Email is more popular now than ever before. While other marketing communication channels are active, important, and utilized by your customers, without good email marketing, your overall marketing program will suffer.  

Too often, marketers end up phoning it in for their marketing emails. They blast out flash sales to their entire database thinking they’ll be interested in a good deal, but that’s often not the case. To get a pristine email marketing program, you need to consider what makes a great email, who it gets sent to, and the data behind it.  

To help you create a better email marketing program, we’ve compiled 10 best practices and customer communications strategies that can help your program increase engagement and start to see real results from your efforts.  

1. Deliverability is key 

First things first: your customer communications strategy can’t work if your customers can’t see your communications. For people to interact with your email, they need to be able to receive them. Deliverability is often overlooked when marketers start to tinker with their email marketing to see where things go wrong. Ensure that your emails are reaching inboxes instead of hitting junk or spam folders, or bouncing back.  

2. Subject lines are crucial 

Subject lines are the first thing your customers will see from your email marketing programs. Often they determine whether or not the customer will open your email—in fact, 33% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. One of the best rules is to never ask a yes or no question within a subject line. Imagine if someone answers “no?” You won’t even have a chance to get those people to open your email.  

3. Get to the point (and fast) 

Don’t you hate it when you click into a recipe online and then you’re forced to read a novella about the writer’s grandmother walking up a hill in the dead of winter to pick the most perfect berries for her pie? You have about eight seconds to captivate your audience before they move on with their day. Get to the point as soon as possible. Whatever you’re trying to promote, tell them right away, and include a CTA above the fold so they can click with minimal effort. 

4. When in doubt, think SWIFT 

SWIFT means “So, what’s in it for them?” If you can’t answer that simple question, then your email isn’t ready to be sent out. Every single part of your customer communications plan has to focus on your recipients. This starts by focusing on their needs, their wants, and their interests. If that’s through content, tips and tricks, discounts, product recommendations—whatever the case—remember, the email is about them, not your MQL numbers. A customer-focused marketing approach will make sure your customers are getting something out of your emails.  

5. Data is sovereign 

Repeat after me: “I’m only as good as the data I’m given.” This motto should be the cornerstone of everything we do as marketers. Clean, high-quality data will not only improve your deliverability but will also aid in your personalization, testing, and optimization. The quantity and quality of your data will show a direct correlation to the efficiency and success rate of your email marketing. 

6. Personalization isn’t just a buzzword 

“Personalization” has quickly become one of the buzziest buzzwords that exists in the marketing world today. But it’s more than just a buzzword in its true form. For example, a restaurant wouldn’t want to send an email about a new hamburger on their menu to a vegetarian. A sports news site shouldn’t send an email about the Washington Football Team to a New York Yankees fan. It just doesn’t make sense. Your email content should resonate with the readers it’s being sent to. Sending irrelevant email content to your readers won’t only tank your engagement on that email, it can potentially disrupt your entire customer communications efforts in the long-term. 

However, this doesn’t mean you can’t cross-sell products through your email channel. You just have to be cognizant of whether or not that product is going to resonate. A customer buying house plants through a home improvement retailer may be interested in potters or fertilizers, but probably not new faucets. When you cross-sell, you’re targeting people who are either interested in your other product offerings or fit the persona of someone who may be interested.  

7. Testing, testing, one, two, three 

Test well and test often. But don’t just test to test, be scientific in how you do it. Start with a hypothesis, determine what exactly you want to learn from this test, and build the test based on these principles. Once you’ve learned from the test, run another, and another, and another, because you’ll never say “We learned too much.”  

Your testing can be about engagement, what resonates, and what will inspire your customers—the options are endless. For example, you may want to determine if “percentage off” or “dollar discount” language results in more revenue. Testing the phrase “Act now and receive 20% off” against “Act now and receive $20 off!” can showcase that. You may also want to find out which call to action results in more webinar registrations. Sharing emails that say “Save your seat!” or “Join us!” can help uncover this.  

8. Spice up your CTAs 

Don’t let your email marketing get stale and boring. I’d bet that if your customers and prospects have to see the CTA “Learn More” one more time, they may scream.  

“Learn More” has become a crutch in marketing—it’s lazy and unimaginative. Spice up your CTA lingo to make it more subtly interesting to your audience. Use action phrases like, “See it in action!” and “Try it now!” instead. Better yet, use a specific word from your messaging. Anything but the lazy and far-too-common CTAs we see every day.  

9. Knowledge is power 

Survey your audience to go beyond testing to see what they like about your emails, what they don’t like, and what they’d like more of. Be upfront with why you are asking, and you’d be surprised at how willing people are to share feedback when it benefits them. You can even throw in an incentive for the survey with a reward. You’ll see a noticeable increase in response rates, even for something as generic as a chance to win a gift card.  

10. Obsessively measure 

Without measurement, it’s nearly impossible to understand how your email marketing campaigns are performing. Integrate advanced analytics into your email processing system to uncover what strategies and tactics are leading to sales. When equipped with data, you can make informed decisions and adjustments as needed. You can also better align with your sales counterparts by sharing key insights that you uncover based on these results.  

Email marketing is a cornerstone of any customer communications program. To succeed, marketers need to shine above the competition and deliver the best emails. Through the above tips and tricks, marketers can create a much better program and see their engagement soar.  

Interested in kicking off your own email marketing campaign? Check out Acoustic Campaign or schedule a discussion with us today.