Email marketing is still an effective tool, as there are 144 billion emails sent in the world on a daily basis (around 53 trillion yearly!). But in such a huge informational flow, how to make sure your message is read, not left without attention, or thrown into a spam folder? We’re sharing with you some effective marketing strategy examples, which we also call approaches.

What is email marketing?

An email campaign is a tool that helps increase awareness of your brand, product, or service among the people to whom you send your emails. The campaign is a time-limited, goal-oriented event, which has one or more goals to fulfill. It is measured with such indices as email number sent, delivery rate, unique openings, unique clicks, transitional rate, cost of review per email, or average order. A company that initiates the email marketing campaign does not always focus only on sales directly – other goals may be increasing or keeping brand awareness, saying hello to new clients or subscribers, offering the newsletter, or informing about new events connected to the product or service.

In order to get your email opened and read, there are several effective email marketing strategies (or approaches, as we call them), which are used nowadays.

Effective marketing strategy examples

1. Don’t personalize your emails with a name.

According to some of the latest studies, emails from an unknown or little known sender with a recipient’s personal name in them may be perceived as aggressive or confusing (like, “Where did you find my name? Did my info leak anywhere?”). Thus, more likely it’ll be addressed to a spam folder or deleted. Especially if a sender isn’t paying much attention to really inserting a name, so a recipient gets something like “Dear [INSERT NAME HERE]!”. The same goes for small letters for the entire name like “Mr. john a. bootlegger”.

There are ways to be personal yet not aggressive. People love when a mail shows their interests or being in the know of what products of a company they are already using. For instance, ‘We thank you for listening to [this music]. And here are some more [albums/songs] of your beloved performers, which you might be interested in.’

2. Subject line.

Email subjects that contain 1-2 words, up to 10 symbols, cause the biggest interest in receivers (because they are believed to be more engaging and light-to-perceive). Anything that would contain 49 (and below) symbols has the biggest open rate. Anything that would contain over 79 symbols has a bigger click-through rate (because it is believed to be more informative). As you can see, the rule of the subject to be between 60 and 70 symbols does not work anymore (as it had worked in the past), as people are obviously tired of same-patterned email subjects.

3. Send emails between 20.00 and 24.00 hours.

All the basic parameters of email campaigns, which we sounded at the beginning of this article, significantly grow (from 20% to 100%) for e-letters that come into inboxes of receivers between 8 and 12 PM. If you remember, just 2-3 years ago, it was believed that the best response rate is in emails sent anywhere between noon and 1 o’clock (during lunch). And you now see how recipients’ preferences changed (people don’t want to be distracted during lunchtime anymore, they prefer reading after work, in their free time).

4. Give something for free.

Anything coming for free is still the best marketing strategy. This can be anything that comes for free immediately (in exchange for some simple actions) or as such attached to the future purchase (as well as a discount). Or even something that goes free of charge for nothing, like a sheer gesture from a brand.

5. Mobile-optimal.

Mobiles and tablets have seized over 50% of the market. The biggest part of website designers and programmers advise building a mobile-optimal website first and only then think of PC and laptop versions. Over 10% of modern Internet users in the world only get online through a phone, not having any other electronic device in possession. If you ignore this “hand-carry” trend, you’re losing over 50% of your business. That rule would be heavy in megabytes & long-bodies emails, which do not fit entirely on a mobile screen in width/height/auto-adjustment and having something like partial loading with an offer to ‘click here’ to view in full.

6. Email still converts better than Facebook or Twitter.

In one of the studies, from 300,000 new referrals attracted by any of these three channels, 50.8% belonged to email, 26.8% belonged to Facebook, and 22% – to Twitter.

7. Send on weekends.

On average 1% more people open and convert during a weekend (Saturday and Sunday) than during any other day of the week.

8. Re-engage.

If you have an inactive group of clients/prospects/leads, sending them letters to re-engage would give a better effect than reaching out to a cold customer base. Doing that is optimal within 90 days after segmenting a client/prospect/lead as inactive.