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Despite the rising popularity of other marketing channels, emails are still one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers. That’s because, unlike other channels, emails are more one-to-one, personalized, and cost-effective. According to Statista, in 2022, over 333 billion emails were sent and received daily worldwide. That number is set to reach 392.5 billion by 2026. At the same time, consumers often get inundated with too many emails in their inboxes, so brands need help to capture their attention and stay relevant. That’s why it’s essential to understand and implement effective email marketing best practices to ensure that your emails provide the best ROI.
In this article, we’ll cover the best email marketing practices to enhance your email campaigns’ effectiveness, engagement, and conversions.
The best practices for email marketing can be categorized into four areas:
We’ll also share a few examples of email marketing and delve into the different aspects of email marketing, such as segmentation, personalization, consumer journey optimization, and some proven strategies to help you get the most out of it.
Segmentation is the process of grouping consumers based on:
Take the example of Fynd, one of India’s largest omnichannel retail business platforms that allows businesses to manage their inventory, campaigns, and orders. They faced a low customer return rate of 2%. Using MoEngage’s Prediction tool, they identified ideal audiences for engagement and those likely to churn. They created sub-segments and sent targeted emails, which helped them double the open rates (3-5% to 6-8%) and boosted retention by 129%.
Customer segmentation is a powerful tool for developing hyper-personalized email marketing campaigns. By understanding different consumer groups’ unique needs and preferences, you can personalize your communication and product offerings.
This tailored approach helps improve customer loyalty, identify potential high-value consumers, and understand and address consumer pain points. Segmentation can help you identify market gaps and develop products and offerings to give your business a competitive edge.
While demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and predictive segmentations are effective, you can go beyond that to deliver a hyper-personalized consumer experience. For example, you can use the Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) model to identify loyal consumers based on their recent, frequent, and higher-value purchases and reach/engage them with personalized campaigns. We invited a few industry leaders to share their thoughts on segmentation, and here’s what they had to say:
Personalization is the next step of segmentation. It helps you create contextually relevant content for each segment and build micro-moments for them inside and outside digital platforms. According to MoEngage’s Personalization Pulse report, 25.3% of globally surveyed consumers want brand communication based on past communication. 13% of consumers from the North American region stated that they get frustrated when brands don’t understand or remember their preferences based on previous purchases.
However, while brands understand the significance of personalization, they face challenges due to the ‘Personalization Paradox.’ In the personalization paradox, consumers want personalized recommendations beyond addressing them with their first names but are also wary about sharing too much data with the brands. There’s a thin line between personalization and privacy invasion that brands have to maintain.
To overcome this problem and master personalization, you can follow the below techniques:
Instead of sending the same message to every consumer, you can use Personalized Recommendations to hyper-personalize the content. For example, a retailer can map every shopper’s attribute with the product catalog. To improve conversions, they can auto-generate and deliver hyper-personalized messages and product recommendations to consumers at the right micro-moment.
Email personalization is not just about sending the right message; it’s also about sending the communication at the right time. That’s where Personalized Automation come into play. Personalized Automation can deliver real-time messages to your consumers based on their activities. Oyo is one of the best email marketing examples we have seen recently. They used Personalized Automation to send personalized offers and discounts to consumers based on their app usage, search, and booking history. This helped them increase the CTR by 2x.
Website personalization enables you to create dynamic campaigns and tailored content for each website visitor. This helps brands improve customer experience and increase web engagement. You can use strategies like Web Personalization to gather information on the visitor’s attributes and behaviors and provide a seamless and personalized experience throughout the purchase journey.
Typically, a consumer goes through one or more of the following stages once they discover your brand and sign up for emails:
Every stage has a different goal. Optimizing the entire journey to achieve those goals is essential. This involves using specific strategies for each stage. Let’s examine them.
The consumer has already created a new account or downloaded your app. The focus with email marketing best practices is to help them discover the product or app and take the first step, such as completing their KYC or adding their delivery/payment details. You can send them a series of welcome emails explaining how to use the app.
In the engagement stage, the objective is to increase the consumer lifetime value (CLTV), deepen consumer loyalty, and improve retention. To achieve these goals, you can send consumers personalized emails with recommendations based on their behavior and previous purchase history. You can also send them reminders to complete the checkout process if they have abandoned the cart and send timely and relevant communication during events like flash sales to increase conversions.
It’s no secret that retaining consumers is more effective than acquiring them. Thus, focus on retaining or reactivating consumers who have not opened the app or purchased anything in the last 15 to 30 days. To improve the retention rate, you can send them exclusive offers or invite them to join the loyalty program. This will help re-ignite their interest in your app and encourage them to resume shopping.
In addition to these strategies, remember to personalize your communication, maintain consistency across all channels, communicate regularly, gather feedback, and use an intelligent Path Optimizer to distribute consumers to the best-performing path. This will help you improve conversions, engage consumers, and foster long-term loyalty.
What’s the best time to send an email to consumers? That’s the question many marketers ask themselves while sending emails. Some might say the best time is on a weekend or a Wednesday afternoon. If you ask us, there’s no ideal time or day to send an email.
The important thing to remember is not to send a good morning email at night or a bon appetit email at 4 AM. Consumers detest these emails and might not hesitate to unsubscribe from your mailing list if you send them at the wrong time.
However, you can safeguard your brand’s reputation using algorithms like MoEngage’s proprietary Best Time to Send algorithm. Best Time to Send uses advanced data analysis to analyze historical customer interactions with email activities such as opens, clicks, and browser views to determine the consumer’s affinity for a product.
This data is then used to create a personalized schedule and predict the best times for the consumer to receive messages based on their historical engagement patterns. Identify peak engagement times for each customer to maximize the chances of messages being seen and acted upon.
A data-driven approach like this can eliminate all the guesswork and enable you to determine the best time to send emails to each consumer by considering their behavior and preferences. It can help brands increase conversion rates by up to 64%.
One of the biggest email marketing best practices is A/B testing. A/B testing or split testing is an experimental process of comparing two variations of a message copy against each other by sending them to an equal number of randomly chosen consumers. The objective is to identify which message performs better and drives your engagement metrics.
However, merely A/B testing the email marketing campaigns is not enough. If you need a more effective strategy, use an AI-powered content optimization tool. Unlike traditional A/B testing, AI tools help with dynamic A/B testing. They monitor the performance of each variation in real time and automatically direct more traffic toward the better-performing one.
Some of the elements that you can A/B test include:
Do you know over 82% of consumers don’t open their emails? Harsh as it might sound, consumers won’t open your email until it has a captivating subject line. According to Invesp’s data, 47% of email recipients open a brand’s email, and 69% report it as spam, depending on the subject line. Thus, crafting compelling subject lines is the only way to boost open rates.
To craft compelling subject lines, put yourself in the consumers’ shoes and understand what they want to read about.
Let’s look at a few techniques and email marketing examples you can follow:
Email marketing is the most cost-effective way to connect with your consumers and drive engagement. It can generate an ROI of $36-$42 for every dollar you spend. However, it’s essential to implement and follow the best email marketing practices. By focusing on your audience, crafting compelling content, including strong calls to action, and following the email marketing frequency best practices, you can:
Leverage these email marketing best practices with MoEngage. Request a Demo for a quick walkthrough.
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