Email marketing has ruled the roost since its inception, never faltering even when newer marketing formats became popular among eCommerce marketers. Because of this, email marketing has become a steady provider of conversions for many small, medium, and large businesses. Despite many years of predictions that email marketing would be replaced or fade away, that day has yet to arrive. In fact, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways of reaching prospective and existing customers.

If you too are a marketer looking to improve your eCommerce sales, you might need to give your email marketing strategy a bit of a boost. In this article, we talk about top 5 creative ways to get better engagement and conversions from your email marketing.

Personalize your messages

Personalising your email for every individual recipient can improve open rates, engagement rates, and click-through. When we say personalized email marketing, we don’t mean that you send an individual email to every single subscriber. Personalization means that you use customer data to create a personalized message.

Your email should always contain content that is valuable to your reader, as should all of your content marketing. Ask why your audience would benefit from reading your email. What do your contacts gain from reading your email? Why would they open it?

Your content should be positioned with your goal to help you achieve it. Create content that is informative, helpful, useful, entertaining, educational, inspiring, and convinces the user to take action.

Utilize behavioural-based segmentation

You need to make sure your emails are highly targeted and relevant to your customers. A survey by Salesforce has found that 57% of consumers are willing to exchange personal information if it means receiving personalized content and offers. What this means is if you aren’t segmenting consumers yet, you may be missing out.

It’s good practice to use behavioural-based segmentation in your email marketing strategy. By setting up your mailing list provider so that it lets you track your users’ different interests, transaction histories, and the like, you’re more likely to understand what kind of offers they’ll appreciate more.

By getting this kind of information, you’re able to send highly targeted emails and offers, increasing your chances of enjoying higher open rates and click-throughs.

Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly

To avoid your email being sent straight to the trash, it’s important to focus on creating mobile-optimized email content that is eye-catching and engaging on a smartphone.

Opt for a single-column design that works well with the vertical scroll. Use big images and bold headlines - though many marketers advise brands not to use big images. Include plenty of white space for easy scanning. Keep your subject lines short. And make sure your CTA buttons are large enough to be easily tapped – at least 44 pixels squared. Email marketing services like MailChimp allow you to test how your messages look across a variety of devices and in different inboxes, such as Gmail in Chrome or Outlook 2011, and make sure that your designs display correctly wherever they’re sent.

Combine email marketing with other channels

While email marketing is a powerful tool all on its own, you can use it with other channels to make sure you deliver a seamless brand experience for your customers.

For example, using email marketing to drive traffic back to your website can do well to boost your SEO by reducing bounce rates or getting reviews on your business page.

Also, consider taking an omnichannel marketing approach with your email marketing. Make the most of social media CTAs drive conversions to your email list, follow up subscribers with highly-targeted emails promoting your product or service, and make your website and landing pages high-converting and streamlined.

Make your subject line compelling and to the point

Subject lines can make or break a campaign. Try to have them be compelling enough to persuade contacts to open the emails, but friendly enough to not turn them off. First and foremost, keep them short: lines with fewer than 50 characters have higher open rates, and anything over 50 runs the risk of being truncated. Also, try to convey a sense of urgency in the subject line with a special announcement or limited-time sale, but don’t be too pushy.

Keep your subject line short, simple, clear, punchy, and relevant to the content in your email. Use action words and power words to evoke urgency, emotion, curiosity, and excitement to encourage opens and compel action. Don’t forget to test subject lines by resending your email with a new subject line to those who didn’t open the first time.

Here are just a few first steps every marketer should take into consideration when setting up an email marketing campaign. Never hold back from reaching out to a digital marketing agency if you feel you need some help with optimising your campaigns and getting the best out of your email marketing.