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Email Marketing Tips for Your Agency

Here’s something most savvy business owners agree on: email marketing adds immense value to your bottom line. But, oh boy, it can get complex.

You managed to convince prospects to subscribe to your newsletter. In a way, what they are saying is: “I am willing to invest in your brand and form a long-term relationship with you.”

How do you nurture that relationship? How do you convert them from subscribers to buyers?

The truth of the matter is that there are no easy answers here. Email marketing takes a lot of time and work.  It can get overwhelming to keep up with all the rules and updates. So, that is why it’s vital to get the basics right: content and timing. Then you can start experimenting with the hottest trends like experience email marketing or automation.

Without further ado, here are a few email marketing tips that will help you boost your business.

The Best Time to Send Email

Timing is so important, isn’t it? Send the invitations to a birthday celebration too late, and you may end up with the loneliest party ever. Send a congratulatory message too soon and you may ruin a surprise.

The same goes for your email marketing. We receive around 121 emails per day and a lot of it is bound to get lost. You need to find the right time slot if you want to make sure that your audience is going to pay attention to what you have to say.

The good news is that there is a lot of research out there trying to answer this exact question: when is the best time to send an email? In this post from CoSchedule, you will find links to ten studies that have delved specifically into this problem.

Here’s what you need to know.

 The Best Day to Send Emails: Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Wednesdays are considered the best days to send emails to your subscribers. Most studies recommend against sending emails on Mondays and for very obvious reasons. The weekend is over, people are bummed out about going back to work, and they probably have an inbox full of spam messages they received during the past couple of days. So, the first thing they will probably do is delete some of those emails. While the weekdays generally have low open rates a few studies pointed out that you can actually get more people to read your email during Sundays and Saturdays. That may be because these days have a low volume as most marketers avoid sending emails during the weekend.

 The Best Hour to Send Emails: Most studies concluded that 10 am is the best hour to send an email. People get at their offices at around 9-9:30 am, drink their coffee, talk with their colleagues and open their emails, so that’s how you can justify the high open rates. 2 pm is another great hour as most people go on a lunch break and tend to check their emails during it. The same goes for 8 pm at night and 6 am in the morning (let’s be honest, looking at your phone is probably the first thing you do when you wake up.)

It May Be Wise to Plan in Advance: 23% of emails are opened within 60 minutes of being sent. However, when it comes to event invitations and reminders, it would be best to send those a couple of days in advance as some people take one or two days before checking their emails.

One of the best email marketing tips you can remember is that data like this, while considered general good practice, shouldn’t be followed religiously. Your subscribers’ behavior, needs, and intents should ultimately be the factors that support your strategy. Otherwise, the entire structure could crumble.

Look at your own number too, not just general statistics. As a rule of thumb, you should pay special attention to the click-through rate (CTR,) click-to-open rate (CTOR,) and the open rate.

  • The Click-Through Rate: The click-through-rate shows you the people who have actually clicked on a link or image in an email. It’s a good indicator of the quality of the content and whether you are pushing the right buttons to get your audience interested in your offers.
  • The Click-to-Open Rate: This number reflects the people that opened your email and the ones that clicked on a link. This information is vital as it can help you determine what type of content your audience is interested in and what you should focus on. If you want to find out your CTOR, then you should divide the CTR by the open rate and then multiply it by 100%.
  • The Open Rate: As the name suggests, this number shows how many of your subscribers are opening your emails.

 If you want to determine the best day to send an email, then you have to look at this holistically. Sure, maybe a lot of people are opening your emails of Thursday mornings, but are they taking any action? Open rates alone won’t advance your business. So, if people are engaging more with your emails during weekdays, then maybe you should set your newsletter for Saturday morning, in spite of what the data says.

How to Write a Good Subject Line

Your subject line can make or break the effectiveness of your subject line. You can implement all the email marketing tips out there. If the subject line falls flat, the chances that people will open your message decrease dramatically. But, how can you turn a few simple words into an irresistible hook? 

Here are some ideas.

  • Keep It Short and to the Point

Subscribers get to see about 60 characters of your subject line if they are using a desktop computer and only 30 if they are viewing the email from their mobile device. That means that there is no room for beating around the bush.

Place the most important information at the beginning of the subject line. Tell your audience from the beginning why they should open the email and what they can expect to get.

  • Leverage the Double Opens Strategy

Here’s the thing: most of your subscribers won’t open your email the first time you send it, but that doesn’t mean that you should give up. It doesn’t mean that you should start spamming them either. Instead, you should use the double opens strategy. It’s quite simple: you resend the email to those who haven’t opened it, but you change the subject line. Wait for about 3-5 days before resending an email.

  • Mysterious is not a Good Idea

Prospects don’t like to guess what they will get if they invest their time in your brand. They want to be told exactly what they are in for. Subjects lines like “You will want to read this” or “This is something you must know” are vague and will get your email ignored. Also, stay away from filler words that don’t add value to your content, such as “Hi” or “Thank you.”

  • Use Keywords

There are two reasons why keywords can help you write better subject lines. They inform your audience about the content of the email and it makes it easier for you to manage your campaign.

  • Use Cliffhangers

Do you want an easy way to get people to open your emails?

Use a cliffhanger.

Think about the last time you read a book and the author left you hanging at the end of the chapter. Were you able to close the book and go to sleep as planned? Probably not. That’s the power of a cliffhanger: it makes your audience curious by giving them enough information to make them interested, but not enough to get the full picture.

  • Use Numbers

One study showed that stats and numbers can help you increase your open rate. That’s because unlike vague promises, numbers are concrete. “Save 15%” is more palpable than “You Will Save Money.” Moreover, sometimes stats can be surprising and shocking and may make people open the email just to confirm them.

  • Personalization Can Go a Long Way

Personalization is the key to the hearts of your customers. It shows that you don’t see them as nameless walking wallets, but as individuals with specific needs and wants. Using the recipient’s name or company name is perhaps one of the easiest ways to get them to open your email. For example, you could write “Jane, don’t miss the 20% discount on our sunglasses.

  • Experiment with Emojis

It’s 2019 and emojis are here to stay (apparently,) so it is high time brands start embracing them (as long as they fit their audience.) Some reports claim that the businesses that are using emojis in their email subject line are seeing a 56% increase in open rates. 😃 Would it work for you? Well, there is only one way to find out.

Over to You

 There is both an art and science to creating great emails, albeit not an exact one. It takes a lot of testing, tweaking and experimenting to find a strategy that works for you. And, even when you do find it, you can’t just kick back and relax. Your audience is always growing and the market is ever-changing. You always need to pay attention to the latest email marketing tips and see what fits your brand and prospects. It’s hard work, but the results are well worth it.

We are always here to help you at Lift Local and have a team of email marketing experts that can help you achieve success. Let us know how we can help.