Email marketing is an essential part of any brand’s toolkit. When it comes to reaching your customers, building engagement, and sharing important announcements, it’s still the most reliable way to reach your entire customer base. Email marketing automation and programmatic personalization have now super-charged the email marketing channel, providing you a powerful way to connect with your customers with reasonably low requirements in both time and budget.
Of course, getting the most from your email marketing tactics requires best practices and optimization. Like everything else, it’s always best to start with the basics and hone your strategy based on your unique brand goals, audience, and analytic results. Whether you’re getting your email strategy ready for a new year of greater success or building your very first email marketing campaign, let’s dive into the 10 email best practices for 2022.
1) Hone Your Email Automation Tools and Skills
First, get your automation tools ready and make sure your team is trained on everything they can do – not just the features you’re already familiar with. Email marketing software has become truly incredible and most teams only use a fraction of the tools at their disposal. While you might not use every automation tool with every campaign, you always want to build a new email marketing strategy with the entire toolbox at your disposal.
You also want to gear up your campaign to be automation-ready. Make sure the content you’re creating and your automation software blend perfectly so you can smoothly schedule, adapt, and personalize every automated email campaign.
2) Establish Your Email Marketing Goals
Always go into a marketing strategy with goals in mind. Email marketing goals start similarly for all brands, but soon develop a unique personality depending on your industry, audience, and current performance metrics. For example, your email marketing goal to increase engagement might focus on more sales conversions, more on-site activity using your web tools, or more eyes reading your blog articles. It might be to inspire specific actions, spur social media discussions, or get customers using their loyalty reward points more actively.
Your goals will be unique to your brand, and develop as you see the results of your initial email marketing strategy.
3) Build Segmented Email Marketing Tracks
The one-size-fits-all email campaigns are over. In 2022, we will see an increased focus on segmented email lists and custom brand experiences. Segmentation gives you the opportunity to tailor the content, frequency, and even marketing goals for each customer group. Customer behavior and self-selected email preferences can guide you toward easy group-segmenting for your email strategy. For example, some of your customers will be newsletter-readers and some will be deal-hunters. Your reader segment will want less frequent content-rich emails while the deal-hunters are always excited to check out a discount code for something new.
Many brands also develop a unique segment to onboard new customers, separate from the regular pattern of weekly or monthly emails.
4) Develop Your Brand’s Voice and a Recognizable Template Style
Give your brand a unique voice and email appearance. This makes your email experience unique and even more personal for your customer list. Your brand voice can reflect the personality and values of the brand, seeking to resonate with customers who share those values or enjoy the patter you create.
A unique template and visual style will make your emails feel both familiar and interesting. Build a color scheme, an image style, and even an email frame that identifies your emails as unique yet unified each time users open one from their inbox.
5) Prepare to Personalize the Automated Email Experience
Personalization is king in the coming year. Email marketing software combined with your CRM have made it possible to address every email recipient by name and even feature products and articles they would find most interesting. Use your marketing automation tools to show customers who only buy purple items a selection of new products in purple. Send customers who primarily buy camping supplies cool deals on the lastest wilderness products.
Congratulate your recipients on their birthdays and send culturally-appropriate holiday greetings. Not to mention, tailoring your email automation schedule and the type of content they want to see based on individual customer preference.
6) Optimize for Mobile Email Readers
Mobile is everything right now, yes, even in email. Millions now primarily check their email on their phone, often during those in-between times like taking the train or enjoying a quiet lunch break. So many emails are opened on phones that it has become essential to optimize email formatting for phone-sized screens.
This means shorter paragraphs with more compact and flexible templating. Then be sure to test and optimize your email designs on several mobile devices and screen sizes before finalizing the design.
7) Determine More Than One Way to “Add Value” with Every Email
Value-adding has become a must-have for 2022 email marketing. Value-adding is when your email is worth more than a few minutes of word-skimming to your customer list. What does the customer really get out of reading your email? And if it’s the delight of your brand’s company, think again.
Some readers open emails for deals, but coupon pages are only so interesting. Some open for articles, but only if those articles are consistently informative and engaging. The smart approach is to build more than one way that your emails can add value and generate anticipation in customers who appreciate that value.
8) Collect Analytics and Develop an Improvement Cycle
Don’t forget your analytics! Create email trackers that tell you how many emails are looked at, opened, read, and their links followed. Gauge the success of your calls-to-action and the appeal of your personalized deals. Analytics can tell you if your email marketing campaign is a hit or a flop, and show you which areas of your strategy could use improvement.
Then develop a cycle for improvement. Schedule a time to assess the analytics, identify where your strategy could be improved, then implement those improvements to collect more data.
9) Make Use of Test Audiences and A/B Testing
Testing can be essential to success, especially when building a new email template or campaign. Send your emails to test audiences for some honest feedback before you finalize a design for customers’ eyes. A/B testing is also useful – sending two email designs and weighing which one performs better with customers or better achieves your set email marketing goals.
10) Strategize to Remain a Relevant Inbox Item
Finally, 2022 is the year of designing emails that customers want to open. There is so much “junk mail” in the world that many people have become numb to standard promotional tactics. But customers are always willing to consider engagement with a brand – especially in those first few emails they receive.
It’s time to build strategies to remain a relevant, anticipated, and enjoyed inbox item. You want your customers to smile when they see your sender and title-line in their inbox, and to eagerly click for the value you add, the charming brand personality you convey, and the satisfaction they feel when the email-induced interaction is complete.
Ready to dive into email marketing success in 2022? Contact us today to hone your email marketing strategies with Faster Solutions.
