The 3 Most Essential Strategies That Every Email Marketer Should Know

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Key takeaways

• Open rate is the first goal: subject lines are the principal battleground, keep them short and vague to mimic personal emails.
• Use a mix of valuable content and selective offers, avoid constant hard-sell emails to prevent subscriber fatigue.
• Email churn from over-promotional campaigns can drive roughly a 25% subscriber decline per year.
• There is no universal rule: test every aspect of your campaigns continuously and adapt to your audience.

Introduction

There are billions of emails sent around the world everyday. Most people’s inboxes are constantly being filled with emails from work, social media, brands and other emails of all different types. Some are important to them and others are quickly considered spam. This makes it difficult for marketers to distinguish themselves from the competition and craft emails that are enticing to their audience, but it is entirely possible if the marketer knows some of the tricks of the trade.

There are three essential strategies that every email marketer should know if they want to have any success with their email campaigns.

Create Vague and Short Email Headlines to Increase Open Rates

The first goal of any email campaign is to have the recipient open the email. Without the reader actually seeing the content of an email, all of the design, graphics and other elements within the email are totally useless and it is the headline of an email that is the principal battleground for the reader’s attention. It is the fleeting first and last moment of a recipient’s glance at a headline that will determine if they click to open it. This means that it is absolutely necessary to have a headline that appeals to as many potential readers as possible.

Dan Scalco, contributor to Entrepreneur, provides some advice on this.

“Optimizing your headlines is key for making sure that your subscribers actually read your email. Doing so isn’t hard. Just remember two important elements when crafting your headline — keep it short and keep it vague,” Says Scalco.

He argues that one of the best headlines in all of email marketing history was one that was used during President Obama’s first presidential campaign. The campaign raised nearly $700 million online and was comprised of an email marketing headline that simply read “Hey”. This is a subject line that is both short and vague with proven success.

The strategy that accounted for its success is simple. People are more likely to open emails from friends and family and this type of headline closely emulates the types of emails that people receive from their close contacts.

Combine Compelling Content with Appealing Offers

Subscribers need to be provided with content that contains some value for them, but they also don’t want to be beaten over the head with promotional offers. It takes a careful balance between content that is interesting and offers that appeal to the target audience.

“If your email marketing campaign is “sell, sell, sell”, you’re going to wear your subscribers out. They are going to get bored with your offers and eventually unsubscribe,” says Scalco. “This is known as email churn and statistics show that it can lead to a decline of around 25 percent of your subscribers each year.”

Test Everything Constantly

Unfortunately with email marketing, there is no such thing as a golden rule. Every aspect of a campaign needs to be consistently tested throughout the process. No two target audiences are exactly the same and humans by nature have so many different habits and preferences that working with generalized data can sometimes be more about the critical analysis than the actual numbers. There are so many variables that contribute to email marketing that in order for a campaign to ensure its success, it is vital to review and modify as much as possible.

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