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Email Marketing Round-Up: May’s Top Reads

Memorial Day has come and gone and kids are headed into summer break now, which means you’ve probably already eaten more grilled meat (or meat alternatives) than you can even count! While you’re in a food coma, why not sit down and sink your teeth into some of the juiciest email marketing content we’ve recently digested. These four articles are our top picks of the best email marketing advice shared in May.

Subject Lines That Get Results

Tom Sather answers all of your most pressing questions regarding email subject lines in his post on Text-Only Subject Lines that Perform, Now That Gmail Grid View Is History. How long should your subject line be? Which popular phrases should you incorporate into your email? How can you create urgency in your subject line to compel subscribers to click? Can you actually email Santa? (Okay, so he answers most of your questions.)

Tom also provides some secret subject line tips using real-world examples. One of the insights that he shares is:

“Looking at the most common subject line headline types across 3,000 retailers showed what’s working today and what isn’t. In this study, I categorized the subject lines into a few different types: Benefit, Command, How-To, News, Personal, Reason-Why, Urgency, and Discount. For fun, I also looked at how effective common clickbait headlines were in email. Urgent subject lines performed the best. People opened emails with subject lines using the keywords ‘still time’ 16% more than average.”

Get all of the wisdom that Sather shares within his Marketing Land post and start testing your best subject lines.

Email Marketing Tips for Professional Service Providers

The experts at Hinge Marketing offer some pointers on how to effectively market professional services via email. They lay out the following do’s and don’ts for accounting, finance, consulting, and technology businesses and the like.

Do:

  • Grow Your Email List Organically
  • Utilize Drip Email Campaigns
  • Send Educational Content
  • Have Mobile-Friendly Emails
  • Create and Email Content Calendar
  • Test Your Emails

Don’t:

  • Buy a Purchased List of Contacts
  • Bombard Your List with Too Many Emails
  • Forget to Send Hard Offers
  • Make Your Emails Too Basic
  • Make Your Email Content Calendar Static
  • Forget to Segment Your List for Easy Testing

The tweets don’t lie – Critical Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Professional Services was a really popular post across social media and professional offices nationwide this month because it’s full of good advice. And, we know where you can get the services to help you cover their “do” list.

How To Keep Them From Unsubscribing

Keeping existing customers is significantly cheaper for a business than acquiring new ones, which is why companies that invest in email marketing work so hard to retain their email subscribers. To this point, Derek Handova goes through some of the most effective strategies for retaining email subscribers in How to Make Sure No One Unsubscribes from your Email Marketing Campaigns. He explains that a certain number of unsubscribes are inevitable but that creating value that consumers want when they want it is the key to winning the email marketing game. He says:

“Keeping subscribers starts before a contact agrees to subscribe… It’s not enough to get permission to email a contact; you need permission for the type of campaign you plan to deploy. Tell the subscriber exactly what she will be getting and when it will be sent. Otherwise, not only will your unsubscribe rate increase, your company will lose trust.”

Obviously, having an unsubscribe rate of 0% is impossible, but Handova uses an example of a management consulting firm that was able to achieve an unsubscribe rate of just 1% over the course of 2 years by always dedicating emails to engaging, valuable information rather than self-promotion. (If you’re new to email marketing, this may not seem that impressive to you, but trust us – it’s pretty doggone awesome!)

Deliver Location-Based Email Marketing

Mike O’Brien explains that location personalization is an incredibly important part of modern email marketing because it establishes a deep connection with recipients and encourages purchases. In Why Location-Based Emails Are So Important for Your Brand, he explains the basics of location-based emails by saying, “Location-based email marketing allows incentives to be delivered at the right time and right place… It is a powerful medium because it gives marketers the opportunity to engage customers in real-time and deliver value when they’re most receptive.”

He goes on to add that, “This focus on location and personalization in email marketing is especially key where Millennials are concerned… the younger generation is so tech-savvy that they simply expect marketers to know who they are and what they’re doing. A company that fails to do this will generally be looked at unfavorably by Millennials.”

One company that does a great job of this is Starbucks. They send out personalized offers based on preferences and local offerings that make recipients feel like they’re individually recognized and understood. Sign up for their rewards program, grab a latte, and take notes! (Coffee and learning? Now, that’s a win-win!)

As an added bonus, check out O’Brien’s other great post in May on Less Is More: Simple Data Serves Killer Email Marketing.

That’s it for this month’s installment of brilliant email marketing articles. Hungry for more? Keep checking back regularly for more of our helpful resources – we get lonely without you.

Keys to Happy Sending

1. Take advantage of industry research: knowledge is power to improve your subject lines and much more.
2. Service marketing is a special niche. Know the dos & don’ts to keeping your subscribers.
3. Setting your subscribers’ expectations early is key to building lasting relationships.
4. Don’t ignore the power of your reader’s location. Incorporating this data will deepen your relationship and help them feel known.

Start with a free SendinBlue account! 

 

 

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