Email Marketing Tips for 2023
From including compelling video content in emails to specifically tailoring everything you send out, there are a lot of powerful ways you can connect with your audience and customers through email.
Email marketing can be a way to not only promote your products or services but also retain customers and incentivize their loyalty.
Email marketing is considered both a form of direct and digital marketing. It’s an extremely important part of a larger and more effective marketing strategy because it facilitates lead generation, brand awareness, and, as mentioned, the building of relationships and encouraging customer engagement between purchases.
When someone receives an email, it forces them to take action of some type. Maybe they leave it sitting in their inbox which is in and of itself an action, or they read it, delete it or archive it. Just based on the fact that action has to be taken, you can learn a lot about your customers with email marketing.
That’s not to say there aren’t downsides.
People tend to see the vast majority of emails they receive as spam, and they might hit delete almost instantaneously. You also have to avoid spam filters. Email marketing is very competitive, and you have to pay careful attention to the design of emails because they have to be optimized for a lot of devices and platforms.
With all of that in mind, the following are some ways you can start email marketing or improve your existing email marketing in 2023.
1. Include Videos
If you don’t already include video content in your marketing emails, make 2023 the year you commit to doing so.
Emails that include video content can increase your click-through rates by as much as 300% and reduce unsubscribe rates by 75%.
If you include the word video somewhere that your recipients will see it, it can increase your open rates significantly since you’re piquing their interest.
Video content helps you personalize your connection with your audience and build a sense of trust. When you add a face and personality to your brand through video marketing within your emails, then people are more likely to engage with you and continue to open and read the emails they receive from you in the future.
If your goal is to build a trustworthy relationship with your audience, try to use the same person consistently for live-action videos. Make your content something that isn’t all about selling—provide value to your audience.
Adding videos also saves people time compared to having to read what you send them, so anything perceived as convenient is going to be more engaging to your audience.
2. Track and Measure Your Performance
Tracking the performance of email campaigns isn’t new for 2023, but if you’re not already doing it, it should be a top priority. If you aren’t looking at the numbers and taking the time to understand them, then it’s impossible to know how you’re doing currently and what you need to do differently.
The benchmarks and metrics to look at first and foremost include your open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, and unsubscribe rates.
3. Be Transparent
Consumers want transparency in everything. Consumers want to know the details of the story that’s behind brands they trust and the products they use.
Convey the social responsibility you have to your customers through your emails.
One way that you can show that you’re socially responsible and ethical is by being transparent about how you collect and use emails. Don’t try to do it in a roundabout or sneaky way because you’ll damage your brand and destroy your sense of authenticity. You’re also putting yourself at more risk of being flagged as spam.
You can be transparent in your email marketing by using double opt-in and not automatically selecting the opt-in checkbox. You can go further than this by asking your audience to let you know what type of email content they want to receive.
4. Integrate User-Generated Content
User-generated content is a powerful form of social proof, and it works well within your email marketing campaigns.
People are going to feel like they can trust your brand and your products when they can see how other customers are interacting with them.
Plus, user-generated content is free, so that’s always a perk.
If you haven’t applied user-generated content in your marketing, it’s pretty much anything your customers create and then publish on channels like social media. UGC can include reviews, videos, images, testimonials, and podcasts.
Along with getting UGC from customers and people loyal to your brand, it can also come from employees.
UGC is a powerful trust signal, and it establishes authenticity, plus it can increase conversions and be a major influence on buying decisions.
5. Clean Up Your Lists
The beginning of 2023 is the ideal time to do an audit of your email lists and start to clean them up. In 2024, it’s the end of third-party cookies, and it’s when the Apple Mail Privacy Protection changes will take place. This is going to mean that how you capture and then use data is extremely important, and your top priority has to be protecting customer information.
Email is a first-party data source, meaning it’s information that’s consensual, and you have to do everything in your power to protect it. As part of this protection, employing secure email lookup methods becomes crucial to ensuring the integrity and privacy of customer data.
Go through your lists and make sure you have everyone’s permission, and if someone has unsubscribed, ensure they actually get taken off all of your lists.
Also, run your email list through a bulk email verifier tool like Clearout to remove invalid emails.
In the realm of marketing, managing multiple projects is preferred to concentrating on only one. Send marketing news or newsletters all at once! For your email marketing campaigns, use mail merge for Gmail to send mass emails without compromising the customization that will help your audience recognize the human side of your business.
6. Use AI
Retailers are increasingly turning to AI for things like the creation of personalized shopping experiences and customer engagement. AI can help you if you’re an email marketer by going through the data you have to predict the behaviors and trends of your subscribers.
There are already available AI software platforms that will suggest how you can improve your customer engagement by looking at your current data.
For instance, check out the best AI Email Copy Generators and write better email copy faster than ever before.
7. Personalization
Finally, perhaps one of the biggest email marketing trends of 2023 is personalization. It’s not new, but the influence is growing.
You can recommend products to certain segments of your email lists, and you can also set things up so that certain behaviors will trigger emails. You also want to make sure you include the names of your recipients.
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