Nowadays, there are many individuals who still argue the effectiveness of email marketing. What these people haven’t yet understood is that email was, is, and will continue to be the best communication channel between businesses and customers.

Indeed, people are no longer communicating through emails. Instead, they prefer the quicker options such as communicating through instant messages, mostly on social media networks.

However, when it comes to making sales, an instant message is not enough by any means. Distributing your content and sales copy through email, you’ll be able to educate, inspire, motivate, help, and sell better. As Radicati’s 2016 report shows, by 2020, around 3 billion individuals will use email as one of their primary way of communication.

What’s my point here?

Email is not dead and it never will. In fact, your success depends only on your knowledge, expertise, and the strategies that you employ. Work harder but also smarter. Well, considering that you’re owning a list or you’re preparing to develop one soon, here are 10 email marketing hacks to help you develop a more effective and profitable email marketing campaign:

1. Establish a Precise Goal for Each Email You Send

This should be a strict rule that you should always respect, so in this way you can respect your email readers, who have truly better things to do than consume low-quality content that follows no purpose. Before you write your email, consider these things first:

• Do you plan to acquire more leads?
• Do you want to improve the loyalty of your current leads?
• Do you want to educate your subscribers?
• Do you want to sell a product/service?
• Do you want to connect and engage, perhaps with the purpose of generating direct feedback?

Depending on your purpose, you should align your email marketing’s objectives, strategies, and actions. Tom Bensington, the marketing expert at RushMyEssay.co.uk insists that: “You should work with a sole purpose in mind, something that you have decided before developing the content.”

2. Never Spam Users

Spamming is never appreciated, and you should never engage in such activities. Nowadays, spamming is extremely subjective. For example, some users can barely stand emails that come without permission, so they’d immediately signal them (through the email provider) as SPAM.

Two things happen. They never receive your emails again, and many of your future emails will not reach your new recipients. Stay away from that by developing permission-based email marketing type of campaigns.

3. Consistently Optimize Your Email Automation Sequence

Obviously, you should automate your email sequence. Write the emails before launching your marketing campaign, before you generate leads, and consistently track the results as the time passes by.

Your email sequence should have a purpose, a strategy behind, and the proper analytics set. Once you generate new leads, you’ll be able to track their behavior and make changes depending on their actions.Email success requires consistency and constant optimization.

4. Don’t Write Unless You Can Provide Value

Don’t write vaguely, without a purpose, and without providing at least some form of value to the end user. Your email marketing campaign should be based on value. If you can’t provide that, your open rates and your click-through-rates metrics will never be satisfying nor will they positively influence your ROI. Customers want value. If you can’t give something truly good, you’d better abstain from sending something at all.

5. Give Your Subscribers a Personalized Experience

Using your analytics and your email marketing autoresponder, you should track and mark your user’s behavior. For example, you can personalize your automated sequence by adding specific rules. If the email subscriber clicks on ____(link to Subject X), the user will be automatically moved to a new list that will focus on content and products related to the Subject X. Another way to personalize email is to consider usingEngageBay’s marketing automation tool.

This way, you can be more relevant to your email audience and improve your overall open rates and click-through-rates.

6. Include Effective Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

For your emails to have a true impact, you need to develop effective calls-to-action that would guide your user towards your end goal. So if your email’s purpose is to convert a subscriber into a customer, a powerful and effective CTA would be “Buy Today at 30% Discount”, with a red or orange button that would create urgency.

7. Make Your Emails Mobile Responsive

Nowadays, almost everyone has a smartphone. We can easily connect to everything we need, find our information by just pulling our phone out of our pockets and checking in a few minutes.

For us, marketers, this could mean one simple thing. We cannot longer afford to create email marketing campaigns just for desktop users. The mobile age is here, blooming under our eyes, so we must acknowledge it and adapt it to it immediately. Mobile-responsive email campaigns are a must.

8. Never Consider Buying Emails

Indeed, never consider buying email contacts from unknown sources that pretend to be “trusted”. No such thing is permitted nor appreciated. When you buy emails from a source you don’t know, you risk two things:

First, you might fill your email list with irrelevant, less targeted subscribers that will never buy your products or open your emails. Second, you might reach people that will have nothing to do with your niche, therefore they’ll be annoyed by receiving such irrelevant emails.Next, your emails will get reported or put into the spam folder, and you already know what’ll happen next.

9. Keep It Short & Simple

Short and simple. That’s another rule I always love to follow. Think about it. Most of the mobile users who are opening your emails are in a rush. They don’t have time to read 1000 words. That’s exactly why your emails should focus on a single, core message. Concrete, quick, the proper CTA, and poof, success.

10. Align Your Campaign with Your Customer’s Needs, Wishes, and Desires

Don’t forget your customers’ needs, wishes, and desires. Always keep in mind that people are subscribing in order to gain something. If it’s valuable information they’re seeking, it will ultimately lead them to the next level, which means the purchase of a product.

However, every time you send them something, remind them that you will be able to help them find a solution to X problem, solve Y need, and so on.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a challenging marketing approach. The risks are low compared to the other marketing approaches such as paid advertising, yet the potential benefits happen to be significant. Building a list is basically the development and continuous nurturing of long-term business-to-customer relationships.Put our hacks into practice and notice the benefits you’ll get sooner than you could ever expect.