Every experienced marketer will tell you about the value that email marketing brings to the table. It’s no wonder 37% of brands opted to increase their investment in email marketing during 2022. But, to be here, you must look for new and effective ways to outperform your competition. Together, we will discover the key email marketing features enabling you to take your email campaigns to the next level. So, let´s kick things off with a definition.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing involves creating and sending emails to the contacts within your mailing list to inform them about new products or services, important business news, upcoming events, exclusive offers, and more. With the right email marketing tool, you can craft the perfect email using pre-designed templates and schedule your emails to reach your recipients at the right time. It’s a tried-and-tested approach to generate credibility and build lasting relationships with your recipients. And there’s more to it.
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How can your business benefit from email marketing?
The importance of email marketing has been debated many times in the past. Throughout the years, though, most modern businesses have realized the advantages it offers and chosen to integrate it into their marketing mix. It’s time to see why.
- It offers a direct line of communication: Email marketing is a direct and personal way to contact recipients. By giving up their email addresses, recipients grant you access to their inbox, probably the most personal digital space they own and check daily.
- Emails foster relationships: This channel enables you to nurture new leads and get them to recognize your products or services. Also, it boosts customer retention by strengthening the relationship with your existing customers. Sharing valuable email content is a bulletproof method to foster loyalty and trust.
- It’s cost-effective: As already mentioned, email marketing generates high ROI for every dollar spent. On top of that, free email marketing services offer you advanced capabilities to power up your game for free or at a reasonable price. Not to mention you have the opportunity to scale your efforts as your business grows.
- You make it about them: Your customers come across tons of digital promotions daily, most of them being about the brands. But your email campaigns allow you to show the value of your product or service. How? By highlighting how it addresses their pain points and makes their lives easier.
- You can customize your outreach: The personalization options that most ESPs offer let you tailor your email content and offers to match your subscribers’ demographics, buying habits, or psychographic data. Personalized targeting is critical to demonstrating your business can provide specific solutions based on each customer’s needs.
- It delivers measurable results: Email marketing provides measurable and accurate results to monitor your email performance. By keeping track of email marketing metrics like your open, click-through, or conversion rate, you monitor the effectiveness of your emails and refine future communications based on the data collected.
8 Key Features to Power Up Your Email Marketing in 2023
We have already established why your email marketing campaigns should be integral to your overall marketing plan. But to make every email count, you must stay ahead of the game. So, here are the key email marketing features to leverage and reach success.
1. Personalization
Dispatching personalized emails to recipients shows them you have taken the time to learn a few things about them and want to cater to their specific needs through customized content. Unfortunately, though, gone are the days when basic segmentation and adding your recipient’s name to a catchy email subject line would do the trick. In 2023, customers expect genuinely relevant experiences, no matter their stage within the customer lifecycle.
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From dispatching emails on special occasions like a subscriber’s anniversary with your business to delivering product recommendations to their inboxes, personalization drives engagement and conversions. However, finding the silver lining between delivering personalized experiences and creeping readers out has become all that harder. Additionally, new privacy regulations form an additional obstacle in accessing recipient data.
That´s why requesting the right information during your sign-up process is crucial. Users who complete your subscription form freely give up their data in exchange for relevant offerings. This way, you generate qualified leads genuinely interested in your business news and promotions. And since they have given you permission to access and manage their data, you avoid legal trouble. After you get your hands on the right information, you only need to get your creative juices flowing to craft customized email content that addresses your readers’ unique preferences.
2. Email marketing automation
Email marketing automation is about setting up automated emails or email series to target the right audience at the right time. What constitutes the right time? Well, it depends on the selected triggers, meaning the predefined action or event that will set your automation in motion. The challenge with email automation, however, is to treat it in such a way that automated emails don't feel auto-generated, too.
This email marketing feature lets you automate your communication based on what and when recipients want to hear from your business. There are numerous ways to leverage automation in your emails, regardless of the stage your subscriber is at within the customer journey. Once a recipient joins your email list, you can use a welcome email or sequence to onboard them and set expectations regarding your value proposition.
Especially for e-commerce businesses, email marketing automation is among the most powerful tools to boost conversions. From directing recipients to their abandoned carts to sending product recommendations based on their purchasing or browsing history, the sky is the limit on how to engage them. Even something as simple as sending an order confirmation email can become a business opportunity with email automation. And with AI technology entering the picture, email automation strategies will become even more laser-focused.
3. Mobile optimization
Every savvy marketer knows that mobile optimization goes hand in hand with modern email marketing. That’s because the majority of your recipients check their inboxes on the go through mobile devices. But let the numbers speak for themselves:
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So, creating visually appealing emails that users with small screens can easily navigate through is a lot more than a mobile marketing trend. It’s imperative that you design your emails to render perfectly, no matter the device used to display them. If you use email templates, ensure they are responsive and adapt to all device types and screen sizes.
But to take user-friendliness to the next level, there are more factors to consider when optimizing your emails for mobile devices. Here are some essential tactics to implement:
- Avoid large blocks of text
- Write concise copy with adequate white space
- Opt for a well-structured and clear layout
- Use short and to-the-point subject lines
- Include a single and straightforward CTA
- Remove unnecessary visual elements to reduce loading times
4. Interactive content
Interactivity in emails has been on the rise for many years. But in 2023, interactive content is more than creating appealing emails that grab readers' attention. It’s about enhancing the email experience and getting readers one step closer to completing the action you need them to. By removing friction points, brands increase the chances of recipients performing the desired action right then and there.
Interactive elements may vary, from animated CTAs and countdown timers to rollover effects or interactive games. You could leverage the components that best serve your email objectives as long as they motivate recipients to engage with your email content by clicking, swiping, or watching. For instance, you could use product carousels to showcase your products or include a survey or poll within your email content instead of directing users to a dedicated landing page.
Doing so enables subscribers to act on your call to action straight from your email without going through endless clicks and jumping from one page to another. Such an option eventually facilitates the buying process while offering users a seamless experience they’ll remember.
5. User accessibility
None of the features mentioned above and the ones that follow will make sense if the user can’t access your emails. Therefore, user accessibility is an absolute necessity instead of an essential email marketing feature. If your emails don’t comply with accessibility standards, you risk losing a large percentage of your audience and trust us when we say they won’t come back. This percentage includes distinct groups, from people with permanent impairments to those with situational restrictions, like a busy parent viewing your email while holding their baby.
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All subscribers who join your email list expect a memorable and equal experience. To make your messages accessible to every user, here are some tips to help you rise to the occasion:
- Select a simple typeface that boosts readability
- Use an uncluttered design for readers to spot crucial information easily
- Break up text with visual elements, bullet points, and headings
- Include alternative text for your images so that users relying on screen readers comprehend their purpose
- Make sure your email links and buttons are prominently displayed and accessible
- Be mindful of the colours you use, as well as the colour contrast between your text and its background–the same goes for your CTA
6. Artificial intelligence
The contribution of artificial intelligence in marketing is up for discussion. Most marketers view AI as a potential threat to their jobs when they should focus on its advantages, one of them being freeing time for creative tasks and taking some of the pressure off. AI is here to change the marketing field in 2023 and for years to come. Many marketing professionals are already taking advantage of the technology to personalize their content marketing, optimize their ads, or analyze data.
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Especially for email marketing, AI facilitates automating specific tasks. For instance, it could enable small businesses to create larger volumes of content or make it more laser-focused. Some of its other uses in email marketing involve building or sanitizing mailing lists, creating email subject lines or CTAs, optimizing email sending times, collecting and analyzing metrics faster, or suggesting ways to improve your email campaigns.
Don’t get us wrong; AI won’t replace the human factor any time soon. However, it can reduce some of the workload when handling non-creative activities. But more importantly, AI will serve as a source of inspiration for copywriters, designers, and other marketing professionals in optimizing future email marketing campaigns.
7. Data Privacy
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that required marketers to have a user’s consent to access their data changed email marketing once and for all. Meanwhile, the CAN-SPAM Act came into effect to prevent spam emails from landing in recipients' inboxes. Privacy regulations keep getting stricter, leading marketers to worry their email marketing efforts will suffer from the upcoming changes.
Although, it’s the other way around. Data privacy and anti-spam regulations have made the email marketing industry safer for brands and email subscribers. On the user’s side, they have the option to give up their data in exchange for some type of lead magnet, like an Ebook, a free trial, or a video. Companies, on the other hand, get to grow their newsletter subscribers and understand their prospective customers’ needs.
But getting a user’s consent to add them to your email list won’t be enough. So, here are a few things to consider to improve data privacy and stay compliant with legal requirements:
- Ensure you have a comprehensive and transparent data collection and management privacy policy. Adding this policy to a dedicated page on your website is equally essential for every visitor to review.
- Give recipients a visible and clear option to unsubscribe from your email marketing material or change their email preferences. Whatever you do, don’t hide your unsubscribe link or use unclear messaging that confuses users regarding what comes upon clicking it.
- Stay away from deceptive tactics related to spammers, such as using spam words in your email subject lines or not including your company’s physical address in your emails. Moreover, ensure your email content is aligned with your subject lines, or else you’ll risk annoying readers, which, in turn, may result in them marking your email as spam.
- Invest in a reliable ESP that meets email compliance requirements, allowing users to opt out while managing their personal information as required. Such software usually gives marketers insight into whether or not their content will be displayed correctly on email clients or if spam filters could block it.
8. Detailed analytics
One of the main reasons behind the effectiveness of emails is that monitoring their performance is an easy and simple process. Robust email marketing services provide detailed reporting to track several recipient actions like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and more. Tracking these metrics enables businesses to put data at the center of their email marketing efforts and leverage them to improve future email content.
Email marketing solutions usually allow previewing your analytics through a unified dashboard. There, you can check things like the email clients or devices your emails are mostly viewed on, the demographic groups with high levels of engagement, the percentage of readers that forward your emails, or the elements your audience clicks on the most.
Apple’s changes in its operating system have already resulted in turning open rates into a somewhat inaccurate metric, thus reducing the necessity to monitor it. On the contrary, unsubscribe or click-through rates will be among the most crucial key performance indicators (KPIs) for email marketers worldwide. But no matter the metrics you define as the most crucial for your business, they will serve as your guide on what works and what doesn’t so that you can improve your email marketing results over time.
How can your business benefit from email marketing?
Email signature: Using a well-crafted email signature can significantly benefit your business in email marketing. An attractive and informative mail signature can serve as an additional promotional tool. By including links to your website or social media profiles, you can increase brand visibility and drive traffic to your online assets, ultimately boosting your marketing efforts"
Final Words
If history has taught us one thing about email marketing, it’s that it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing method. Key email marketing features keep evolving, and brands of every industry and type should step up their game accordingly if they want to make the most out of their email campaigns.
While features such as personalized content, automation workflows, and mobile optimization have been around for a long time, others, like email interactivity or artificial intelligence, have just started to show their potential. User accessibility and data privacy have become a necessity rather than an essential email marketing feature.
Last but not least, investing in detailed analytics is an all-time classic capability that helps you power up future email marketing communications. So, just follow the tips shared in this article and get ready for your conversions and sales to skyrocket.
If you need help with driving sales, say no more. At TechWyse Internet Marketing, we offer clients a huge range of services that are catered to their each and every need. From SEO and Web Design to Social Media Management and Content Marketing. Choose our services and get ready to stay ahead of the game! To book an appointment, call (416)-410-7090 or contact us here.
