Email remains an effective marketing channel, but organizations need to find ways to stand out from the crowd and provide relevant, personalized content if they want their campaigns to be successful.
At HubSpot's Inbound 2023 conference in Boston, speakers highlighted ways marketers can improve their email marketing strategies. Email marketing can help your organization build brand awareness and connect with customers, but common challenges such as spam filters and a competitive landscape can prevent your emails from reaching your target audience. there is.
Marketers need to know common email marketing challenges and how to overcome them to increase open rates and engagement.
1. Avoid spam filters
Email service providers use spam filters to protect users from unwanted communications. As a result, marketers' emails often end up in spam folders. These filters use algorithms to analyze various factors such as the sender's overall engagement rate, keywords in the subject line, and the sender's girlfriend's IP address to ensure that the email is delivered to the recipient's inbox. determine whether or not.
The session was titled “Debate: Email — Get the Open! vs. Get the Response!” Jay Schwedelson, CEO of marketing services company Outcome Media, explained that the more emails marketers send, the more engagement they get and the more effectively they can evade spam filters.
“I need to send more emails than I do now… [but] “It's about the secret sauce. Don't send something like, 'Hey, our company is great,'” Schwedelson said during the session. …Put out real content, real things that matter to people. ”
Marketers need to understand their customers' interests, wants, and needs and use those insights to send relevant, personalized emails multiple times a week. In the same session, Nancy Harhat, chief creative officer at Massachusetts-based advertising agency HBT Marketing, said these emails must have informational, educational, and entertainment value for customers. . Sending frequently relevant emails increases engagement and helps your organization avoid spam folders.
2. Get the recipient's attention
The average person receives dozens of marketing emails every day, so marketers struggle to stand out in recipients' inboxes. To improve open rates, marketers can optimize email addresses and subject lines.
Email recipients first and foremost check the sender's address. Chris Eichelsheim, director of inbound marketing at Dtch, said using a person's name in the address rather than a generic department name makes the email feel more personal. Digitals is a marketing agency based in the Netherlands.For example, an email like [email protected] They typically have higher open rates and higher engagement than things like: [email protected].
The recipient then checks the subject line. In the session “New Email Marketing Test Ideas and Pitfalls to Avoid,” Schwedelson said marketers need to experiment with subject lines that appeal to recipients' desires.
For example, a B2B marketer selling financial management technology might send an email to a finance director with the subject line, “6 Trends Every CFO Should Know.” These subject lines can generate high open rates, as directors are often looking to fill C-suite positions in the future.
3. Creating convenience
Advances in automation tools have made people increasingly impatient and expecting technology to complete mundane tasks for them. Customers demand convenience, so marketers need to make it easy to complete email actions.
For example, email marketers often struggle to get people to fill out forms, says Jessica Bell, digital marketing strategist at Growth Spurt Agency. If your email includes a call-to-action button that takes you to a landing page with a form, many customers won't fill out that button, even if they're interested in your offer.
“People don’t want to take the time to fill out a form, even if it’s just two minutes. [ways] we were able to get through it [by] We do one-click email,” Bell said in an interview.
One-Click Email allows your customers to forward personal information such as their name and email address to a form, so they can sign up for offers like webinars, e-books, loyalty programs, and more with just one click. This automation provides convenience to your customers, which increases engagement rates.
4. Improve click-through rate
Another challenge with email marketing is the fact that customers increasingly expect convenience. Marketers need to know that most recipients don't read emails carefully from beginning to end.
To keep the recipient's attention, marketers should keep emails no more than three lines long, says Schwedelson. Long blocks of text turn people away and reduce click-through rates (CTR).
Additionally, Bell says marketers should include only one call-to-action or link in their emails to avoid confusion. As with long blocks of text, emails with multiple links or buttons can overwhelm readers and reduce CTR.
According to Schwederson, marketers can also add a postscript at the end of the email. Because these lines tend to grab people's attention. Short blocks of text, bullet points, brightly colored buttons, and postscripts can help your customers quickly understand the content of your email, which can increase your CTR.
5. Effective use of generative AI
Since ChatGPT went public in November 2022, marketers have increasingly relied on generative AI to write marketing copy. Despite the usefulness of this technology, these tools can also pose challenges for email marketing. For example, it can produce unnatural and formulaic content.
“We've asked our AI tools to write multiple stories, and they always use terms like 'picture this' and 'in conclusion.' “A lot of people just copy and paste the results, but you can immediately see that it’s AI,” Bell said.
To make AI-generated content feel authentic, marketers should edit their copy and remove boilerplate or repetitive language.
Generative AI is also an emerging technology, so marketers may not know how to use it most effectively. Conference presenters provided many tips to help inexperienced AI users get started.
For example, marketers can use tools to convert long-form content such as blog articles into marketing emails and social media posts, Schwederson said. This content transformation feature allows marketers to reuse existing work across different channels and improve overall productivity.
Marketers can also use generative AI for content ideation.
“I compile a list of things I want to say, and then… I see if there's anything I missed. Maybe I got seven really good marks, and suddenly I have something to chat about. What? is coming back? Two or three more things coming back that I hadn't thought of,” Harhat said.
The future of email marketing
As technology advances, organizations can expect new marketing channels to emerge, and email will continue to coexist with these channels due to its effectiveness. Still, with advances in AI and automation, consumers will expect more convenience than ever before.
Overall, email marketers need to keep their emails easy to understand and provide relevant content. You should also stay up to date on emerging technologies such as spam filter algorithms and generative AI that can enhance or challenge your campaigns.
