Email Marketing for Startups: Everything You Need to Know

According to statistics, the number of email users is projected to grow to 254.7 million by 2020. That’s almost half of the world’s population. As a marketer, it is in your best interest to make the most of email marketing and indulge in one-on-one conversations. It is an apt tool to build an audience, convert leads and gain new customers.

However, for an email marketing campaign to work, you need to ensure your message is correct and engaging enough to not bore the reader. Don’t ignore the fact that your prospective customer is bombarded with a hoard of promotional messages at every given point. For them to give you attention to you would need some creativity and efficiency from your end.

Listed below are some email marketing tips to help you craft your campaign.

Take your subject lines seriously

Your subject line is your selling point. The right subject line will entice the reader to open your email and see what you have to offer. But it does not end there. Your preview text needs to be just as exciting. Creating an engaging subject line followed by a strong preview text is likely to up your email marketing campaign game.

Here’s an example of subject lines that we Digg.

If you’re in the process of promoting a huge campaign or your startup, then you need to pay heed to these seemingly minute details. Cause that’s where the real magic happens.

Use Email marketing to offer value

Having an email base may feel like you have it going well, but that’s only the first step of email marketing. You have offer value to that base if you want to win their business. You have to offer content that isn’t constantly promoting your product or service.

Having a blog section on your website can help you achieve this. You start creating content about how your product helps solve their problems. Offering them actionable tips and tricks in a fantastic way to add value to your blog and in turn, your email newsletter.

Adopt a customer-centric approach

Getting the attention of an average internet surface is no easy feat. Your readers have a short attention span and one of the ways to combat that is to get more personal. We’re living in an era of customer-centric marketing, so it makes sense to embrace it. To be able to do that, you have to start by segmenting your audience.

For instance, you can share different content with your male audience and different content with the female ones. You can also adjust your email marketing messaging depending on whether the person on the receiving end is a new customer or a loyal one.

Pay special attention to the subject line and the first paragraph of your email as they determine whether your email will be read or not.

Time your emails

We live in the world of smartphones. So, chances are your recipient will get the “new email received” notification on their phone. But that doesn’t mean they will at once open and read it. When it comes to setting a time to send your emails, there is no general rule. You will have to keep testing.

One way to do this is to divide your audience into two segments and send email to one set in the morning and the other set in the evening. Study the metrics afterward and determine which period was more receptive for better email deployment. Take it a notch higher by further segmenting the audience and the time frame to see which ones get higher open rates.

Keep your message clean and simple

In an attempt to promote your product/service, you don’t have to create over-the-top fancy emails. In fact, keeping your message clean and simple is likely to get more attention. Be brief in your email and give your readers a simple and clear call-to-action. It’ll help you earn new subscribers, especially the kind who prefer to skim through emails. This is a crucial technique to consider when working on your email marketing strategy.

Uber does this really well. Their emails are simple and therefore highly effective. They inform their subscribers about their ongoing deals and promotions briefly, which is highly attractive and effective.

Personalize your emails, but without the recipient’s name

An important element of email marketing is building relationships. Do the recipients trust you? Do they know who you are? Humans tend to get uncomfortable with excessive friendly behavior in the beginning. Now imagine if a brand were to do that! When an email jumps the gun by being too familiar too soon, it comes across as skeevy. Intimacy is earned in real life and it would appear to be the same with emails.

Faking familiarity can turn off the reader, but this doesn’t mean that all forms of personalization are off the table. Sending emails that acknowledges the reader’s purchase history or demographics can seem less threatening and trigger a more positive response.

When it comes to email marketing, personalization has to be done in a meaningful way. It takes little knowledge (and mostly a software) to add the recipient’s name in your email. It shows far greater care when you personalize the email to the readers’ preferences and their history.

For instance, Rdio used to implement this beautifully by dispensing the formalities completely and directly providing with the recipient’s music taste.

Conclusion

Email marketing delivers result; however, the approach has changed significantly over the years. It’s not about one size fits all anymore. You can’t send the same message to your audience. Now you need to send targeted messages that are personalized and perfected for multiple devices. The more you care for your reader, the more positive results your email marketing will deliver, and your business will continue to grow.