Email marketing is one of the most effective inbound tactics for driving sales, but it can be difficult to make sure your emails are standing out from the competition, and aren’t just being ignored. The following tips will help you to improve your overall email marketing strategy, and increase your email conversion rates on your next campaign.

1. Use a Sense of Urgency

People tend to make purchase decisions more easily when there is a sense of urgency pressing them. In the email marketing world, there are two different types of urgency you can employ in your campaigns: scarcity-based or time-based.

For example, if you were selling tickets to an event, a scarcity-based urgency tactic would use wording like “Hurry! Only 20 spots left!”, whereas a time-based model could use a deadline, like “place your order before midnight and get free shipping!”

Whichever method you pick, you’ll definitely notice a difference in your email campaigns when using urgency.

2. Grab Attention with a Captivating Subject

The subject title is your email’s first impression, and can be the deciding factor to whether or not your email gets opened. Use this opportunity to grab your audience’s attention by using specific and informative wording (ie: “Welcome to Summer Sale – 25% off your first purchase”), and make sure your offer flows through the body of the email. For example, if your subject title advertises a sale on women’s shoes, then don’t start your email with men’s clothing.

Also make sure that your title matches your call to action. If you’re offering a discount in your subject, then your readers should be able to easily find the call to action required to gain access to that deal.

3. Be Welcoming

I always love it when I subscribe to a new newsletter or email account and get a welcome gift 🙂 Maybe it’s just an email welcoming me and letting me know what to expect next, or maybe it’s 10% off of my first purchase; whatever the case, it makes me feel appreciated as I start a new relationship with a new vendor.

And the great thing about welcome emails from a business perspective is that they can be fully automated to send out as soon as a new subscriber submits their email address on your website.

4. Personalize Your Emails

Personalizing your emails can lead to increases in conversion rates and revenues. Check out this report from Experian Marketing Services, that says personalized product recommendations in transactional emails can increase your revenues by up to 20%:

Compared with emails that display static cross-sell items, emails including cross-

sell items driven by predictive models and recommendation engines have double

the transaction rates. With open rates of more than or near 100 percent, investing

in personalized content allows marketers to reach a highly responsive buyer

segment at an optimal time, resulting in increased transactions. Keep in mind that

cross-selling initiatives do not have to focus only on tangible products, but also

can pertain to the sale of additional services applicable to the customer.

In an email marketing survey conducted by HubSpot, respondents indicated that they subscribe to company newsletters looking for content that is “particularly and specifically” relevant to them.

5. Send Reminders

I was doing some online shopping the other day and got distracted before I could complete my purchase. A few hours later, the online store sent me a reminder email about the items still sitting in my shopping cart — and it was a good nudge for me to log back on.

Another way to use reminder emails is with subscription-based services. Instead of letting a subscription expire and just hoping that your customer will renew, set up an automatic process to send them a reminder email a month or so before the expiration date. You could even include an incentive of 5% off the coming year, and make the renewal process a snap by providing a CTA link in the email body for them to click right away.

6. Email Segmentation

Segmenting lists is an important concept of email marketing that will help you easily target customers in specific stages of the Buyer’s Journey. Segmentation makes it possible for you to send email content to your subscribers that is tailored to their wants and needs at each stage, which will improve your open, click-through and conversion rates.

Your buyers are not all the same; each one has different wants, different needs, and is at a different stage of the buying process. Determining your company’s buyer personas is the first step in building out your segmented lists.

You always want to keep a positive email reputation with your customer base. Sending them irrelevant or spammy content will only lead them to “unsubscribe”. Take the time to understand who your clients are and what they want from you, and segment lists that will attract these buyer personas in unique and relevant ways.

Summary

As always, you’ll never know what works for your customer base until you test it out. You can even use A/B testing in email marketing, by sending two different email templates to two different groups and measuring the success rates of each against each other. Testing is the best method to find out what works for your target market, and how you can continue to increase your email marketing conversion rates.

To learn more about buyer personas and how you can create email content targeted to your ideal customers, check out our free Buyer Persona template download.