10 Email Marketing Strategies for a Tightening Budget
Ten concrete email marketing tactics worth using in 2008, as tightening budgets push marketers toward the lowest-cost, highest-accountability strategies.
With ad budgets under real pressure this year as the economy slows, email marketing’s appeal has never been more practical: it is cheap to run and easy to measure. Here are ten strategies worth prioritizing right now, ranked roughly by how quickly they tend to pay off.
1. Segment by purchase history, not just signup date. A customer who bought once behaves differently than one who never has. Splitting your list this way, even into just two or three groups, usually beats sending everyone the same offer.
2. Build a welcome sequence. New subscribers are more engaged in their first week than they will likely ever be again. A short automated sequence that introduces your business and delivers real value up front converts far better than dropping a new subscriber straight into the regular newsletter rotation.
3. Set up a cart-abandonment reminder. For any business selling online, a single automated email reminding someone about items left in their cart is one of the highest-converting messages you can send, because it targets people who already showed clear buying intent.
4. Test subject lines against each other. Most email service providers now support simple split testing. Send two subject line variants to a small portion of your list, then send the winner to the rest. The lift from this alone is often larger than any change to the body content.
5. Build a preference center. Instead of an all-or-nothing unsubscribe, let subscribers choose what kind of mail they want and how often. Businesses that offer this option see fewer full opt-outs and stronger engagement from the subscribers who stay.
6. Design for the small but growing mobile audience. More subscribers are checking mail on a phone than a year ago. Keep your most important message and call to action near the top, since narrow screens push everything else below the fold.
7. Run a win-back campaign for inactive subscribers. Addresses that never open or click drag down your sender reputation with every send. A short campaign offering something specifically to re-engage lapsed subscribers, followed by removing anyone who still does not respond, protects deliverability for everyone else on the list.
8. Personalize beyond the first name. Referencing a past purchase, a browsing category or a location does more for engagement than a name merge field ever will, and most platforms now support this level of customization without custom development.
9. Watch your sender reputation actively. Monitor bounce rates and spam complaints through your provider’s reporting, and act on problems immediately. A reputation that slips can affect every future campaign, not just the one that caused it.
10. Tie every campaign to a revenue number, not just an open rate. In a year when every marketing dollar is being scrutinized, the campaigns worth repeating are the ones you can show drove sales, not just the ones with an impressive open rate.
None of these strategies require a large budget, which is exactly why they matter more this year than in years when marketing spend was easier to come by. A modest list, run with real discipline around these ten practices, will outperform a larger list run carelessly almost every time.
Keep exploring: browse more Email Marketing guides, see everything we published in 2008 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
