Email Marketing Best Practices for 2021
Email best practices may not be as exciting a topic as the newest social media trends or experiential events production. But it’s one that must be addressed for a company to maximize its return on marketing. Email marketing remains a fundamental pillar of customer outreach, and each email a company sends should be intentionally designed to engage the target audience.
Here are four of the most important best practices and forward-looking trends to consider for any email campaign.
1. Personalization is Vital to Email Marketing
Customers want individual attention, and they want to feel like they’re important to your company. Personalization in your email is such a simple way to make people feel valuable. When your business takes the time to set up personalization for its email marketing, it could see up to a 100% increase in the responses it gets to those emails.
A personalized subject line means the customer is more likely to open the email. Inside, they should find a personalized greeting, but you can also tailor the email to their area of interest or their industry. It requires a bit of work to personalize emails, but it can be automated easily using token features inside your email delivery platform. Once the initial setup work is done, personalization tokens work for you to provide a level of personalization shown to make a difference in consumer engagement.
2. Include Video in Your Emails
In 2020, more companies started using video in their emails. It became a trend, and your company should follow along if it hasn’t already. You might see as much as a 65% increase in your click rate when you have videos in your emails. Those videos may also lower your unsubscribe rate. Why? Because people find videos entertaining, and that helps with user engagement.
Just keep in mind that most email programs aren’t set up for video playback. You can add a link to the video, instead, so it’s easy for your customers to watch it. If they can’t play it, they’re going to lose interest pretty quickly.
3. Make Sure You Have Dark Mode Compatibility
Switching to dark mode for reading emails is becoming more common. If your emails aren’t compatible, your customers (and your company) are missing out on the interactions they could have. Outlining black text and using transparent images will help ensure that you’re reaching compatibility.
Additionally, do a test run of the email in dark mode before sending it out. That will help you catch any problems before your customers do.
4. Make Your Email Strategy Customer-Centric
The best thing you can do for your email marketing strategies is make sure they’re customer-centric. Emotional responses are a big part of connecting with your customers, and when you show them empathy or attempt to relate to them in some way they’re much more likely to buy what you have to offer.
Customer satisfaction is the most important thing for any company to look at, and that’s only going to be more accurate in the future. People also want to socialize again, so providing them with relatable content will encourage more of that.
There’s no reason to let your email marketing strategy fall by the wayside when there are so many ways to make it better. Your company stands to make significant engagement and loyalty gains when you use commonly employed best practices to keep customers interested and coming back again and again.
