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Email Best Practices for 2019

 In Digital Marketing, Email
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Staying up to date with the trends of what’s happening in your industry is essential as a marketer. And the same goes for your marketing channels too — especially email.

Let’s face it; what worked in email five or even three years ago is not what’s working right now or will propel you forward into the future. So you need to know what other experts and brands are doing to help expand your skill set and gain a competitive advantage.

That’s where this post comes in.

We’re sharing some of our top email best practices for 2019. This is the stuff that is working right now on the cutting edge of email and will help you grow and improve your email list.

Understand your audience

Even today, too many people are still looking at an email list as a big pile of numbers and data. And while we’re in no way saying that isn’t important, the data can only take you so far in connecting with the people on your list.

The rest is up to how you approach your email strategy from the design to the copy of your emails.

So how do you get focused on your audience?

There are a few approaches.

First, look at the way you’re segmenting your audience. How are you breaking up people on your list into different groups? It might not seem like a big thing, but it matters.

Having smaller groups means you can get very targeted and specific with your readers.

And when you do that, you can have a lot of fun with the emails you’re sending too. You can even send fewer, but much more specific emails to your segments too.

But at the end of the day, segmenting your emails leads to higher open and click-through rates; these readers know that you understand their needs and interests and are sending them information that applies directly to them.

That’s pretty powerful — and an easy way to stand out in the sea of generic emails people (including you) get in their inbox every day.

Embrace interactivity

Yes, you’ve probably heard us mention this just a few times, but hey, it’s important.

Interactive content, especially interactive email works, that’s the plain truth. The brands that use these types of emails see improvements on their open and click-through rates which can help add to the bottom line.

There are a few reasons why interactive content succeeds where regular plain text email continues to see falling rates.

The first is it gets people actively engaging. Having that kinetic experience in email, where readers both on their desktops and on mobile devices are clicking, scratching, pulling, and spinning triggers the power of touch.

When people are actively engaging in something that starts to subconsciously build connections in their brains. They begin to value these connections more, feel ownership over them, and can even get conditioned to want to repeat the processes over and over again.

Now, add in the power of reveal marketing. When you’re hiding the fun behind something, you’re now tapping into curiosity and the fear of missing out.

Ask yourself, when someone hands you a scratch ticket, do you really just want to give it back without finding out if you’ve won?

For most people, the answer is no, and that’s why combining interactive content and reveal marketing into one can be such a great way to engage your email list.

Sound like a human

Let’s not forget about another big part of your emails outside the technical stuff, and that’s how you’re communicating with your email list.

A big problem for a lot of brands is they are using the same old boring and generic copy in all of their emails. And when readers see that sort of stuff again and again — in addition to all the other stuff they have inundating their mailbox — they start to ignore it.

Talk about a kiss of death!

While creating fun and engaging interactive emails is one great first step for improving things, another way to tap into your list is to improve what you’re writing.

One way to do that is for brands to start acting like humans.

Take your customers on a journey with you as they move through your list. Think of some of the big successful marketing campaigns that you’ve seen over the last few years and how they are far more human and emotional; Nike’s ‘Dream Crazier’ ads that target women’s empowerment is one example.

You don’t have to have the budget of Nike to understand that what’s powerful to people is other people. So the more you can make your brand seem like it’s a person talking to another person, the better the response you’re going to get over the long term.

The days of talking down to customers is over; look at them as your friends and your peers and communicate with them that way moving forward.

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