Email best practices
With summer coming, it can be tempting to slack off on your email marketing. Maybe you wonder if your customers check their inbox as much during the summer. With more vacations, a few major holidays, and a general feeling of increased leisure, you may be feeling like sending fewer or no emails in the coming months.
That would be a big mistake.
A consistent email marketing cadence is proven to be more effective and generate more loyalty because of three main reasons: It helps you maintain a strong deliverability, it keeps your brand top of mind, and it provides regular engagement and revenue. Want to know more? We’ve got you covered.
You should send consistent emails because your subscribers need to hear from you. Not only when you have something to sell.
Your email cadence is the frequency and rhythm with which you send your email campaigns. So, what should that cadence look like? What is the optimal number of emails to send? Should you send emails even if you have nothing to promote?
These questions aren’t actually the best way to think about email marketing. Email isn’t only about promotions and news. Email is, fundamentally, about staying connected and solving problems, and the frequency of emails with which we send our emails plays a big role.
For most companies, email is a relationship, not a news source or place to shop. In other words, unless they’re opening up their Google promotions tab, most people don’t read emails to go shopping. They read them to learn, to find solutions to problems they’re dealing with, to stay connected and informed, and to meet needs.
Think of your brand as a resource. You should send consistent emails because your subscribers need to hear from you – not only when you have something to sell. You are giving answers and offering opportunities your customers and subscribers want and need.
Your goal should be to consistently touch on different stages of the customer journey. Emails about awareness will be very different from emails targeted at renewal, which will differ still from emails focused on conversion. As you plan out an email content calendar, including for the summer, try to hit on all aspects of the customer journey at regular intervals.
We’ll share several ideas in a moment to help you plan out an email sending calendar.
But first, let’s look at why sending emails consistently benefits your business.
When you only send emails sporadically, it eventually hurts your email deliverability. There are several reasons why.
If you’re worried about sending too many emails, test different sending frequencies and segment your contact list based on engagement. You might be able to target those that always open and click on your messages weekly or even daily emails, but you’ll want to send less frequently to those who don’t.
With Mailjet’s Segmentation you can create subscriber segments based on engagement to find the right frequency for each.
Even if most subscribers don’t mark you as spam, the lower open and click-through rates rates you earn will obviously mean lower engagement. As you slip further back in subscribers’ minds, your attempts to re-ignite and sustain interest in your products after being silent for the summer months will be much more challenging.
One of the benefits of a consistent sending frequency is that it helps you keep your company top of mind with your prospects and clients. It also helps you build an engaged relationship with them, so that when they have a need for your products and services, they think of you first.
When subscribers begin asking themselves, “Why is this company sending me emails?”, you’ve already lost them. And when you send infrequent emails, this is what happens.
With lower deliverability and reduced engagement, it’s not hard to see why this will impact your revenue. And even for people who do open your infrequent emails – if they’re only hearing from you every few months – your emails will have a harder time motivating a purchase.
Getting someone to click and buy requires timing as well as relevance. What might have been relevant last month may not matter anymore to a subscriber. But if you’re only sending emails every couple months – when you have something to say – you missed the window of opportunity for many of your subscribers.
Do email open rates really drop during the summer? One statistic reports they drop from around 21% to 19% during June, July, and August. So yes, it’s a drop, but it’s not very much. Most people work the majority of the year and summer vacation habits often differ around the world. Yes, routines will change for people with kids, but they still have to eat, go places, do fun things, pay the bills, and grow professionally.
Your products and services still matter in the summer months. So don’t stop emailing.
People may shift a bit in how they use their time, and there are, perhaps, more interruptions. You could make a case for developing a unique summer email marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t include much of a drop in your email frequency.
Here are nine types of emails to keep your email frequency consistent:
A weekly newsletter can encompass several topics at once, including many of the content ideas that will follow on this list. This is also the place for updates about your business, new opportunities for customers to engage, links to blog articles, new product announcements, and more.
At Mailjet, we send regular newsletters with our most recent articles and resources.
Email newsletters work best when they employ proven strategies for design, content, calls to action, and other ways of engaging.
Hopefully, you have already created segments based on previous purchases and other forms of engagement. If you know which subscribers are interested in certain product categories or services, send relevant sales emails or promotions only to those subscribers.
Relevance perpetuates engagement. Even if they don’t buy, they’ll still appreciate the offer since this is something that matters to them.
Truebill showcases how their services can be used daily.
Another targeted approach is to use summer holidays and special events. These can vary by region and don’t always need to be a major holiday. For example, in the United States, you could relate your brand to Flag Day, if appropriate. It’s not the first thing Americans think of when you say, “summer holiday”, but if it works for your brand, it works.
And again, your use of holidays doesn’t have to mean making a sale or closing deals. You might just send a message expressing something about the holiday, and nothing more.
What are some common problems and challenges customers face when using your products or services?
Create content to help work through these difficulties. This isn’t selling anything, but it positions you as a helpful resource who wants your customers’ lives to be happier, easier, simpler, less stressful, more enjoyable, more fulfilled, or whatever other benefits arise from your value proposition.
These kinds of emails build customer loyalty, promote product adoption, and increase positive reception to sales and promotional emails that come later.
Alexa’s welcome email series shows users how to make the most of their new device.
Customer testimonials make great emails. Everyone likes to hear about satisfied customers when it concerns a product or service they have interest in – that’s ultimately what makes review sites so successful.
Fetching Fields promotes their products in a fun way with a testimonial from a dog and its human.
Just remember, there’s a level of quality to testimonials, especially in the world of deepfakes.
Full names are better than first names. Job titles, cities of residence, and other identifiers are better than just names. Photos are better than just text. Videos are the best of all.
The more authentic the testimonial, the more power it will have to influence.
If you have any events coming up, that’s an easy source of email content. And not just one email. If you want your event to s쳮d, you need to send several emails about it. The bigger the event, the sooner you need to start promoting it.
If you’re hosting an online event like Slack, don’t forget to add clear CTAs to register and join.
Have a joint venture or partnership opportunity with a non-competing business? Did you meet someone at a networking event who might be able to offer helpful advice or expertise for your subscribers?
Let them write a few emails to your list sharing their expertise. Just make sure your subscribers will want to hear about this, any promotional offers are relevant, and make sure you introduce the guest in the email.
Subscribers need encouragement, and any email strategy’s goal should be to provide that.
Pretty much any business can send emails with the objective to make subscribers feel like they have someone in their corner. You are with them. You want them to s쳮d, be happier, get smarter, make more money, advance in life and career – whatever relates to the core benefits of your products and services.
In this re-engagement email, CLEAR shows that their services improved greatly since the recipient last used them.
The key to a great email nurture series is to send the right emails, with the right cadence, to the right people so you can push them down the funnel and along the customer journey. Email automation tools can help you deliver that experience, but ultimately it comes down to really understanding what your subscribers need to take the next step and finding the best touchpoints to deliver that.
Summer, especially, is the time for leisure.
If your brand voice allows for it, find a way to send humorous email content where the entire goal is simply to get a laugh. It might be a funny customer story. It could be a GIF that relates somehow to your business or your customers’ needs or frustrations. Funny photos, light-hearted stories – look for humor that your audience will appreciate.
On April Fool’s Day this year, Notes From the Dev sent out this MySpace email.
Even just one humorous email will go a long way to build a different type of connection with your audience. Just be sure to stay away from offensive topics.
For many businesses, customer loyalty is less about the products and more about the owner, the founder, or their internal subject matter experts. People buy because they like the person who’s selling. If there’s a face and a personality to your company who your customers know, like, and trust, some emails can just feature that person sharing their thoughts and observations about…almost anything.
Our lead email developer Megan Boshuyzen is the face of Notes From the Dev, Sinch Email on Acid’s developer newsletter and video series.
Growing your business and making money through email doesn’t happen with ‘flash in the pan’ marketing. This isn’t a sprint. It’s a long-term strategy that produces consistent revenue if you use it to its full potential.
Keep on top of your email analytics. Pay attention to things like send times, sending frequency and its effect on engagement, and subject lines that seem to get more response. Know what’s working well, and keep using all the tools at your disposal from Mailjet to keep your subscribers engaged and your revenue growing.
Need more help and inspiration? Our Email Growth Playbook gives you specific tactics to use to grow your email list, design beautiful templates for your email marketing campaigns, increase engagement, and improve your chances of getting into the inbox.
