7 Email Marketing Resolutions for 2017
How do you stand out with your email marketing campaign? Sticking to these 7 email marketing resolutions for 2017 will help you achieve better campaigns.
1. Clean your email lists
Start the new year organized and clean your email lists. Keeping a clean list will lower the risk of email bounces, which will improve your deliverability rates. Too many invalid addresses might render your newsletters undeliverable as a domain might assume that you have poor collection practices. If you don’t end up in spam mail, you might be blocked altogether.
If you haven’t yet used a double opt in sign up form to collect email addresses from subscribers, get it as soon as possible. Without that, you are likely to break the law and be classified as a spammer. To learn more about email marketing laws, check out this infographic on international email law.
2. Segment your contacts
Now that you’ve trimmed your email list, make sure you create target group-specific lists to make your newsletters more relevant. What are your contacts identifying traits? Create lists for different age groups, or according to purchase history, location, gender… the sky is the limit.
Contact segmentation allows for better email personalization, which consequently translates in higher open rates.
3. Automate your emails
Now that we’ve entered 2017, you’ve got a perfect excuse to send the very first newsletter to your subscribers. Be creative about it: you’d like to send more than New Year’s greetings and stand out from your competitors. Obviously, it shouldn’t be a sales newsletter, but everybody loves a good New Year’s surprise. Let people glimpse into a crystal ball and showcase some of your new products. Alternatively, you review 2016 or make your customers interact in any other way.
Automated email examples:
- Welcome email
- Birthday email
- Abandoned cart email
- Survey email invitation
- Date/time triggered email
- Re-engagement email
4. Launch a customer engagement campaign
Another email marketing resolution for 2017 should be re-engaging inactive subscribers. They haven’t landed on your email list by chance, yet they haven’t been reacting to your emails. The sooner you engage them in 2017, the better: the majority wants to make a fresh start, just like your inactive readers. Another reason to do that is that launching a re-engagement campaign is cheaper than customer acquisition.
Star off with checking engagement metrics: you probably would like to reach out to subscribers who haven’t engaged within the last 30-60 days. Sending out a survey is a good idea to get a glimpse of what your customers would like to read in the future and how often would they want to hear from you. Then, A/B test your email campaign: check which subject line/sender name/content piece performs best.
5. Create user-friendly emails
Your competition has probably many email marketing resolutions for 2017, one of which is to stand out given the increase of emails down the line.
Therefore, you need to make sure your emails are:
-Well scannable
-Optimized for mobile
-Have one, clickable CTA
Email skimmers are on the rise. You can’t avoid this habit, you could embrace it. Therefore, you should break sea of text into neatly organized columns that enable scanning. Use whitespace and images appropriately to enhance the reading experience even further.
With more and more people reading email on mobile devices, make sure you use responsive design. Therefore, your newsletters will display perfectly no matters the device.
As far as the CTA is concerned, your audience need to clearly see it is clickable. Make sure they could easily click on it with one finger, when viewing your campaign on the go.
6. Create a content calendar
Consistent flow of content proves to be a challenge for many marketing professionals. Therefore, the further ahead you plan, the easier it proves to upload content.
You might plan content on a weekly basis if you’re in a face-paced industry, or quarterly if you expect little changes.
There three steps will help you to come up with a content plan:
Identify your audience
Once you’ve identified your audience, you will be able to identify appropriate topics. Now you can see why contact segmentation makes sense – as far as newsletter content is concerned, you create one newsletter template and add several adjustments to it so that different target groups get personalized messages.
Analyze past year’s content
Before you start with a plan, see which content pieces performed best last year. Update your best performing content or re-purpose it. Then, think what other content type can be exploited. You can take advantage of data from your CRM system, surveys, colleague’s expertise. Translate one content type into another – for example, combine a series of blog posts into a whitepaper or turn a YouTube video into a blog post.
Track your content
Make sure you allow time to review content performance. See how many visits did it attract, what was the engagement rate etc. so that you will have an easier time to come up with a content plan next quarter/year.
Another way of tracking your content is to create a calendar where you include video, graphics, social posts, podcasts, blog posts alongside newsletters. It will enforce consistency and a coordinated theme.
7. Test your newsletter
The last email marketing resolution for 2017 should be newsletter testing. Make sure to improve your newsletters even further with email testing. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when testing a sales campaign:
- Newsletter doesn’t display properly
- Images don’t display
- The email contains empty links…
- …as well as typing mistakes
- It lands in the spam folder