

This is a great place to start, and if you haven’t started this journey yet, now is the time. Once your segmentation rules are in place, it gets easier to market yourself to your audience.

I can almost guarantee you’ll see an increase in open rates and click rates, along with what we’re all really here for: conversion rates.

This might be my favorite tip.

Yet I don’t see it being followed as best practice by many brands.

And it doesn’t just apply to email. This strategy can and should be used for other channels, too: social media, website, blogs, one-sheeters, how-to guides and more.

Format your email copy like I’ve formatted it here under tip #5.

Short and simple. Left to right. One or two sentences per line.

Because that’s how people read. And when they see a long email with chunks of text, they feel overwhelmed and don’t read at all.

So while your subject line may have been great (thanks, tip #1!), they didn’t click your email because it felt like it would take too much time to get to the point.

We’ve already discussed the abandoned cart email, but there’s a whole automated email world out there ready for you to discover.

I love that you can spend time up front to create and write a series of emails—whether it’s just three or 10+—and then set it and forget it. (Well, forget for a while, at least. Be sure you come back to look at how it’s going and optimize as needed!)

Here are a few of my favorites:

• New-subscriber welcome series: Triggered as soon as someone subscribes, welcomes them to your world, educates them, and gives easy actions to take as they get to know your brand and offering.
  
  
• New-customer welcome series: Begins when a customer purchases your offering. These emails can be specific to that product or service, suggest additional offerings that make sense for the customer, and educate them on how it works or what they’ll accomplish with it.
  
  
• Engaged subscriber series: This is based on your lead scoring model. When a contact interacts with your content regularly, they’ll achieve this engaged status. From there, they should receive more bottom-of-the-funnel content and communications relevant to their actions.
  
  
• Re-engagement series: Typically triggered when a contact doesn’t interact with your content for six months. First, you’ll want to try re-engaging them with high-quality, relevant content or an exclusive offer. Based on their actions, you’ll re-engage them or you’ll send a few additional emails asking if they’re still interested in receiving content from you.

These are some of the basics, and they work. There are quite a few others that I love, but I always start with these as a foundation.

I’ll end on another one I don’t think is thought about often enough.

Before you send emails, there has to be an email strategy discussion, right? Take this opportunity to discuss who the email is coming from and the overall tone of voice.

Is it the collective “we” at your company? Is it the CEO? Different people each time?

It needs to make sense for your brand and, in most cases, it depends on who the face of your company is and what type of content you’re communicating about.

This is important for how your target audience perceives your brand purpose, your offerings and what it’s like working with you. It’s evident through the tone of voice, the person who signs off the email, and the “From” name and email address. It all needs to work together and be consistent.

Remember when I shared strategy #2 with you about CTAs and email length? I said generally you should keep your email short. But when it comes from a person and not a brand, I think it’s OK for it to be longer, as long as you’re providing value (AKA education or entertainment).

And to that point, I’ve been leaning toward emails being from a person more and more over the past few years. People are smart—they know a brand can’t write an email. They know someone wrote it, and in a time when transparency matters more than ever, why not tell them who it’s really from?

What’s your favorite email strategy I’ve shared today? I’d truly love to know. You can always chat with us on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn.

And when you’re ready to take your email marketing to the next level, email me at emma_alexander@dixonschwabl.com or send us a message here.