5 Ideas for Energizing Your Email Marketing Efforts

Think for a moment about your first cup of coffee in the morning. Or a walk around the block in the middle of your workday. Or a power nap on a lazy weekend afternoon. What do all these things have in common? They energize and revitalize you. They wake you up. Sometimes your email marketing needs the same. After a while, your regular email marketing tactics and approaches can become tired and sluggish.

There are many ways to refresh your email marketing efforts, but here are five ways that you might not have considered:

1. Resend emails to non-openers. You only get one chance to get your subscribers to open an email, right? Not necessarily. While you should do so sparingly and strategically, try resending emails to recipients that don’t open them the first time. This doesn’t mean sending the exact same email multiple times. Keep the subject matter the same, but change the subject line, preheader text and even elements of the content, like the text for the call to action or the images, so it seems like a brand-new email experience.

2. Build your lists. Even the best email list with the most engaged subscribers degrades over time. People change email addresses, lose interest or opt out of your communications. According to MarketingSherpa, the average email database will degrade by an average of 22.5 percent every year. To combat that decline and its impacts, businesses must constantly focus on building their email lists. Something as simple as adding easy-to-find email sign up boxes throughout your website can help tremendously. Social media is also a great place to build your lists by promoting things like giveaways, content downloads and newsletter subscriptions.

3. Re-engage old customers. New email subscribers often seem to love everything message you send, but over time that interest can fade. Before you know it, formerly engaged subscribers barely blink before deleting your emails. Rekindling the relationship won’t be possible for every subscriber, but you can win some back with re-engagement campaigns. These campaigns can come in many different forms, but they should communicate the message that you recognize they haven’t interacted with your company’s email in some time and that you want them back as an engaged subscriber. Try asking them how you can improve their email experience or giving them a special offer that is presented as it is just for them and their fellow longtime subscribers.

4. Utilize campaign automation. While not solely limited to email in its capabilities, campaign automation can be an effective way to re-energize your email marketing efforts. These automated nurture programs include decision points and actions based on how the recipient interacts with your message, allowing for a highly customized experience. By tailoring your campaign automations to a specific audience and sending your messages at the right time, a nurture program can build rapport with your audiences, increase conversions and much more. In addition, campaign automation can help save your team time setting up more routine email marketing initiatives, so you have bandwidth to focus on other things.

5. Try split testing. Split testing, or A/B testing, is a method of testing two versions of an email against one another to see which one performs better. You can use the results of these tests to improve future email marketing efforts and send emails that really resonate with your audience. What should you change in your email variations in a split test? Try using different subject lines, layouts, send times or content. Split testing can demonstrate how even small changes can have a big impact on opens, clicks and conversions.

Happy Marketing!