Master your email marketing with these 6 Golden Pro Tips

Since the dawn of the internet age and the invention of the popular mailing service HotMail, one of the most profitable and of course misused marketing channels is email. If you are a marketer living in India you are fortunate enough to have the most relaxed rules when it comes to email marketing. Refer to this wikipedia article, on the email spam legislation by country and it says India has almost no regulation for the same.

You don’t need to scour the dark web to find the email addresses of your target audience and no startup (big or small) has ever seen growth bereft of email marketing. The ROI of a good email marketing campaign succeeds on any other channel. But done the wrong way, email marketing can be like shooting in the dark with no ROI whatsoever.

Here are some golden tips that will help you not only land your emails into the user’s inbox but build a conversation with your Target Audience.

1. Limit your cold email marketing: No matter how enticing some random email database from an e-commerce website sounds like, if you are blasting emails to random people on the internet, chances are your email will land into their spam inbox. If in case you want to give it a try and see the results try it out with a different domain or a subdomain. Like www.letters.YOURDOMAIN.com. This will make sure your domain reputation doesn’t take the toll.
2. Keep them Conversational: We all love conversations and hate getting advertised. So the next time you are planning to pull your designer to design an attractive looking email. Chuck that! Rather keep your emails real and engage with your audience and do it on a regular basis. You can automate onboarding or the funnel emails but the emails that you send out regularly to your customers have to be contextual and real. So keep them related to the current affairs and look for ways to connect it to your brand. And don’t forget to weave a story to keep the users come back again and again. And like all conversations, encourage users to reply to your emails.
3. Use your founder’s email address: Whenever you are talking to your users, make sure that you use a variant of the founder’s email address. This will increase the engagement on your email campaigns, especially for onboarding users.
4. Send personalised emails: Personalisation doesn’t end at adding merge tags. There is a lot to it. Personalisation can encompass sending users personalised written emails according to the category of the product that they are interested in or according to their stage in the user journey.
5. Experiment: Now to test if everything is working fine, you need to experiment with different copies and subject lines to figure out the best ones. Apart from tracking the CTRs and the Open Rates, make sure that you are also tracking the entire funnel metrics to see which users are actually converting your micro and macro goals.
6. On a technical note: While in most cases, there isn’t a lot of tech required to draft a successful email campaign. Leveraging any popular email marketing tool like email octopus or sendy will give you a good starting point. There are a few records that need to be set up in your DNS.

The first one is called SPF. Think of SPF records as the “from” attribute in any email. It is a form of email authentication that defines a process to validate an email message that has been sent from an authorized main server to detect forgery and to prevent spam.

The other one is called DKIM. This is sort of like a signature on the email authenticating that the domain with the email sent. The recent media attention around emails from WHO where scammers were spreading fake news, was because they didn’t have a DKIM record set up.

Nothing can take away the importance of what you write in your emails but by applying the above tips, you can be sure that your emails don’t end up in SPAM. Over the years, using some clever copy and the principles above, I have witnessed open rates of 10–30% and CTRs of up to 5%.