Advanced email hacks for serious marketers

Tuesday June 14, 2016 , 6 min Read

Email marketing is more than just broadcasting your promotions to a database of emails and praying to get conversions.

When it comes down to grabbing and retaining eyeballs, email is proven to be the best – 95% of online consumers use email to buy goods and services, while 77% of consumers prefer email for communications. But only a small percentage of emails are actually read. If readers feel that the email is irrelevant, they can move it to their spam folders in a click. So learning the basic etiquette and, also, a few advanced skills of email marketing can be quite useful.

Chirayu Akotiya, Product Manager at MyOperator, recently spilled his email marketing secrets at a HelloMeets community event. Here is the exclusive and unfiltered crux of his learning in this field.

Image credit- Shutterstock

PHASE 1: EQUIPPING YOURSELF

The broadcast list – baby steps

Many marketers wonder how to get a good email list from scratch. There is an astonishingly simple way to tackle this problem, as follows.

a. The search

Simply post blogs about your product/service on different networking sites and form relevant groups. Alternatively, you can search for existing groups and if you get lucky then there could be a thread where somebody has asked for emails. This happens more often than you would expect.

b. E-mail extractions

The list of emails can be very large and hence cumbersome and time consuming for a person to copy-paste each email. A shortcut to this is to use email extractor tools and extensions.

c. The necessary touch-up

Associating names with these emails is a hit-and-trial scenario as most emails have the first name of the person followed by the last name followed by a number like his or her birth year. Google sheets and Excel have simple formulas that can split the contents of a cell into multiple cells based on a separator like a number.

d. Sorting

Once your email list becomes large and organised enough, say 2000+, you may need to divide your list into chunks based on user’s preferences, so as to keep it the least intrusive and not annoy customers with unwanted content.

It’s okay if your database is not large enough. Getting 1000 conversions out of 1,00,000 emails is better than 100 out of a billion.

Emailing without knowing the email address!

What if we told you that you can send someone an email without even knowing his or her email address? This can be done with the help of Facebook. If a Facebook account user has used his personal email address while creating his or her Facebook account, then the profile link can be used to send that person an email on his personal email address.

For example: https://www.facebook.com/vj.nitin.

The above is my Facebook profile. In order to send me an email, all one has to do is send that email to [email protected], where “vj.nitin” is taken from the profile link. Facebook will automatically forward it to my Inbox! Go ahead and try this on your own Facebook link!

Why beat around the bush and check complex analytics to assess success in email marketing. Getting good conversions is the best metric there is period.

PHASE 2: THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

The 3Rs of email marketing

- Right time to broadcast the mails

- Relevant people who will receive the mail

- Right way to present the content

This above trifecta will not only please your selective audience, but also keep the load on you to the minimum.

Five points to keep in mind for a good email

Personalise each message: Using the receiver’s name in the Subject line as well as the body of the text makes the user feel special and it may even hit emotional chords.
Using trackable links: Obviously this helps you to analyse the conversion rates through emails.
Using bullets: Long paragraphs of text in an email often do not get read because they subconsciously feel fatiguing to the eyes.
Always use a CTA (call to action) button: This is where you embed whatever you want the reader to do after he reads the email. Maybe a transaction or a link to a webpage for detailed information etc.
Don’t forget the mobile experience: It’s the user’s prerogative to view your content on a device of their choice, so you have to take care of both desktop and mobile experience.

Bonus tips

While many marketing domain names get blacklisted for sending a lot of promotional emails (cold emails), there is a good way to gain back the reputation from, say, Google (postmasters) by simply getting a lot of people to un-spam your email and get your emails out of their promotions folder. One simple way to do this is to open a Facebook group and get the members to do the above while giving them some incentive like free coupons etc.

In Chirayu’s experience, Tuesday 4PM worked out to be the best time to push out bulk emails for them at MyOperator. This metric will vary depending on many factors like what is your product about, which day of the week/month your customers need your product or service etc. Which date and time is suitable for sending emails about your product can be determined only by hit-and-trial and observations.

Replace spammy words like ‘discount’ with ‘waiver’, and replace ‘chance’ with ‘opportunity’. There are bots that detect them and rank down your emails. This is an email ethic that even novice marketers should be aware of.

What the future holds for email

Chirayu believes that, going forward, we will continue to see email automation tools become even more useful, offering email marketers more ways to creatively use them. We can expect to see more integration with apps and products, allowing marketers to send emails based on not only in-app behaviour but also other interactions. We’ll also see an ever expanding list of triggers, allowing us to send targeted messages based on all sorts of details, completely customised to the individual user and giving greater context to our messages.

Until now, most marketers have been using low-scale automation across the most lucrative customer touch-points and experiences — examples include cart abandonment emails and welcome messages. But that will change with the onset of a strong and flexible AI in this field.