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You’re probably insanely busy. But staying on top of your email is critical to maintaining a good relationship with current and future customers. Below are best practices to follow and mistakes to avoid in email marketing.
4 best practices to follow in email marketing
1. Send a welcome email
Square’s average open rate for automated campaigns is 32 percent, but it jumps to 38 percent for automated welcome email campaigns. If you do nothing else, send a welcome email. The results are worth your effort.
2. Be consistent
Your customers want to hear from you, but it’s important to strike a balance between how often you want to contact them and how often you should. A good rule to follow is to email your customers once a week and follow your unsubscribe stats closely. Sixty-nine percent of U.S. email subscribers unsubscribe when they’ve been sent too many emails, according to Hubspot.
3. Personalize your email
By personalizing your business email, you could increase your open rates by 26 percent, according to Campaign Monitor. Our own study showed that personalized birthday email has open rates and redemptions more than 2.5 times higher than the average email across all types of campaigns.
4. Include a clear call to action
When creating an email for your customers, make sure you’re including a specific call to action (CTA). Think of your CTA as leading your customer to take the next right action. This is often a link that drives them to take action, for example, sign up for an event, or shop your online sale.
4 mistakes of email marketing
1. Emailing too often
You have great products and your customers want to hear from you, just not all the time. Announcing a special sale or promotion in addition to your monthly or weekly email here and there is part of a great email marketing strategy, but if you’re hitting your customers’ inboxes every day, you can expect a lot of unsubscribes.
2. Not checking your analytics
In your Square Marketing dashboard, you can view your analytics, including open and clickthrough rates. Your analytics are worth their weight in gold because analytics can answer many important questions. How is your email doing? What offer made your audience click through the most? What email caused a lot of unsubscribes?
3. Writing a novel
This isn’t the time for long-winded email. Keep your email clear, concise, and compelling. “Data suggests the ideal length of an email is between 50 and 125 words. Emails this length had a response rate above 50%,” according to Hubspot.
4. Not purging your list
We know it may seem counterintuitive to building a large email list, but you want to make sure that you have a healthy email list, and that includes pruning inactive users. If you have users who haven’t been active for more than a year, try sending them a re-engagement email with an offer or coupon. If they still do not respond, it’s time to take them off your list.
It’s worth noting that for email addresses you’ve collected through digital receipts, Square automatically only includes customers who have purchased from your business in the last year. This way you can devote your attention to customers who are engaging with your content.
