Are you planning to start doing email marketing for 2018?
1. Send email to lists that want to hear from you
The biggest mistake you can ever do is to send emails to everyone — regardless their interest. Email marketing is a super targeted marketing strategy. Therefore, you need to ensure that emails delivered are highly cusotmized and targeted to specific audiences.
Pro tip: The best way is to create different email lists or tag your email subscribers properly. Tools such as ConvertKit and Drip allow you to tag your audience based on their actions.
2. Have a goal for each email before you press send
Setting a goal is critical and it is definitely one of the top 10 email marketing tips for 2018. Goals doesn’t need to be complicated and you certainly don’t have to have dozens of them before sending out an email.
Simple goals such as number of open, open rates, click through rates (CTR) and number of reach are great goals to start with.
3. Personalize and test your emails
Don’t just send out cold emails. Instead, make sure you spend 30 minutes customizing each email before sending it out. For example, I make sure that the tone of each email is accordance to the reason the subscribers subscribed to my list. If they are interested in WordPress, I’ll make sure they get WordPress related news and not other topics.
Once that is done, test your email! Work with both long and short forms email title, content and even different forms of media. Analyze through the reporting feature of your email marketing software and determine which is the one that best fits your business.
Need help? Here are the top 3 email marketing tools for 2018 that come with detailed analytics reports.
4. Send emails from a personalized account
Are you sending emails through Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook?
Please. Stop. Doing. This.
It doesn’t make you look professional and instead, use your domain’s email address. This bring authority to the email and more importantly, it tells Google and other email service providers that your email is genuine and not spam.
5. Experiment with sending emails on different days of the week
There is no such thing as “the best time to send email” because it is highly dependent on your subscribers.
The best way is to test this out with your email marketing tool.
How to gauge the results?
Personally, I prefer using open rates and number of reach as it gives me a good idea about my audience.
Pro tip: The process of testing different times in a day and different day on the week is tedious. However, this is one of the best email marketing tips for 2018 if you want to make email marketing work for you.
6. Keep engaging with your subscribers
It doesn’t matter if you are sending once a day, weekly or monthly emails to your subscribers. Keeping up with the pace and making sure that you deliver every time is important to build trust with your subscribers.
Don’t have enough time? Do it once a month and even schedule the emails in advance!
7. Clean up your un-engaged subscribers to avoid sending graymail
When is the last time you clean up your list? I do it once every quarter. If you use email automation such as ConvertKit, Drip or AWeber, you can easily segment email subscribers through their level of activeness.
With this, you can easily filter our those who are inactive and take the next course of action; either sending them an email to confirm if they are still interested or simply remove them automatically after a certain time period of inactiveness.
8. Don’t panic when people unsubscribe
People unsubscribe all the time and there is no reason for you to panic if there is unsubscribers on a daily basis. This is the bread and butter of email marketing.
The only time you should be panic is when people starts unsubscribing in large numbers. This means that something is dearly wrong with your email marketing strategy.
Personally, I do appreciate my email subscribers to unsubscribe than I have to clean up the list myself.
9. If people stop opening your emails, figure out what’s going on fast
One of the top email marketing tips for 2018 is to watch your open rates. A research done by the Radicati Group shows that the number of emails receive by each person increases by the year. I am getting around 120 emails in a day and the number is growing by the weeks!
As you receive more emails, it is common that you will stop opening those that are not important. Therefore, when people stop opening your emails, start asking yourself “why” and figure out a solution fast!
Most commonly, it is simply because the content that you share is not interesting for many. Working on your content (title and context) could easily increase the email open rates.
10. If you want to learn more about email marketing, take up free email marketing courses
Last but not least, the best email marketing tips for 2018 is to start learning email marketing today!
Email marketing is not as easy as blogging or content writing. It takes some learning and of course experience. However, here’s a small problem. Experience takes time — months and years of training and experimenting new email marketing strategies.
Lucky for you, I have a solution for you. Introducing ConvertKit’s Product Creation Masterclass.
Click to discover how ConvertKit’s Product Creation Masterclass can help you in email marketing
What is the Product Creation Masterclass?
- A four week long project walking you through every step it takes to create a successful product from scratch.
- Daily lessons sent straight to the registrants inbox, Monday through Friday running January 15th through February 9th.
- Weekly live trainings led by the ConvertKit team walking through the lessons and answering questions
- Expert interviews from Melyssa Griffin, Jeff Goins, Chris Guillebeau, and Maya Elious where they share their experience in building online products
- Free trials to Samcart and Thinkific for all registrants, including a 30 day free trial of ConvertKit for new customers