We have said this and we’ll say it again, email rocks! One of the biggest gifts of the digital age, email has aged like fine wine. It has only gotten better with time. The ROI that it gives is still one of the best among all digital marketing tools and hence needs to be in focus for any marketer. You may notice that email spam has in fact seen a dramatic increase over the years and this is purely due to the success rate it can achieve. As a digital marketer, that should not worry you at all because today, email is still the most trustworthy means of communication.
Latest trend in email marketing-Priority inbox
This is one major step that email providers and clients have incorporated in the past year with regards to prioritizing email senders and eliminating spam to a certain extent. The world’s largest email provider for personal use, Gmail, initiated this feature onto their inboxes. Today, over 24% of Gmail users utilize the liberating feature of Priority inbox. Clearly, the stakes have been raised. It requires a solid strategy to get into email inboxes. It’s time to reinvent the wheel!
HTML or plain text
HTML seems to be the overwhelming winner here. There are a couple of reasons for this. Emails sent with pictures have a distinct possibility of increasing readership, simply because visual is in. Another important factor is that these heavy emails have adapted to increased download speeds and are accessible on various gadgets including smart phones. We feel it is a smart move to use a mix of both.
Readability
More and more people are dedicating time towards reading emails. This means that your email copy needs to be crisp, interesting and valid to the reader. Copy is as important as the various steps that you need to adhere to so that you reach the inbox such as negotiating spam filters and so on.
It’s smart to optimize for smart phones
Smart phones have become synonymous with business users today, just the way laptops were, a decade ago. You need to optimize your email in such a way that it is viewable on all types of devices, and when we say all, we mean it. Test your email on different interfaces and see how they react.
Subject lines are important — always
One fact about email marketing that will never change is the immense importance that subject lines have. Derive a subject line that has been subject to persona-based data, verb usage and extreme degrees of personalization. This is email war, might as well go all in!
Finally, split test your emails till they collapse in a heap. Go through the results with a fine comb, understand what works and what doesn’t for the particular demographic and schedule according to their convenience. Email can really bring in the money, all you need to do is keep yourself updated and ensure that all points are ticked off.
