Email marketing is an effective way to get a lot of information to your audience in a format they are familiar with. The problem is that predictable marketing emails that have earmarks such as an overly formal subject line are getting ignored. One way to increase the interaction you have with your audience is to find ways to personalize your emails without making it look patronizing. There are plenty of ways to do this, and they can all be very effective at increasing your email success rates.

Include Their Name

If you include your recipient's name in the subject line and a couple of times in the content, then you are going to pique their interest and get more emails read. Once again, this move can seem patronizing if you put the name in too often. But it can be extremely effective if done in moderation.

Include Other Personal Information

The point of personalizing emails is not necessarily to make the reader believe that you sat down and wrote the email. In most cases, your readers are going to assume that they are getting some sort of marketing email piece. But if you include more than just their name, then you will make them feel more engaged with the content.

For example, setting up your email template so it includes mentions of the recipient's company, the street the office is on, and maybe a personal bit that can be applied to every recipient would help add more appeal to your emails.

Diversify Templates Based On Funnel Position

One mistake most companies make is sending out the same message to every prospect or customer. A prospect who you have had several conversations with and is higher up in your funnel is not going to be affected by an email designed for people who are new to your company. You need to have a different template for each level of your funnel and engage prospects in a manner that will get them interested in what you have to say.

Try Local Images

If your marketing piece lends to the idea of using local images, then that can help to engage your audience further. For example, emails sent to Buffalo prospects would get a Buffalo-related picture while the same content sent to Boston prospects would get a Boston-related image. A visual tag that your prospects will recognize can help to increase the likelihood that they will read your content.

Try A Variety Of Calls To Action

When you create different templates for different positions in your sales funnel, then you are adding strength to your content. But you can also change up the calls for action in all of your templates and find out which types of calls are more effective. You should always be experimenting with your emails to see what type of content is most effective, and changing up calls to action is a good idea.

Email marketing is effective when you take the time to try and make a connection with your audience. Personalizing emails is one of the more effective ways to get your audience interested in your emails and increasing the rate at which your emails get read.

Why do companies use newsletters and what makes a newsletter effective? There are many ways to effectively use newsletters, but the most recent trend is to get more clicks for email marketing by including a newsletter. When a newsletter is effective, it can deliver important product information and help support an existing customer base. The best way to determine what makes a newsletter effective is to check out some of the coolest newsletters in use today and see what makes them so effective.

InVision

InVision is a website design company that has a very popular newsletter it circulates through email. While it makes sense that a design company would have a popular newsletter, it is not always a given that design professionals know what the public wants to see or read. With InVision, their newsletter is a perfect balance of eye-catching graphics and useful content. Instead of trying to use its newsletter to sell to customers, InVision uses their newsletter to educate customers and the response has been very positive.

Medium

The idea that a free blog platform could challenge Blogger for market supremacy seemed far-fetched until Medium launched in 2012. Since then, Medium has steadily grown in popularity and a lot of that has to do with its newsletter. The Medium newsletter is very straightforward in its design, which makes it easy to read. The uniform use of color and the way that content is separated by dividing lines helps to make this newsletter interesting and simple to utilize.

Quora

Quora is a brand that has become famous for its question and answer format that attempts to answer any question a user may have. While Quora's web offerings seem somewhat blocky and unsophisticated, its newsletter has been drawing a lot of attention. When your business is answering questions, you tend to be able to collect a lot of interesting content each week. Quora goes out of its way to include the best content from the week in a simplified newsletter format that is not cluttered by ads. Some users prefer Quora's newsletter to the website itself.

Yelp

Yelp has become one of the default websites people go to when they need information on places to eat and stay. Yelp's newsletter is popular because it targets specific audiences and delivers information that would be interesting to those audiences. For example, consumers in the New York City area get information specific to interesting restaurants in and around the Big Apple. Because Yelp's business is designed to deliver geographically specific information, it makes sense that its newsletter would do the same thing.

Email marketing is still a very effective tool for a business to maintain quality contact with its customer base and target audience. Newsletters are popular with email marketing campaigns because a good newsletter will significantly increase the number of clicks an email campaign gets. If you want to see what a good newsletter looks like, you need to start subscribing to newsletters that interest you. It is always a good idea to subscribe to the competition's newsletter to see what they are doing to attract your customer base, but you should also check out newsletters in other industries to get ideas on how you can improve your email marketing efforts.

A Click-To-Open (CTO) rate is the percentage of people who open a marketing email after they have received it. Reputable digital marketing companies only send emails to people who have opted-in to receive marketing pieces, but opting-in to getting marketing emails does not bind a recipient to open those messages. If you want to increase your CTO rate, then there are a few processes you can follow or recommend to your digital marketing agency.

Try Sending It Again

Over and over again, marketing researchers are finding that simply resending a marketing email to the same recipient who did not open it the first time gets the email opened the second time. Some researchers found that more that 50 percent of resent emails that were not opened originally get opened the second time. Sometimes researchers changed the subject line and resent the same content which got results as well, but it has been proven that resending marketing emails works.

Target Your Lists

If your demographic is male smartphone users, then you might decide to send out a large group of emails to that general target audience. The problem is that smartphone users ages 18 to 30 have different priorities than smartphone users ages 31 to 50. You need to separate out your target audience and create content that appeals to each sub-set of recipients. After some testing, you will discover how to speak to each segment of your audience and increase your CTO rate.

Avoid Filters

These days, just about everyone has a spam filter on their email service. If the individual recipient does not have a filter, then their email service provider has one for them. If you want your messages to get opened more often, then you have to increase their chances of getting past the spam filters. You do that by avoiding spam-triggering words and phrases such as:

• No credit check
• FDA approved
• Free offer
• Limited time
• MLM
• Make money now

Your individual industry will have its own list of spam triggers that you will need to discover and then avoid if you want your messages to get through.

One Message Per Email Blast

If you are trying to cram too much information into one email, then your subject line is going to be confusing. If you want to increase your CTO rates, then you need to have one message per marketing email that allows you to write a very compelling subject line.

Don't Use Misleading Subject Lines

If you try to increase your CTO rate by using misleading subject lines, then you might see some initial success that reinforces your decision. But as your audience loses trust in your company, your CTO rates will plummet and it will take a long time for them to recover. Misleading subject lines in marketing emails makes people associate your company with scammers. Once you attach that reputation to yourself, you have created an uphill climb to credibility that might be impossible to achieve.

Your marketing emails are only effective if your target audience opens and reads them. Professional digital marketing experts spend time experimenting with different email approaches to find the ones that work. While you are experimenting with your emails, it is important to avoid doing anything that could compromise the reputation of your company and damage any future email campaigns.

The short answer is, yes, but only if you are doing it right. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, 91% of adults in the U.S. like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. In order to effectively conduct an email marketing campaign, you must be mindful of the consumer’s wants. The last thing you want is for your consumer to consider themselves being spammed by your business and click the unsubscribe button. In that situation, not only have you lost an email subscriber, but you’ve also tainted your image a little in the consumer’s eyes: you became an annoyance rather than a source of great products/services and great deals.

Content & Style of the Email

Are your emails bland and boring or are they over-the-top and obnoxious? Neither is a good look. Your subject line is the first thing subscribers see so it needs to be attention-grabbing and convince the user to open it. A subject line that uses humor or provides something consumers want (like a great deal) is enticing and more likely to be opened than a dull subject line.

Technology has progressed so far today that marketers can personalize emails to the point of fine segmentation and retargeting. Give your emails a personalized tone by using the consumer’s name and suggesting products similar to products they had purchased or informing them of a deal that relates to categories of their previous purchases.

To Who & How Often

Make sure your email campaign at least has the potential for a return on investment by carefully keeping track of who is in the recipient list. Making sure your emails land in the inbox of people who are still viable customers of your company is especially important. Today’s lead generation software is capable of checking your email lists for you for outdated information and can even recommend updates. Dig online and determine which software is best for you and your company.

Who you are emailing is almost as important as how often you are emailing. True, subscribers provide their email for the sole purpose of receiving emails from your business, but that doesn’t mean they want those emails all day every day. The rule of quality is better than quantity reigns supreme in the world of emails. Be sure to send your subscribers relevant information to them as well as something enticing such as info about promotions or exclusive coupons. Do not bombard them with upfront messages tooting your own business’s horn; that is simply not what consumers are interested in and you will be marked as spam sooner rather than later.

Test & Results

Do you know your customers? What are the click rates and unsubscribe rates? What emails aren’t pulling their fair share and why are they less effective than others? These questions can be answered with diligent monitoring. Understanding what types of emails resonate best with consumers will go a long way towards perfecting each and every marketing campaign and generating a healthy ROI.

If your company is still paying a digital agency to blast out tens of thousands of emails based on a geographic location using the same content, then you are wasting your money. Big data has allowed digital marketing experts to gain insights into consumer trends that had not been available in the past, and all of that information is helping to re-shape the way email marketing is used. It is still smart to use email marketing to reach your audience, but you need to stay up to date on the evolution of email marketing if you want to get a strong return on investment.

The Days of Mass Email Blasts are Over

The idea that one email can be sent to hundreds of thousands of people at the same time and get results now seems ludicrous to digital marketing experts. Email marketing today is done on a much smaller scale, but it is done to qualified audiences of potential consumers who are more apt to be interested in the material that is being sent to them. Email campaigns are segmented in a variety of ways and different emails are being designed to appeal directly to the specific audience that will be receiving them

Using the Sales Funnel as a Guide

A sales professional would never use the same pitch to customers at different points in the sales funnel, and email marketing has finally caught on to that idea. The three primary points of a sales funnel are the point where the prospect shows interest, the point where the prospect decides on what they want, and the point where the prospect takes action in executing a transaction. A customer at the interest stage is not going to have the same requirements as one at the decision stage, and that is why custom emails are required.

This idea of breaking customers down by their position in the sales funnel destroys the notion that email marketing demographics should be simple. Instead of creating one email for hundreds of thousands of people, your company would better benefit by creating emails that talk to the individual needs of customers at every point of the sales funnel.

Basic Demographics are Gone

The idea that your email marketing campaign would be most effective if sent to people in the 21 to 35 years old age group has disappeared. In its place is a system that analyzes the real needs of clients and breaks them into groups based on their interests. You may have a 21 year old prospect who wants your red shoes and a 35 year old prospect who likes the blue ones. You will get much better results with your marketing if you appeal directly to the fans of red and blue shoes instead of trying to appeal to everyone with a generic message.

Tools such as re-marketing and email design templates have also helped to advance the concept of email marketing. The more information you can gather about your target audience, the better your chances are of sending an email that will appeal to that audience. If you are still paying a digital agency to send out generic emails to groups of people based on their age or geographic location, then it is time to upgrade to the new world of effective email marketing.

The holidays are just around the corner and now is the time to sit down and figure out how you will maximize this year's email marketing campaigns. The holidays is the one time of the year when your customers are looking to their emails for great gift ideas and pricing specials that will save them money. In order to maximize your customer's need for information, you need to develop emails that get their attention and solve their problems.

Check And Re-check Your Database

If you are bringing in a large amount of new qualified leads this year, then make sure that you do not have any double entries with your existing list. Your holiday email marketing email list should be segmented based on the types of customers you want to reach and the kinds of products you want to sell. The more precise your lists are, the better your email marketing results will be.

Remember Mobile Users

Mobile computing is a rapidly evolving marketing medium that requires your specific attention when you create email marketing campaigns. You should have all of you mobile users on their own list, and you should create emails that are optimized for mobile users. You need a catchy email that encourages mobile users to click the link to your website if you want to take advantage of this large consumer audience.

Work On The Subject Lines Until You Get Them Right

When it comes to success with an email marketing campaign, the subject line is the key to success. Continue experimenting with different subject lines until you find the ones that give you the best results and use those subjects in your various emails. Monitor the progress of the subject lines you use and get ready to experiment with more lines to find better options to replace the lines that are not getting you the results you want.

Remember Time Zones

If you have a national customer base, then you need to have an email marketing list that is broken down by time zones. Over time, you have discovered that certain times of the day are best for getting responses to your marketing emails. However, you have to remember that the time is different as you cross time zones. To get the best results, you should utilize segmented email lists based on time zones to make sure your customers are getting your emails at the optimum times.

Include The Add-Ons

If your email marketing is going to be used to highlight certain products, then remember to include the add-on products in your emails. If your product has no add-ons, then include associated products that customers may be interested in when they look at your featured product.

For most companies, the holidays determine whether or not the annual revenue goals are met. It is important to start planning your email marketing campaigns early so that you are sure to cover all of your important points. The more comprehensive and detailed your email marketing campaigns are, the better chance you will have at increasing revenue and meeting your financial goals for the year. It is also important to remember that your competition plans on starting their holiday email marketing early, which means you need to get to work if you want to beat the competition.