7 Effective Tips for Email Marketing in HubSpot

For example, when looking at the statistics, you'll see that:

• Email, on average, generates about $38 for every dollar you spend, which means you'll get a staggering 3800% return on your investment. So, it's not only one of the cheapest digital marketing strategies but also one of the most effective too.  
• About two-thirds of customers make a purchase as a result of an email marketing message they've received.
• Email marketing is 40 times more effective at getting new customers compared to Facebook and Twitter combined.
• As a bonus, considering that there are about 3.8 billion email users globally, it gives you access to a massive audience. 

Now, the question is whether it's a simple as blasting out a few emails and waiting for the leads to roll in. Not exactly. You see, to get all the benefits that email marketing offers, you'll need to use a well-thought-out and effective email marketing strategy. 

If you do, you'll be able to generate more leads for your business and convert more of them into customers. With that in mind, we'll look at some email marketing best practices you can use to develop your email marketing strategy.

Why Use Email Marketing? 

Before looking at these best practices, let's first recap why email marketing is so important. To do this, it's important to understand what email marketing allows you to do. For example, an effective email marketing strategy allows you to:

• • Create personalized content that allows you to tailor your messaging to where your customers are in their buying journey. As a result, you'll be able to reach the right people at the right time.
  • Generate more traffic to your website, which allows you to reach, communicate with, and offer value to a wider audience.
  • Increase the number of leads you'll be able to generate. 

Keep in mind, though, these are just some of the things that email marketing allows you to do and there are many more. The key, however, is when done right, email marketing is an invaluable tool that allows you to grow your business. 

The result is that, when you use an effective email marketing strategy, you'll get some of these benefits:

• • Lasting relationships. When you're able to reach your audience with personalized, relevant, and valuable content through email, you'll be able to build lasting relationships with your audience.
  • Increased brand awareness. With email marketing, you'll be able to create more awareness about your brand.
  • Increased content promotion. You'll be able to share your blog's content with your audience. In this way, you'll attract more of them to your website and you’ll increase the number of leads you'll get.    
  • Better marketing. Ultimately, when you're able to reach your audience with more personalized content, increase awareness about your brand, and attract more visitors to your site, you'll be able to market your products and services more effectively.    
  • Lead nurturing. It doesn't stop with getting more leads, though, as email marketing allows you to nurture the leads you get and guide them through your sales pipeline. 

With that in mind, let's look at some best practices you can implement in your email marketing strategy to make it as effective and efficient as possible. 

Plan Properly 

As with most other aspects of your business, you need to plan your email strategy properly for it to be effective. This means you'll have to plan the content you'll send, who you'll send it to, and when you’ll send it. 

So, if you send content to nurture leads, this content should be tailored to where the leads are in their buying journey. For example, the messaging to a lead who just registered on your website will be very different from the messaging to a lead who has a product in their cart. 

Likewise, the messaging to the subscribers to your newsletter will differ depending on how long they've been subscribed and how many newsletters they’ve received. 

Fortunately, an email marketing platform like HubSpot makes it easy for you to not only plan and schedule content upfront but also send emails automatically. In turn, you'll ensure that the right people get the right emails at the right time. 

And speaking of time, no matter who you send emails to, they should be delivered at the time when they're most likely to open your emails. It's simple, when you send emails to a prospect, a lead, or a subscriber to your newsletter at a time when they're most likely to read it, your conversion rate will go up and you'll get a bigger return on your email marketing investment. 

Fortunately, a tool like Seventh Sense can help. It uses artificial intelligence to optimize email frequency and delivery times for every individual in your database.  Personally, I've used it for several client and have seen a great return on open rates and more importantly, engagement.  

With Apples MPP, engagements like clicks, replies, and ultimately conversions are even more important for email marketing metrics.  If you're sending marketing emails with HubSpot, I urge you to check out Seventh Sense.

Focus More on Personalization 

Let’s face it, consumers want valuable content that’s relevant to them. Because of this, personalization is becoming increasingly popular in digital marketing. In fact, nowadays, it's something your customers expect. For example, 31% of customers wish that their shopping experience was more personalized while only 22% feel satisfied with the level of personalization they're getting. 

And it doesn't stop with the customer, as marketers who use personalization in their digital marketing strategies see significant results. For instance, according to survey results, 96% of marketers feel like personalization helped them improve customer relationships. More importantly, though, 88% of marketers said that they improved their business’s results through personalization. 

With email marketing, it's no different as research shows that personalized emails increase open rates by 29%. Fortunately, there are several ways for you to personalize your emails. 

The simplest is probably personalizing the email greeting by inserting your customers' or prospects' first names in the greeting. In this way, you’ll grab their attention as soon as they see the email and it's a perfect way to make your email stand out from crowded inboxes. 

Another way to do this is by using segmented email marketing. Here, you’ll use information you have about your customers and their preferences to send them personalized content. Luckily, you'll likely already have some of this information stored in other business tools and platforms, so you'll be able to see what your customers like, what they've purchased, and what content they engage with. 

What if you don't? Well, then it's as simple as asking them what content they'd prefer when they sign up to receive emails from you. You'll then be able to segment your audience based on their interests, preferences, or expectations and send them relevant content. In this way, you’ll ensure that you send emails to the customers who want to read them. 

Optimize Your Preview Text and Subject Lines 

The saying, "first impressions count" is just as true with email marketing. So, how do you create an impression when using email marketing? It's simple, by optimizing your subject lines and preview text. 

If they don't grab the readers' attention, they simply won't open the emails. In fact, 33% of readers open emails based purely on the subject line. On the other hand, 69% of email recipients will mark an email as spam because of it. Unfortunately, many marketers fall into this trap and spend hours crafting the perfect email without giving any attention to the subject line and preview text.     

Think of it like this. Considering that the ideal length of a subject line is about 40 characters and the preview text adds a few words, readers only have a few words to decide whether they want to open an email. This gives you a very small window of opportunity to pique their interest enough to make them click on the mail. 

With that in mind, you can optimize your subject lines and preview text by:

• Making them more personalized. As mentioned earlier, when you use a reader's first name in the subject line, they'll be more likely to open the email.
• Keeping them short. If your subject lines are too long, your readers will lose interest even before they've finished reading them. This is especially true nowadays considering that many people receive notifications and read emails on their mobile devices.
• Be more descriptive. You should consider being direct and descriptive by communicating what a specific email is about in the subject line.
• Avoid spammy language. Using spammy language is the fastest way for your email to be deleted or sent to the spam inbox.  
• Don’t mislead. It’s important to align your subject lines and preview text with the actual content of the email. If you don’t, your audience will realize and your opening rates will plummet. 

Be Consistent 

A significant contributor to your email marketing campaign's success is being consistent. Generally speaking, consistency relies on various aspects. 

For one, you should ensure that you use your brand voice consistently in all your emails. Look at it like this. Every page on your website uses the same design elements, logos, and typefaces. When it comes to emails, they should be no different. 

This means you should stick to the same email design, colors, and fonts in the e-mails you send. If you don't, you could confuse your audience and fail to show them who you really are as a brand. 

Also, you should use the same size template for every email you send. Here, the ideal width of the template should be about 600 pixels. If not, your readers will need to scroll horizontally to read the email, especially if they are using mobile devices. This makes them less likely to click through, causing your conversion rate to plummet. 

Another important consideration when it comes to consistency is email frequency and when you send emails. As mentioned earlier, the time when you send your emails influences how likely they are to be opened. Here, the advice is that it's best to have a consistent schedule because your audience will then expect your emails in their inboxes. 

Likewise, how often and how many emails you send can also affect you're open rates and, therefore, your conversion rate. The idea is that you should send emails often enough for your business to stay fresh in the minds of your customers. In other words, if you send too many emails, they'll seem like spam. Conversely, if you send too few, your engagement will decrease. 

This thing is, your email marketing frequency will depend on your typical customer's purchase cycle and profile. For example, if your customers only make a purchase every six months, they shouldn't be emailed three times a week.

This makes figuring out exactly how often to send emails to your audience challenging and it could rely on a lot of trial and error. Another option would be to use a tool like Seventh Sense. By using artificial intelligence, it allows you to email customers at their preferred frequency. In turn, this ensures more satisfied customers and higher conversion rates. 

Email Prospects That Want To Read Your Emails 

To get the best results using email marketing, you should only send emails to those people that actually want to read your emails. In turn, your open rate will increase. 

Fortunately, there are a few strategies you can use to make sure the right people get your emails:

• • Ask customers to subscribe. Just because someone has bought a product from you doesn't mean they want to be on your email list or receive your newsletter. It's thus always better to ask customers or visitors to your website to subscribe to your promotions or newsletter. You could even consider using a double opt-in system to ensure that your audience really wants to receive your emails.
  • Manage your email list properly. It's crucial that you manage your email list properly. So, you should remove email recipients who never open your emails from your list. You should also unsubscribe recipients who request you to do so and you should remove addresses that bounce. In this way, your open rate stays high and your messaging reaches the recipients who want to read it.
  • Don’t buy contact lists. When you buy contact lists, you'll get information of people who, in most instances, never had any interaction with your business before. So, when you email these people, they'll more than likely not open your emails. As a result, your open rate and, by implication, your campaign's performance will suffer. 

Apart from ensuring that your messaging reaches the right audience, the strategies mentioned above will also ensure that you stay clear of spam filters. It's simple, once your emails are classified as spam, your entire email marketing campaign could collapse. 

Put Your Main Message and Call to Action Above the Fold 

Nowadays, people don't have the time or the inclination to read lengthy marketing emails, especially considering that the average person receives about 120 emails per day. As a result, you need to get to the point of your email fast. If you don't, your email marketing will simply not be effective and you won't be able to generate leads. 

To do this, you should put your main message and call-to-action in the first section of your email. This allows readers to understand what the email is about and the value they can get by reading it without needing to scroll down. In fact, it's proven that, when calls to action fall below the fold, as many as 70% of readers won’t see it.  

Also, if you succeed in making your readers read the email, you’ll want to remind them of the call-to-action throughout. So, you should repeat your call-to-action at least three times in the body of the email. 

Test and Analyze 

When you don't measure something, you won't have any insights into how to improve it. For this reason, you should test all aspects of your email marketing campaign regularly to not only see how they perform but also how you can improve. 

For example, you can figure out what content, subject lines, and calls to action work best before sending an email to your entire audience. You'll typically do this by using A/B or split tests. During these tests, you'll split your audience into two or more groups. 

One of the groups will then receive one version of an email while the other group will receive another. Once the email has been sent to both groups, you'll be able to track the results. These results will then show you which version of the email your audience prefers. In this way, you can tailor your calls to action, subject lines, and content to what your audience prefers and what is most likely to convert. 

It doesn't stop there, though, and you should also analyze email marketing data during and after your campaign. By using analytics, you'll be able to track some very important email marketing metrics, including:

• • Open rate.
  • Click-through rate (CTR)
  • Conversion rate.
  • Bounce rate.
  • Unsubscribe rate.
  • Return on investment (ROI).

Ultimately, these metrics show you how your campaigns perform which, in turn, gives you the insights necessary to improve your campaigns. In simple terms, you'll be able to see what works, what doesn't, and what your audience likes. 

The Bottom Line 

It’s no secret that email marketing is a very effective tool to not only generate more leads but also to create more awareness about your brand, increase engagement, and build lasting relationships with your audience. The thing is, to be effective, you’ll need to do it right. In other words, you’ll need a well-thought-out email marketing strategy. 

Hopefully, this post helped illustrate some tips and best practices you can use when developing your own email marketing strategy. As you can see from these best practices, the success of your strategy not only depends on what content you distribute but also how you do it.  Interested in learning more?  Feel free to book some 1 on 1 time!