Email Marketing Hacks That Will Help You Dominate Your Customers Inbox

Email marketing can be an efficient and orthodox form of marketing campaign. This form, coupled with strategic planning can prove to be fruitful for marketing managers who seeks to boast around that ‘Best employee of the year’ badge. Like a coin, email marketing is too bilateral in nature. Either it can help achieve great marketing goals set by marketing chiefs or it could disappoint your boss a tidbit.

So, marketing directors may often ask this question: what could be some great email marketing strategies to ensure that could help build a larger customer base? We call these methods are termed ‘hacks’ as they can greatly aid in email campaigning and provided they are intelligently used could take the Email marketing game to the next level.

Creating a consistent Brand Identity

It is quite unlikely that one can demarcate email marketing strategy from any strategy regarding branding, messaging and other forms of content. Hence, it is evident that this entails building an image of a business which includes style, tone of communication, the logo and overall look (especially if you are a registered business/company) which should be in line with the composition of emails.

For instance, if the logo of an elite class stylist salon is embedded in the middle of its newsletter and articles, your email marketing director should incorporate this little detail so that customers know what to expect. This would enable customers to perceive the business as consistent.

Secondly, it is more than obvious that any business eventually thrives because of its products. If the product is mediocre and lacks real quality, no customer would only just subscribe to the email service just for the heck of it. This means after a certain period of time either those subscribed will keep receiving the emails or they will unsubscribe eventually seeing that they receive no incentive (such as a mere free goodie) for reading the emails. Yep, it is a cruel world.

Collect addresses anywhere and everywhere

The first step to having a large base of customers is to have a large accumulation of addresses to which you can direct the emails towards. If a business is doing things right it should already have an email subscription sign-up form embedded in their website. This could involve an interesting tagline which would encourage customers to pay heed to the subscription pop-up box and sign up. Also, we know that the emergence of social media has marked the beginning of a great aeon of technology.

Social sites such as Facebook and Twitter help take businesses to a whole new level in terms of marketing. MailChimp, Sign up Anywhere, Onspotsocial are amongst the many hundreds of websites which lets us embed free email collection forms in the form of apps on Facebook. With a majority of individuals having a social networking account such as Facebook and Twitter, emails are collected with ease.

Talk to the right audience

It would be a grave misconception of a business thinking that hitting the send button to thousands of subscribers is a good idea. Yes, to gain someone’s attention is difficult. More than that it is not free at all, it is earned over time. Second comes trust. Suppose you have to bake brownies for a friend. What is one ingredient you would put which binds the flour and cocoa/ chocolate? Eggs. Here, the word RELEVANCE is equal to THIS one vital ingredient. Relevance binds together the vital elements of trust and attention which every marketing manager would crave for.

Every relevant email and one consecutively followed will grasp the customer’s attention. However, irrelevant email spamming provides no coherent reasoning why any customer should bear with a business sending them irrelevant emails. Customers see it as spamming. Attention can be gained over time and so can trust, but if trust is based on a shaky foundation the attention becomes scarce too. Trust is fragile.

Hence, directing relevant emails to the right audience could help secure their trust and attention. A helpful strategy of ‘Email forking’ automatically categorizes subscribers to new email lists which are more specific to their interests for instance if someone clicks on ‘Belts’, emails specific to that category will be re-targeted.

Offer loyalty with incentives

Always give a reason for customers to take that step of subscribing to emails. Let’s be realistic. Incentives such as free printable discount coupons are a great incentive for customers. Freebies such as free E-books which offer product samples in the form of free brochures are always an instant hit.

Send a Few impactful emails

“Half a loaf is better than no bread”. This expression proves true in the field of email marketing also. In order to do this, we must grasp a few ideas which could enable this: Proof-reading, building customer’s curiosity and sending other people’s content.

The importance of proof-reading is two-fold and cannot be stressed enough. Often a times the proof-reading stage is neglected which could lead to a vital difference between an increase in sales and readers un-subscribing en masse.

Curiosity is the key to actively engage customers with the reading. This can overhaul the email marketing campaign for the better. One astute way coming from a brilliant Email marketing person would be to compose emails which ask a lot of questions.

A compelling question can give astounding results.

Sending someone else’s content may show that you genuinely care about your customer’s interests. This could not only enable you to provide great quality content (eg; from popular blogs, tumblr etc) but also would save time. Even Marketing Department Directors seldom have spare time to write great content also which the customers enjoy reading.

Introduce yourself with a catchy subject line

Subject lines could be short but must be irresistible. “Hey” has been proved to be an excellent subject line. The Obama Campaign raised a massive $690 million online so obviously, it did wonders afterall. Brevity can be quite impactful and piquing the reader’s curiosity is of immense importance through a attention-grabbing subject line because this is what hooks the reader into reading rest of the email.

Brainstorm viral ideas

This idea could be a vital factor in arousing the reader’s interest. Naturally when an individual enjoys reading some content it has a fair chance of going viral. Jonah Berger, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School confirms through his research that useful content that evoke high arousal emotions (anger, pain, fear loss, laughter, sadness etc) gets shared the most). Ideas are twice as likely to get shared if they arouse human emotions as compared to content write-ups that don’t.

Personalize, personalize, personalize!

Sending an email from a real person offers the opportunity for readers to reply to emails. When they receive an email from Dan Joe, Head of your company, they will definitely see it as a great user experience and will be impressed. A business should employ a few persons who can draft emails in a human-like tone and could also proof-read thereafter. Personalizing emails could greatly boost up customer interaction. According to Hubspot, companies between 1 to 10 employees overall contribute to open click rates of around 35% while companies employing 26 to almost 200 earn a slightly lower rate of 32%. Using the first name when addressing emails is indeed the first small step to personalizing emails from a batch company. Also, using your personal name or company name as the ‘From’ address.

It is evident that incorporating these Email Marketing Hacks can contribute to a boost in email click rates. These hacks, if implemented properly with due diligence can help achieve a positive visible change in the overall sales of a company. There are many other ‘hacks’ which businesses can incorporate in order to achieve their desired objectives.