Did you know that email marketing is the most cost-effective way to drive sales and revenue?

We often think the benefit of digital marketing is the ability to reach millions of people at once, but that's only half of the equation. The other benefit of digital media is the ability to connect to millions with precise targeting and to still be personal. An example of this can be seen in email marketing.

Email marketing remains an extremely efficient way to reach customers especially when you provide people with important content and promotions.

"Email is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences, behind only colleague recommendations and industry-specific thought leaders."

According to DMA, targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue and marketers have recognized up to a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns.The only thing which can hold you back from driving a high email marketing ROI is the lack of email personalization.

It’s been found that on an average, more than 13 emails are hitting the inbox of an average subscriber on a daily basis. If your emails are not personalized and customized to the choices of individual subscribers, they are likely to get ignored, making your entire campaign less effective.

Here are some important ways to personalize your emails and boost your email marketing ROI.

1. Personalized Email Marketing

Simple and easy way to attract your customers’ attention is by using their name. Personalized emails boost the click-through rate by 14 percent. Placing your customer's name in the ‘to’ field, or at the very beginning of your message is especially important in the on-boarding process because it can create a relationship with the customer.

Behavioural targeting is the superior version of personalized marketing. The simplest way to do this is by looking at their purchase or click pattern. When you figure out what, a customer buys or looks at specific items, you can send them a triggered email suggesting other items that they might be interested in.

2. Provide Valuable Information:information-request-800x537

Let’s assume that you have created a great email with a flexible template, appropriate design and persuading content, but unfortunately, you send it to the wrong person. Will that bring any lead to your business? The truth is that it won’t even get opened.

This is the only reason, why context is such an important component of email marketing. The email will not be opened by the recipients unless you provide any value to them. Recipients scan their inbox without much attention. So if the email you have sent to the subscriber does not seem important and attractive at a glance, then they will overlook it.

Include the problem you wish to solve in your subject line of the email. Do not save the best for the last or you may end up going unnoticed.

While sending emails to your subscribers, keep these points in mind:

· Tell them how you intend to help them with what you do.

· If your services have no importance to a group of subscribers, DO NOT send your emails to them.

3. Auto responders

In order to increase ROI and to develop customer’s trust Auto-responders is the best way. There are mainly two types of autoresponders which are:

1. Action Based

Purchase/shipping confirmation – Mail an autoresponder which will let your customer know that their purchase has been confirmed. If a customer didn’t actually make a purchase, seeing this message will prompt them to contact you, so both are protected in case of fraud.

Sign-up confirmation – Why welcome emails? It is found that the average open rate of a welcome email is 50 percent, which is 86 percent higher than regular newsletters. Grab this opportunity and present your new subscribers a special discount!

Birthday emails – This is the best way to increase your ROI. Birthday emails are a great way to not only go near to customers and make them feel connected with your business but by offering a special birthday offer you can increase your revenue.

2. Time-Based

autoresponder

Newsletters – Content cycles triggered on a specific day of the week or month are great ways to keep in touch with customers, let them know about special offers your business might have, or inform them about changes or new products.

Follow up – if you have a new customer it is good to set up a time-based autoresponder. For example, set up an autoresponder to be sent out a week after they sign-up for your list, and offer them a special discount. With a special offer, people are then more likely to purchase again.

4. Divide your email list

divide email list

Email segmentation is one of the best approaches to send personalized emails to your subscribers. Sadly, many marketers overlook the importance of email segmentation. Email segmentation offers you to send personalized emails to each individual. It categorizes every lead into different groups depends on the common interests for example customer personas, user demographics, onsite behavior , etc.

Through email segmentation, you can send laser-targeted emails to each group addressing their common interest. And so, if the emails which you have send grabs the interest of recipients then it will ultimately boost your email’s open rates & engagement.

5. Subject lines should be engaging

Engaging subject lines are a very important part of the email campaign. It ensures people to open your emails, learn more about your company, and ultimately become customers.

The finest subject lines are the one which is concise and personal, uses strong verbs, and give readers an accurate idea of what they can expect to find inside the email.

Subject lines can also be used to convey a sense of urgency like “Don’t miss our exclusive webinar!” or “Register now to save your spot!” Don’t forget to incentivise with discounts and special offers.

6. Cross-Channel Marketing

Email marketing is an authoritative & powerful tool, but you can make it even more powerful by incorporating social media strategy into your newsletters! With social media sharing buttons, your emails will have a far greater reach.

Your customer is able to increase your email’s audience by sharing it with his/her Facebook friends or Twitter followers.

Moreover, placing a “sign-up “call to action button on your Facebook page, or integrating an email sign-form will take your social media leads to your email list.

Always keep in mind, when you are taking your contacts and social media fans to your list, it increases your email’s value. You can generate more leads and double over on your customer

7. Avoid The Spam FilterOne of the foremost reasons why email marketing is not often considered to bring in high revenue is that of its improper content. Most of the times, the emails that you want to send to the people land in their spam folder or promotional tabs instead of their inbox. Therefore, people do not open them.

Unnecessary to say, an email that does not go into the inbox will never grasp the attention of its addressee. Your struggle in creating and sending the email will totally get wasted.

To avoid your emails from ending up in the spam folder, stop making them appear entirely promotional.

Train your subscribers, provide them with valuable information, and NEVER use the typical attention-grabbing words.

8. A/B Testing

ab testing

What can you do with all the feedback you receive? You can start analyzing & testing different approaches to see how customers respond to an old or new edition of your email. It could be as easy as changing the copy of your welcome mail, changing your call-to-action button, or adding more or less social sharing buttons. Whatever it is, it’s very important that you run an A/B test prior to you start a whole new campaign.

Keep trying new hypotheses until you learn to get to the bottom of customer behavior .

Some of the chief metrics to consider when testing your emails are delivered messages, open rates, click through rates, and performance differences.

9. Follow up

Just wait for about a week and then give a mild nudge – it’s entirely worth taking the time to follow up, as people often miss your first email, it goes to spam, or they’re just totally overwhelmed by their inbox.

Therefore, if you forward just a few emails per day and some of those people convert to paying clients or awesome collaborators, it’s worth the time you invested, right?

Final Advice

As you possibly noticed, all of the above points relate to each other. In turn, to fully succeed in your email marketing campaign and increase your ROI, you may need to take a good look at as many of these points as possible.

So take some time and think about what your email marketing is lacking and start building a strategy with an approach that develops your ROI success process:

Feedbacks -> Personalization -> Testing -> Analyzing.

As you revamp your emails, you will start seeing changes in your ROI.

There are different tools that can help you to calculate accurately & closely monitor your performance, so be sure to take advantage of them.

And finally, take advantage of the results you see. They might just surprise you.

Author's Bio: 

Ricky Makan is a Senior Digital Marketing Consultant & founder of Absoltz Internet Marketing SEO Agency in Sydney Australia, with over 10 years online experience. He has helped businesses of all sizes increase the return on investment from their online marketing spend.