Email Marketing Strategy: 8 Ideas To Implement This Year

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In 2024, the approximate number of email users is 4.48 billion, which is more than half of the world’s population!

Imagine how your business could grow if you incorporated the right email marketing benchmarks and strategies this year. It’s not just about segmentation or personalization—there’s a lot more to it.

In this post, we’ll take a look at 8 new email marketing strategies that you can implement this year for increased channel success.

8 Email Marketing Strategies to Test This Year

1. Use compelling offers to build email lists

The first step towards running a successful email campaign is to build a strong, healthy email list. Buying a list is never advisable—emailing people without consent will do more harm than good. Not only will it damage brand reputation, but also create low open rates, which in turn harm IP reputation, causing future emails to be marked as spam.

Build a healthy email list through innovative campaigns and a popup form with compelling offers, like gift vouchers that entice your audience and invite them to share their email address with you. Another alternative is to gamify the process of acquiring emails via a lucky-draw or spin-the-wheel.

2. Periodically overhaul your email lists

Amateur email marketers often make the mistake of emailing their digital newsletters to as many people as possible to maximize conversions. What they don’t realize (until after the damage is done) is that this sabotages IP reputation.

An unsolicited or irrelevant email will go unopened—and email open rates are critical to IP reputation. The only way to keep open rates (and IP reputation) high is to be selective with your email list. Only send your emails to people you’re sure will open them and don’t send irrelevant emails to your users or you risk going to spam.

Review and verify your email list every 6-12 months. Email list scrubbing allows you to retain only those email addresses that show the greatest open rates, and discard the rest. With the added bonus to pro-actively remove disposable email addresses and keeping engagement high.

3. Keep your emails simple and contextual

On average, people receive over 120 emails per day.

With so many emails vying for attention, yours could easily get lost in the crowd. The only way to stand out is to keep your emails contextual—making it more relevant to your users, incentivizing them to open them.

For example, if someone bought cat food from a pet store, they’re more likely to respond to an email about cat care than dog or fish care. So, be it a follow-up email or a cold emails automated by cold email platforms, make sure that it is relevant and meets people’s needs and interests.

To make contextualization possible, you need to segment your users into different groups based on their actions and behavior.

With MoEngage for omnichannel communication, you can perform AI-based predictive segmentation and categorize your users into groups like ‘Price sensitive’, ‘Needs Attention’, and others, to ensure you tailor your email communications effectively.

4. Personalize your emails through segmentation

Email personalization is a high-converting tactic that marketers should leverage more. A hyper-personalized and micro-segmented campaign can do wonders for your business.

Create segments that capture user preferences and behavior, and use this information to send them personalized emails that address their greatest needs or issues. Some email segmentation strategies include:

1. Segmenting by age, gender, and location
2. Using quizzes and surveys to understand where their interests lie
3. Analyzing customer purchase history
4. Mapping usage frequency
5. Checking customer behavior on your app or website

5. Combine email marketing strategies with other channels

The lines that separate the physical and digital world are blurring, and the two mediums are merging into one. It’s important to keep up by going ‘Phygital’—combining physical customer experiences with digital communication strategies. For example, create geo-targeted email campaigns that get delivered when your user walks past a shop, offering their favorite products at discount.

“You need to treat every channel differently and make sure that the consumer enjoys your messaging across each channel.” – Furqan Khan, Apparel Group

Follow this up with a push notification or an SMS with the discount coupon, and you’ve just made a customer follow-through with a purchase.

This sort of omnichannel marketing is crucial for brands to stay relevant to customers and keep up with those customers that channel-hop. You need to create a strong brand presence over multiple channels like push, SMS, in-app, email, social, and more.

6. Improve email deliverability

Email deliverability has been challenging marketers for as long as email marketing has existed—but the impact is even more so now that email is a popular marketing tool. Increasing email deliverability comes back to segmentation and contextualization: you should only send emails to those groups of people who are most likely to open them.

This, in turn, tells the mailing algorithm that your emails are not spam—keeping them in the ‘updates’ (or better yet, the ‘inbox’) folder.

“The kind of segmentation and the kind of audience you have on your database plays a
key role for deliverability.” -Joydeep Das, Landmark Group

Email deliverability is also impacted by other seemingly unconnected factors, like content and creativity. The logic is that emails that don’t look or read great go to the trash—and this impacts future deliverability. It is also crucial to choose an email marketing platform or email marketing services that has good deliverability rates overall.

With MoEngage, you get 95% deliverability. Get a demo now

7. Track the right metrics for your email marketing strategy

While open rates and click rates are the most significant and popular metrics to track, there are a few others that shouldn’t be ignored, like:

1. Deliverability and delivery rate
2. IP reputation
3. Conversion rate and ROI
4. Subscriber health

8. Tackle unsubscribes with a smart strategy

Building an email list is difficult, so it can be disheartening to see unsubscribe rates go up. Even so, it is important to give your email readers an opt-out mechanism. If you make the process difficult, it reflects poorly on the brand and customer sentiment. Allowing uninterested customers to opt out ensures that your email list is healthy and requires less overhaul.

A roundup of email marketing strategies for this year

Here’s a quick recap of the email marketing strategies we’ve covered so far:

1. There are approximately 4.48 billion email users worldwide, so it’s important to leverage the right strategy for this channel.
2. Never buy an email list. Build a healthy one instead through innovative campaigns and compelling offers.
3. Review your email list every 6-12 months and remove the ones that don’t open your emails.
4. Send contextual emails that incentivize users to open your emails. This is a surefire method to improve IP reputation.
5. Segment your customers into groups based on their actions and interests and personalize emails for each group accordingly.
6. Don’t just stop at email—send out consistent messaging across multiple channels and create an omnichannel marketing strategy.
7. Email deliverability is crucial. Pick a trusted email marketing platform with historically high deliverability rates, like MoEngage.

Looking to advance your email marketing strategy this year? Schedule a demo of MoEngage’s email marketing solution to see how you can level up your game.

Related Video: Best Practices for Boosting Email Engagement