4 Ways You Can Optimize Your Email Marketing

Email marketing plays a critical role in generating leads. Data from MailChimp shows that a 25% email open rate and a 4% click through rate means your email marketing efforts are successful. What makes email marketing a powerful tool to use is the fact that they can be targeted to a specific audience and can encourage meaningful engagement. B2B companies that use emails are able to personalize their communication better than any other digital channel and get visibility in the eyes of the customers that matter most.

With the effectiveness of conventional communication methods waning off, marketers and salespeople are now prioritizing email marketing to generate leads, increase brand visibility and generate revenue.  Statistics show that 66% of customers purchased items online as a result of email marketing. This number is significantly high considering that only 20% of customers made purchases as a result of social media platforms. According to Databox, email marketing appears to be the most effective way for businesses to re-engage leads.

Source: Databox

So how do you effectively convert leads through email marketing?

1. Add images and videos to your emails

There’s no doubt that visuals are behind the content that goes viral these days. As a result, email communications that includes visuals such as images, videos, infographics and gifs will appeal more to customers than communications that don’t. The growing popularity of highly visual digital platforms such as Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram is a clear indicator that people prefer to engage with visual mediums than they do with written ones.

Truth is, visuals save people time - available data shows that the human brain processes them 60,000 times faster than text. Though emails have been largely text-based, companies can integrate videos and images to encourage interaction. 

Consider using videos to educate and inform your prospects about your products or services. For instance, companies can use videos for product demos, DIY videos and or show how your products solve particular problems. Integrating visuals in email marketing enables companies to:

• Make email content highly engaging
• Raise their brand awareness among prospects
• Improve customer conversion rates

If you do decide to include visuals in your emails, ensure that:

• Your visuals correspond to your brand - this means they communicate your brand story and are in line your branding guidelines
• Your visuals match your email message to avoid distractions
• You use quality, custom images

See how Cuyana uses images in its emails below.

Source: Hubspot

2. Capitalize on call-to-action

In email marketing, the purpose of using CTAs is to encourage customers to take action. Statistics show that companies that include at least one CTA in their email marketing content are able to increase click through rates by 371%. This has a huge impact on sales with increments of up to 1617%. This also makes CTAs critical tools for optimizing customer interactions.

As such, marketers should always complement visual images with strong CTAS that are well aligned with the customer journey stage that their audience is at. To ensure that your audience doesn’t miss out:

• Use a CTA Button as opposed to hyperlinked text. CTA buttons boost conversion rates by up to 28% and are hence more effective
• Use a unique color on the CTA Button. Make your CTA button stand out by picking a bright color that contrasts other colors used in the email.
• Include white space in the email and make your CTA button sizeable
• Use action-oriented words in your CTA to encourage your audience

Source: Campaign Monitor

3. Encourage immediate action

The call to action in an email can determine whether prospective customers take action or not. Employing CTAs that explicitly communicate your product's benefits and unique features to your target audience is critical in converting leads.

However, by themselves, CTAs may not be sufficient to provoke action from leads. As such, companies need to create a sense of urgency in the minds of their target audience. Setting limited time for discounts or product offers is one way to encourage prospective customers to take immediate action. Businesses can subtly communicate this in their email copy and subject lines by including phrases such as:

• 'Download Today'
• 'Buy Now'
• 'Don't Miss Out'

Source: UnboundB2B

The other way to encourage action is to make the sense of urgency more real by adding statistics and specific deadlines. Marketers can do this by highlighting limited product stock by showing the number of items left and using deadline dates as shown in the example below.

Source: Campaign Monitor

To encourage your audience to take immediate action:

• Offer your readers valuable discounts or coupons
• Share valuable content even as you try to sell to your audience
• Show your readers the benefits they will derive from your product or service

4. Automate follow-up emails

Through direct and personalized interactions, email marketing offers businesses a great chance to build relationships with existing and potential customers. Once a lead has received an email and interacted with it, it’s crucial that you keep the relationship going by following-up.

This is often time consuming and marketing aren’t able to individually follow-up every interaction they have. This is where automated follow-up emails come in handy, allowing you to schedule multiple emails and send them to identified leads at the appropriate time. Companies that use email automation software are able to automate email delivery based on the actions taken by individual customers. For instance, the system can send specific product pages or download notifications to those who take relevant actions.

To ensure your leads receive relevant follow-up emails and increase their responsiveness, segment your target audience so you know what content to send to them and when to send it. Automating follow-up emails enables marketers to follow-up on numerous leads in a targeted manner and be able to do so faster, ultimately improving your lead conversion rates.