But your subscribers don’t seem to feel that way.

Far from engaging and converting, most subscribers are only glancing for about three seconds, which falls well short of the average dwell time of 11 seconds. Whereas you spent hours working on it and hours staring at it. From our work with over 5,000 clients, we’ve seen this happen many times. Now, there may be several reasons, but it’s best practice to smoke out the most common ones first. 

One of those is email size and load time. (Note that HTML file size is not the same as email size. HTML size is essentially the HTML code itself, whereas email size refers to how large an email is once the recipient opens it.) 

Users want emails to load quickly. Delays can frustrate them and may cause them to leave before the email finishes loading. 

How can you avoid it? By following certain best practices.

1. Optimize Images

We can optimize images to enhance loading time through the following techniques:

1. Use Smaller Image Files: Compress images to reduce file size while maintaining quality. Choose appropriate formats like JPEG, PNG, or GIF based on the content.

2. Use Correct Dimensions: Ensure images are sized accurately for both desktop and mobile to prevent unnecessary loading delays.

3. Minimize Image Usage:
   

• Excessive images can hinder loading speed. Strive for a balance between text and visuals for an attractive yet fast email.
  
• Wherever possible, replace background images with HTML background colors. 

Read More: How to minimize Landing Page Bounce Rate and Maximize conversions

“The more frames your GIF has, the heavier it will be.”

— Martyn Lee, Design Associate at Litmus

2. Prioritize Text over Images

It’s better to use text for email content since text files are smaller and load faster than images. This makes your emails open quickly, giving readers a better experience. It also helps reduce the overall file size. For instance, instead of using “>” as an image, we can use an HTML entity to achieve the same effect.

3. Break up Long Emails

To improve loading speed and clarity, break up a long email into multiple sections instead of coding it all in a single table or div. This makes the email load faster and easier to read. Consider the following snippet. 

Now, we can divide the above email code into several parts, as shown. 

4. Minimize CSS

Avoid using external CSS files and keep inline CSS simple and minimal. Use short CSS rules and remove unnecessary styles to reduce the email’s size. You can also use shorthand operators to simplify styling and avoid redundant code.

For instance, in the following screenshot, padding is written separately for top, bottom, left, and right. Instead of writing each margin individually (e.g., margin-top, margin-right), use shorthand to reduce the email’s size.

Again, instead of writing separate CSS properties, use shorthand. For example, write padding as: `padding: 5px 11px 10px 20px;`.

5. Limit the Use of Web Fonts

System fonts load faster than web fonts. Using common fonts like Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman ensures quicker loading since they’re pre-installed on most devices. If web fonts are needed, always provide fallback fonts to keep the email readable while loading.

Read More: Does email size and loading speed affect email deliverability?

For example, web fonts like Google Fonts need to be loaded externally, which can slow down the email’s load time.

6. Limit the Use of Large Files

Avoid attaching large files directly to emails. 
Instead, use cloud storage and share links to speed up loading times, or upload the file to your email service provider and send it directly to your subscribers. 

“Keep your design simple and focused on your main message.”

Dmytro Kudrenko, founder of Stripo

7. Minify the File

The standard email file size is typically between 45KB to 70KB, but aim to keep it under 100KB. Larger files can result in slower loading times.

• Minimize HTML Size: Keep your HTML clean and simple by removing unnecessary tags, comments, and whitespace to reduce file size.
  
• Avoid Excessive Nested Tables: Simplify the layout by minimizing complex or deeply nested tables, which can slow down rendering.
  
• Reduce the Number of Links: Limit the number of links in your email, focusing only on essential ones to improve loading speed.
  
• Avoid Heavy Elements: To enhance loading speed, skip heavy elements like videos and large GIFs, as they can take longer to load. 

8. Use Mobile-friendly Design

With many users checking emails on mobile devices, you should be optimizing loading times. Mobile-friendly designs and optimized content improve the user experience on smaller screens. Use media queries to ensure emails look great on all devices and enhance mobile loading by adjusting the code for different screen sizes. 

For instance, multiple media queries can be used to target various screen sizes.

9. Test across Clients

Testing your emails on different platforms and devices helps identify and fix loading issues. Use tools to preview how your email appears across platforms to improve user experience. Regular testing should be an essential step in the email process to  ensure smooth performance.

In Closing, A Few General Best Practices

Let’s round off our discussion with these general best practices:

• Avoid attachments larger than 10MB; upload them to an external server and provide a download link.
  
• Keep the email body size between 15 KB and 100 KB.
  
• Limit the use of animations, CSS, and GIFs.
  
• Finally, optimize all of your emails for responsiveness. 

So much for email. Learn how to improve landing page load speed next.

The post 9 Proven Best Practices to Optimize Email Load Time for Better User Engagement appeared first on Email Uplers.

This, of course, translates into tangible benefits for your business. According to Stripo, gamified emails can increase conversions by 2.5 times. In addition, e-commerce companies say that gamification leads to a 14% increase in average clicks in contrast to promotional emails. 

But not so fast! We need to first understand what gamification in email newsletter marketing involves. We will explore its facets in this post. To begin with, what is email gamification?

What Is Email Gamification? Savvying The Context

It is important to realize that we are not talking about games as such. The primary objective of gamification is to effect persuasion in the minds of users, leading to “serve certain strategic business motives.”

“This new paradigm,” informs Luis Filipe Rodrigues et al. in their 2019 paper on gamification principles, “relates concepts that promote a human-machine interaction, and brings out elements such as persuasion, eye-catching design, and game mechanics.”

“Thus, gamification is a fresh mode of thinking, developing, designing and deploying software applications, which aspires to change users’ attitudes and behaviors,” the authors add.

This is the framework within which email gamification operates. It is basically what the authors call a “non-game environment improvement” for the promotion of products and services. 

When Is The Best Time to Send Gamified Emails?

Notwithstanding the impact of gamification, you shouldn’t send gamified emails too often. Usually, the tendency among certain brands is to view gamification as an alternative engagement strategy, which leads them to overuse it. 

However, gamification is a discrete component in your marketing blueprint. There is a time for it. Sometimes you want to surprise your audience; at other times, your subscribers might be expecting something out-of-the-ordinary from you. 

(At Email Uplers, we use gamification only during the holiday season. We have indirectly trained our newsletter subscribers to expect something interesting from us around this time. Each year, we fulfill their expectation, which amplifies engagement and loyalty.)

With these factors in mind, let’s explore the best times when gamification emails will work for your brand. 

1. When The Holiday Season Is at Its Peak

The holiday season is arguably the best time to send gamified emails. In fact, your audience more or less expects you to send entertaining emails their way during that time of the year. If you want to offer discounts, you can ask users to “win” discounts for themselves. 

Or you can simply use games for entertainment. We at Email Uplers sent the following Christmas quiz to our subscribers. (If you want, you can play the game here.)

2. When You Want to Amuse Your Audience

The thing is, as an email marketer, you can’t always find relevant content to share with your subscribers. But you can still keep your audience engaged during those dry patches through gamification. 

That’s what Penguin Random House does in this email. The email does not include any incentive. It’s pure entertainment. 

3. When You Can’t Afford Generous Discounts

This, too, is a great marketing tactic, which Kudrenko references in his ebook. When it is not possible to give away generous discounts to all of your subscribers, you could still leverage gamification and convert your limitation to an opportunity.

 Which is exactly what Skills Life has done in this email. This Wheel of Fortune game implements the special offer with singular panache: now only one subscriber would win the lion’s share of the discount, while others must be content with smaller amounts. 

In the following gamification email example, Boden also offers discounts through a similar Spin-to-Win game. 

4. When Making An Exciting Announcement

Feel free to use gamification when making important announcements. You can transform a text-and-image-only announcement into something humorous and entertaining. 

For instance, in the following email, in which Parcel announces their virtual conference on email marketing, the tongue-in-cheek use of Outlook as the “official hurdle” in the game is amazing. Note how contextual the game is, as well. 

5. When Launching A New Product

You definitely don’t want to make it a custom, but you may, at times, use gamification in your product launch emails. It’s kind of a DIY launch if you will. Instead of you launching the product, your newsletter subscriber does it. We feel it is quite respectful on a brand’s part. 

Check out Chick-fil-a’s awesome way of introducing a new summer drink. It is a superb way of using the legendary word link game.

Characteristics of A Good Game 

Coming up with an interesting game is not simple. But if you know the anatomy of a good game, you will find it easier to produce one.

We have identified four non-negotiable elements of a good game:

1. A storyline: Any good game has an interesting storyline. “Interesting” doesn’t, however, mean it can’t be simple. In fact, you want to make these emails simple and achievable.
2. A goal: Your game must have a “non-stupid” goal to motivate the viewer to play.
3. A character: Include a character whom the player can relate to. This is another way of letting the player immerse themselves in the story.
4. Rules: Make sure the rules of your game are easy to follow. Don’t include too many. 
   

For our holiday campaign last year, we incorporated the above aspects in the following Thanksgiving gamification email. It tells a story; has a goal; has characters; and just three easy-to-follow rules. (Feel free to try the game yourself!)

Strategic Considerations for Email Gamification

Thinking up a good game and actually implementing it – not the same thing. You must have certain strategic flagpoles to implement a gaming email newsletter template. 

• Development cost: Building a game is costly. The cost will vary depending on the complexity of the game, features, and the level of customization needed. It also depends on the collective expertise of your development team. You want to make sure that the cost of the project does not outweigh the benefits.
  
• Total implementation time: The quicker you can implement your ideas, the better. Borrow ready-to-go elements from an archetypal configuration of your game.
  
• Analytics: Gamification is not outside the bailiwick of email analytics. Make sure you are able to track, measure, and analyze your gamified email campaign. (Engagement is usually what we track for our gamified emails. We want to see how long subscribers engage with the game, and how often they share these emails with others.)
  
• Scalability: Instead of building games from scratch each time, create reusable games. You should be able to incorporate certain go-to elements for every game you launch. 

To give you an instance of scalability, here’s another Thanksgiving gamification email we designed a number of years ago. Compare this with our latest email above. The basic template is more or less the same. We simply customized this email. 

Fallback Measures to Maximize User-friendliness

 Gamification in email marketing is complex. Apart from development, implementation, and cost, email compatibility is a huge challenge. Not all email clients support gamification, such as Yahoo, Gmail, and Outlook. How do you deal with this? 

The simplest way is to add a web version link to your email. In fact, there is no other viable alternative since only Apple Mail supports interactivity. 

You can, however, try email templates with embedded games. You just need to customize these templates according to your campaign parameters. 

Wrapping Up!

Gamification, if done right and occasionally, can transform how your audience engages and interacts with your brand. Much of its efficacy lies in the inherent appeal of games themselves. Games reinforce persuasion, which leads to certain intended behavioral modifications in the players. When you thus sell experience, people don’t hesitate to buy. 

Gamification is one of our fortes. We design gamified emails every year during the holiday season, and so far, we have had a great response from our audience. Have any additional insight to add? Comment away!

The post Dissecting Gamification in Email: The Nitty-Gritty, Tips, And Examples appeared first on Email Uplers.

1. Engaging students with news and regular updates
2. Keeping alumni informed of the activities at the institution
3. Encouraging prospective students to enrol into different programs
4. Promoting offers that would entice students to get referrals
5. Communicating with staff and stakeholders

It is different from other B2B or B2C email communications as the audience of these emails include students, applicants, partners of the educational institution, and its employees. There is a huge competition and you need to communicate at several touchpoints on a daily basis.

Marketing for a university, educational institution, or an online learning and teaching marketplace is not just about “promotions”. It is about building lifelong relationships and imparting a memorable experience to the recipients. 

Advantages of Email Marketing for Education Industry

Of course, social media and moment marketing with memes and GIFs sounds like the most attractive thing for marketing to the young population. But email marketing outshines all these tactics. A report by SendinBlue has revealed that 71% of millennials will take action from an email having the preferred content. It shows that emails are more effective to reach the millennial generation of students. 

Millions of students are applying to colleges, universities, and online courses. They compare different programs to determine the one that suits them the best. That’s where email marketing can help overcome the competitive bottleneck and persuade students to enrol. 

Email marketing not only helps convert the prospective students but also in retaining the enrolled students. If a student is happy with your university, it is quite likely that they will continue their education or take up another course from you. 

Points to Remember While Planning the Email Strategy

1. Be consistent in all your communications

Follow the brand guidelines in all the email communications. Whether it is the colors, the mascot or logo, or the messaging tone, keep it consistent throughout.

2. Personalize the emails according to the recipients

Segment your target audience according to their interests and preferences to personalize the emails. In the education industry, you can segment the subscribers based on the courses they have expressed interest in and the degree they are pursuing in your university. Besides addressing the users with their name, incorporate dynamic content in the emails to create hyper-personalized messages.

3. Send interesting content with actionable CTA

Relevance is key if you want to get conversions from emails. Draft engaging content considering the purpose of the email and target audience. Add relevant visuals with an actionable CTA that will prompt the user to take action. 

Now, let’s explore the email automation strategy for the education industry.

1. Welcome the prospects or students with a compelling email

As soon as someone signs up and expresses interest in your courses, you must welcome them with an introduction email. Through this email, you must talk about your university, the programs you cover, and reasons why students should choose you over other universities. 

Take a look at this welcome email by Thinkful. 

They have invited the prospect into the Thinkful community and explained the program structure. They understand that the subscriber might not be sure which course to take up. So, they have offered an introductory call to help. The email also encourages the readers to take a look at their offerings and must-read blogs. They have also highlighted their free events and online learnings that will support active learning. 

ASU sends out a professional yet aesthetic email to senior year students. It is an informative email that explains how a student can start planning for college. They have asked the students to review their admission requirements and then apply to be a Sun Devil (represented by their mascot). 

They have even invited the students to their free event in which they allow the students to visit the campus, get answers to their questions, and explore all the opportunities that ASU has to offer. 

2. Inspire the prospects to apply for the course

After the introductory call, you will get an idea about what the prospect is interested in. Then, you can send out an email that thanks the student for their time and recapitulates the discussion. The aim of this email is to gently nudge the prospect to take action and apply for the course. 

Take a look at this email by Upgrad. It is the main touchpoint that convinced me to apply for the digital branding and advertising course. They have shared the brochure as well as the contact details of the admission counselor to address any objections that I would have. 

3. Keep the students motivated to continue learning

Often, it so happens that the students enrol for your course and then get distracted, busy, or simply disinterested. You must use emails to keep such students motivated. 

Duolingo has gamified the entire learning experience by dividing it into various levels and challenging the users. 

Take a look at this email that reminds the subscriber to continue learning to reach Level 7. 

LinkedIn learning also follows the same tactic, without any gamification principle.

4. Try to retain the existing students 

Retention is important for every business. Education industry is no different. You can retain the students by inviting them to start a new course with you like Highbrow has done in this email. 

Alternatively, you can also launch new courses to get the students interested and continue learning with you. 

Check this email by Foreign Policy Design that promoted their Summer School during the pandemic. It is an off-site program, suitable for young designers as well as seasoned studio owners. The email also covers the different topics included in the program and their instructors. The copy at the outset subtly compels the readers to scroll till the end by mentioning about a “surprise”. It is a good way to increase the reading time and subscriber engagement. They have ended the email with a discount code that will entice the readers to register for the program.

5. Keep the alumni engaged

The alumni are your most priceless possession. They are the ones who can bring you new students with word-of-mouth publicity and make the university flourish. You must keep them engaged and informed about the events, updates, and everything that they should know about. 

The email by Wharton University of Pennsylvania reflects how much they value their alumni. It shares details about the transforming campus, customized career resources, upcoming events, and other curated content pieces. In addition, they have also offered a 25% discount and invited the alumni to apply for open-enrollment Executive Education programs. Now, that’s a great way to get new students and retain the old ones. 

6. Send occasion-based emails to (almost) everyone on the list

If you search for “Education industry email templates”, you will find many examples from Arizona State University. Here’s an email they sent to their subscribers on Valentine’s Day. 

Given the serious nature of the education industry, it is tough to imagine such visually rich emails with animations, right? But your students are humans too and they would appreciate such fun elements in the email once in a while. 

The email has an exclusive Spotify playlist and 6 printable messages for Valentine’s Day. It will surely garner click-throughs and engagement from the readers. Take a bow, ASU people!

They never miss out on wishing their students for the Holidays too. 

7. Send promotional offers to your subscribers

Promoting discount offers looks like a universal marketing tactic. Do not limit your offers to special occasions like Christmas. Take some inspiration from Americademy Inc. and see how they have offered $200 off their weekly summer camps

8. Automate your referral marketing strategy

Acquiring new customers is difficult… but it becomes easy if you have your old customers vouching for you. That’s exactly what referral email marketing is all about. You incentivize the referees and referrals for choosing you over the competitors. 

See how Internshala trainings has promoted their referral marketing strategy to get more people to sign up for their courses. 

9. Re-engage the dormant students

If you are an online learning portal, people might go dormant over a period of time. You must try to win back such learners by sending a re-engagement email. 

This re-engagement email by Duolingo is a nice example of the same. They have not expected much from the reader except a 5-minute lesson. The emotional appeal of the email is likely to draw the subscriber’s attention and get them back on track. 

10. Maintain the list hygiene with automated unsubscribe emails

Create an automated workflow for students or prospects who have not engaged with your past communications over 6-12 months. 

Udemy sends a simple and straightforward email that informs the readers that they have 5 days to stay on the mailing list. It also incentivizes the ones who click on the CTA and choose to stay on the list. Such emails are good to maintain the list hygiene and ensure an optimum deliverability rate. 

Wrapping Up

If you are an email marketer from the education industry, these examples and tips will surely inspire you to create more impactful emails that will help engage, retain, and acquire students/customers. 

Still unsure how to go about it? 

Hire our dedicated resources for your university or educational institution and let them execute your email marketing strategy. 

Contact us NOW>>

The post Education Industry Email Automation: It’s not as difficult as you think appeared first on Email Uplers.

No?! 

That’s fine. If you stick with this article till the end, you will know how to build loyalty, engagement, and trust with your audience by sequencing your emails and re-engage with the email list that hasn’t heard from you for a while. 

In this article, we have lined up ten emails in a sequence to help you nurture your leads and make quicker conversions. Let’s dive into them!

 #1. Permission emails

As you may have guessed, authorized-based email, popularly known as permission-based email marketing, is exactly what it sounds like. It is a method for companies to obtain consent explicitly from the audience in order to send business emails to them. If you are a GDPR compliant, which is required if you need to send to an EU country, you will need clear confirmation from the user if they would like to receive marketing emails from your business.

According to statistics, 77% of users prefer to receive promotional messages by email, rather than direct mail, SMS, phone, or social media. As a marketer, you can send these emails by connecting your popular tools like a Mailchimp to Facebook Lead Ads app so that you can gather leads, trigger automated emails and put your email marketing on autopilot. So make sure you get permission before sending an email regardless of its context.  

As an example, if you’re hosting a webinar that has, what you consider, insanely helpful information for your customers/prospects, you still need permission to email them regardless of how important YOU think the message is. It doesn’t matter if you know it’ll be helpful, their permission is crucial. 

If users have not chosen to communicate via email and you still send something to them, chances are they will mark your email as spam. In this case, a sufficient number of spam reports will filter the email and list the IP addresses. Of course, there is a way to prevent emails from being blacklisted. The best thing to do, however, is to make sure that everyone on your mailing list is willing to receive emails from your business. Besides, it would be wise to validate email addresses before sending any newsletters.

#2. Onboard emails

The user receives an onboarding/ welcome email as soon as they subscribe. They equip the recipient with everything they need to keep up with and use your offering.

Onboard emails, for example, can help users to book an appointment, start using items, or learn about the programs they tested.

The simple move of calling the recipient by their name allows a brand to show that it does not only think of an individual as a number.

Once you have sent the first onboard message, it is clever to send another one to fix potential doubts.

If a client is confused as to where help can be obtained or feels they cannot get assistance, they probably will not be long-term clients.

#3. Clout emails

Since we need to show our audience that we are somebody worth listening to, clout emails have a very significant role in making that happen. Primarily, there are two approaches to clout emails. The first one is to direct your audience to your own platform. It could be your YouTube channel, podcast, or blog. The second one is to feature your emails. These techniques demonstrate your expertise in your field and somebody your audience should hear from.

 #4. Training emails

In training emails, brands can share hacks to solve a problem or fill the gaps to change the perspective about something. Training emails are used to demonstrate a strategy on how to do tasks more conveniently and effectively. You can either send out an email full of instructions and training or you can send an email that will direct your audience to a tutorial. To take this to the next level, consider investing in tailored online courses. Using a learning management system to create courses for your audience will increase the chances of getting positive responses from them.  

The purpose of a training email is to make your customers feel like you are concerned for their welfare and want the best for them.

This email, no matter how convenient it seems to the customers and builds their trust for them, still is not the best way because there is a good chance your lead will claim their download and forget about it.
You need to make your audience get to know, like, and trust you and then take them to your sales pitch. Just like Neil does with his stories!

I absolutely love how Neil Scheffer delivers his lead magnet link in these emails. 

You can do the same. This way you know your audience won’t unsubscribe and come looking for your download everytime they need one.

 #5. Recommendation emails

Did you know that 50% of all buying decisions are influenced by email marketing? This means your email subscribers are interested in recommendation emails. 

This email is the screenshot of ContentStudio’s newsletter where they recommend different blogs that are not theirs. Similarly, you may recommend products that are not yours. It may be a gadget or a book that you love, and you would want your customers to have the same valuable experience that you have had. Recommendation emails not only create excitement but also make the audience feel like your purpose is not just to sell, but to add value in their lives.

 It is also a great way to utilize affiliate links. If your customers love your recommendations, they are going to associate the result with your brand, which in turn will strengthen the brand image.

#6. Ask emails 

As simple as this type is, brands are not sharing these emails very extensively. We agree that such mails may annoy us at some point, but it is important to send them out every once in a while. You simply have to ask your customers to buy your product or ask them what they recommend about the product. It is not a great strategy to always “do the talking”. It is essential to allow your customers to interact with you. Give them a chance to interact with you, as much as you want to interact with them.

After all, You’ll never know If you never ask. 

Below is a great email example of eye-catching Ask Email from G2.

However, It can be an interactive email that can be made useful for content curation and to collect data that may come in handy in the future. Make sure that people do not start forgetting about your products and services. So to be on the top of your customer’s mind, keep asking!

#7. Response emails

This is a follow-up email type of the above “ask email”. Once you have inquired about your products, it’s time to give them a response. Make sure the response email that you send is relevant, convincing, and most importantly solves the problem. It makes your audience feel like they have not been ignored and their concerns have been prioritized.

#8. Customer Service Emails

Converting a prospect into a customer can be a challenge. But, preventing that customer from churning can be a significant challenge in itself. Customers usually churn due to bad customer service. That’s where you can use email as an essential channel to resolve your customer’s problems & delight them. 

To save time & effort, you can use a pre-defined customer service email template but remember, personalization is the key. No one wants to read that automated email that is prefixed with a few dynamic fields. 

#9. Conversion Email

The primary objective of a conversion email series is to make everyone on your mail list a highly converting lead.

Many businesses do this by providing something that can easily prevent a customer from feeling uninterested.

The way to get the most conversions is by rewarding your subscribers. You can do this by giving them a link to a useful case study or simply offering a gift! Have a look at how Stacked Marketer multiplied their subscribers by offering free gifts like T-shirts, full-membership to Lifetime Insights and even a trip to Vienna, Austria!

Who would want to unsubscribe now?

The second step is to create a Perfect CTA (call-to-action) to your conversion link that lands on an eye-catching and user-friendly landing page. 

But always make sure the email conversion is precise and links to what the receiver is interested in.

The way you interact depends on whether you want to get an individual to buy something, subscribe or join in another activity.

#10. Engagement emails

You can probably guess from the name that the purpose of engagement emails is to compel the recipient and not make it boring enough to eventually get ignored.

The content of such a template varies according to your objective.

However, the subject line is supposed to contain intriguing information or make it feel like people are missing unless they read the message.

A single image of how readers can take advantage of the sale and the duration of the discount is contained in the contents of an email.

Then Audible adjusts the subject line in the “Last Call:,” following the subject line from the original email when people are not responding to the original email.

So it’s vital to have something in your automation tool that recognizes if a receiver acts on the offer when using this kind of email answer series.

If recipients receive emails for offers after shopping, they get disturbed and can unsubscribe.

More time it takes, more emails can be spaced.

Some engagement emails have elements to encourage people to participate in the process to obtain additional benefits.

Then you could thank the initial recipient for showing interest in one of the emails in your engagement sequence and tell them how much they could benefit if friends had the fun.

The following email may include further tips for using a business or a device, plus an email or telephone number for the organization, and, if necessary, request assistance.

 Like this Special offer email in ContentStudio’s Newsletter to which I’ve subscribed.

The FAQs in this email engage the user to read the email thoroughly and make up their mind into clicking the link for sure.

Email Nurture System:

A nurture email sequence is perfect for sending out your lead magnet, in the beginning, in case of engagement 

The content may be a whitepaper, a checklist that can be downloaded, or an ebook.

The first email you send out to a person should deliver the material as promised after asking for the lead magnet.

It is ideal that you keep your messages branded as much as you can, as Trifecta did in their Nurture email when I subscribed to them to calculate my macros.

We can call these ten emails your permission sandwich because you really can repeat them over and over again in your email nurture system. You can take these six different templates and infuse them with:

1. Different kinds of training
2. Different kinds of features of your products
3. Different kinds of permissions

This strategy can assist you in good engagement and generate potential leads. It is a great cycle where you know what you need to write and in which order to nurture your email list.

You may come across an unwanted situation in which you have a good amount of people on your email list, but they are not engaging since you have not emailed them for a while. If it’s that simple then just email them and tell them you have not been around much. Why? because you have been busy making a lot of changes in your business and they are going to get a lot from you. This is the appropriate way to approach your list in case there was a gap.

Conclusion:

The article is a guide to email marketers that overlook small prospects of email sequencing. It is a reminder that small things matter. These steps may be small but they should be kept in mind while writing an email, considering the impact it can create on your overall email marketing strategy.

Email marketing is an exciting component of the marketing subject. However, it is a friend of only a few. Marketers that have expertized in email marketing are leading the email game. We hope you get there as well!

The post How to use an email sequence and turn prospects into customers appeared first on Email Uplers.

Traditional email newsletters and one-off email campaigns are still serving their purposes, but what makes modern email marketing an advanced communication channel is how, with time, emails have involved in establishing connections. Emails are essential across all the business verticals but the industry that is generating the highest friction from email marketing is eCommerce. 

When it comes to making the most of email marketing, the unique and crafty gift retailer, Uncommon Goods sure knows how to keep its email game strong with leveraging email automation best practices.

Marketing automation is all about relevancy-rich targeting, and when it comes to personalization, nothing beats emails. Automated emails are said to generate 320% more revenue than the non-automated ones, and if this isn’t a number that can widen your eyes, we don’t know what can…

Uncommon Goods sends a series of emails throughout the customer journey under different email marketing campaigns. Let’s explore the types of email campaigns they indulge in and what are the best aspects of their email template designs.

How Uncommon Goods nails their Email Campaigns

On an average, Uncommon Goods sends 27 emails per month. Though the frequency might look way too much, they utilize smart segmentation to target different email lists with distinct email campaign propaganda. Let’s see how they do it…

1. ‘New This Week’ Series

Uncommon Goods keeps on updating their product categories, and to educate their subscribers about the new arrivals, they send emails regularly. The ‘Just In’ or ‘New this week’ series includes images of the products with a little description and price. The series is segmented based on new arrivals that can trigger online footfalls. Take a look at their email designs. The subtle GIF element adds to the awesomeness.  

2. ‘Pre Order’ Series

The next email series that Uncommon Goods runs is for creating a buzz! Ecommerce is all about pushing your prospects further down the conversion funnel and just like educating them, pre-order is a tactic that ecommerce stores use to grab the eyeballs even before the product arrives. These emails are useful in predicting buyer responses when it comes to introducing a new product. The goal behind these emails is to understand the purchase intent, manage distribution and orders, inventory, user demographics, and more. Here’s how Uncommon Goods does it with GIFs that make the email even more engaging.

3. The ‘Sale’ Announcements

The average eCommerce website conversion rate is 2.86%, while email marketing is still the most ROI generating channel. What we are getting at is, brands should announce their Sale, Discount offers, and other price-drop alerts via emails to maximize the revenue. You need to be seen in order to sell, and the reason is, most businesses, including Uncommon Goods, never miss out on an opportunity to inform their subscribers about the upcoming/ongoing Sale. Check these GIF email template designs they send…

they send…

4. One for the Community

Giving back to the community you belong to is a great way to increase goodwill. Corporate social responsibility not only gains you credibility, but also increases your loyal customer base who dearly feel for the social issues and community well-being. Uncommon Goods partakes in charity events and even strongly lends their support to ongoing social issues. The email template for such a cause should be sophisticated and concise. Check out how Uncommon Goods is doing its bit for the community and enlightens its subscribers about the same.

5. Tell ‘em what’s happening

Maintaining a website blog section with all the relevant content revolving around your product/service offerings is a considered best practice for organic visitors’ inflow. Moreover, it helps you with search engine rankings too. Uncommon Goods maintains a fresh content flow by publishing artists’ stories, buying or gifting guides, behind the scenes, and much more. They promote the content via monthly email sends to increase visibility which can be interlinked to sales. Here is their email for the blogs.

6. Leverage the special days

Occasional or special day emails are not new. From festive greetings to birthday wishes, brands are sending these emails for long. Besides, being an online gift store, Uncommon Goods has an added advantage to amalgamate its products for occasional gift sharing. They send the best gifting guides via emails. Here are a few examples.

7. Tell Your Story

Humanizing the emails to establish a bond has been emphasized enough! Telling what you are doing and how you are doing it connects your subscribers with your workflow. Apart from your employees, consider your subscribers as your extended family too. People sign up to get insights and not just offer emails. Share your thoughts about a social cause, introduce your employees’ stories, tell them your philosophy, talk about how you care, and why they should choose you over your competitors. Take cues from Uncommon Goods’ emails.

8. Abandoned Cart Email Series

Cart abandonment emails are crucial for every eCommerce store because a prospect with such high purchase intent doesn’t come easy. Notifying the abandoners about their products is a technique to win back the ‘almost lost’ sales. Studies have established a belief that email campaigns sending 3 abandoned cart emails yield 69% more orders than sending only 1 email. Uncommon Goods also seems to follow the same practice! With different subject lines, email body, CTAs, and up-sell/cross-sell agenda, Uncommon Goods sends 3 cart abandonment emails distributed over a month’s span. Here they are, in the same order they were sent.

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That One Fundamental Aspect About Emails

We’ve seen more than 15 email examples from Uncommon Goods. At the center of every email campaign is the engaging design, consistency, and relevance. The brand has identified different patterns for different types of email campaigns they scale and make the most of GIFs to enhance email engagement. As you can see, all the above-mentioned email examples are uniquely crafted.

Email templates are the heroes to your email campaigns and developing a responsive, actionable, and measurable HTML email template demands expertise. Uncommon Goods has totally nailed it!

Wrapping Up

The next time, when your email developer needs the inspiration to design templates that can convert, have a look at these email examples by Uncommon Goods. If you are looking for an email marketing agency with a result-oriented email marketing approach, Email Uplers is the one! We provide creative and responsive email template production services that can help you ace your email marketing game.

that can help you ace your email marketing game.

The post How Uncommon Goods sends Uncommon Emails To Woo Their Subscribers appeared first on Email Uplers.

In this post, you will find out what engagement is, how it impacts email deliverability, and which simple tips will help you connect with readers more efficiently. 

How Audience Engagement Improves Deliverability

Improving email deliverability is a vicious cycle – in order to make sure more people are opening your emails you need to make sure the people in your email list engage with every letter well. 

When you send a batch of emails, the hosting provider (Gmail, Outlook, or a different email client provider) tracks the way a reader interacts with the emails received via IMAP vs POP3. If people don’t read your emails for a long time or send them to spam, the provider will automatically reroute all future emails to the spam folder.

There are 4 factors that determine audience engagement – let’s take an in-depth look at them. 

1. Email opens

Your email open rate gets ticking when a reader opens an email, right?

As straightforward as the concept of the open rate may sound, it is far more complicated. Even if a person opened your email, the action will be tracked by the client only in one of two cases:

• The user enables viewing images in the side panel of the email tab.
• The reader clicks on at least one in-mail link. 

To calculate the email open rate, ESPs use the formula below:

Number of people who opened the email / Number of letters that didn’t bounce

Most emails have an average open rate of 22% – if yours is below that threshold, the brand’s sender reputation will likely take a hit. 

2. Clicks

Email clicks are powerful proof that the campaign audience is interested in the contents of the email and doesn’t mind getting more letters from the sender. The higher your campaign’s CTR is, the easier it will be to promote your website, and the better the brand’s reputation will be. 

Email clicks is another essential part of audience engagement that influences deliverability rates. Since people are extremely careful about clicking on third-party links and overloaded with emails these days, the average CTR of a campaign is about 10%. 

Here’s how you can calculate the click-through rate of your emails:

Number of clicks / Number of all delivered messages

3. Spam complaints

When it comes to email deliverability, spam complaints definitely take the lead. 

ISPs use two approaches to identify spam complaints:

• One-click spam report –  in which a user reports an email by choosing Report/Spam in the email client tab 
• Process-driven spam alerts a rarer one in which a user directly contacts an ISP regarding an unwanted email. These complaints are disastrous for deliverability 

To calculate your campaign’s spam rate marketing metrics, use the following formula:

Total number of spam complaints / Total number of sent emails

To avoid spam complaints, make sure to message only those who subscribed to your emails and make sure every email of the campaign lives up to the expectations readers may have after filling in the subscription form. Read on the comprehensive guide on how to stop your emails from going to spam.

4. Time spent reading the email

Other than getting people to open your email, making sure they engage with the content for a longer duration should be one of your priorities. The good news is, increasing the average time a person spends to read emails might now be easier than ever. 

According to statistics, the amount of time we spend looking at each email is steadily increasing – right now, 44.4% of readers read emails for over 18 seconds. 

How to make sure people are interested in the letter enough to interact with it longer? For one thing, make sure to optimize your email design for smartphones – mobile users spend more time reading emails. Other than that, using storytelling when writing a copy is an efficient way to keep readers engaged – use personal examples and attention-catching narratives to keep people glued to your content. 

Type of Audiences by Engagement

To get full control over audience engagement and improve email deliverability, it’s helpful to know how exactly your subscribers interact with all emails they receive. 

To understand engagement, marketers observed the way readers react to subject lines of the emails they received. Based on that, the contact engagement cycle was created with the 5 following stages:

• Actively engaged subscribers – these readers are loyal to the brand and happy to hear from you. They interact with every letter without fail and are actively waiting for more content. To keep the interest of actively engaged readers growing, add them to a separate list, and send new content more frequently. 

• Recently engaged. Although these readers are generally happy to hear from you, their excitement is not as evident as it used to be. Perhaps, they can only relate to the content partly and don’t interact with some emails as frequently than with others. To re-engage these subscribers, introduce additional perks in future campaigns – be it a coupon, a giveaway contest, or a special offer. 
• Re-engagement needed. These people were once your loyal followers – yet, they may have moved on or outgrown your content and no longer care about what you are doing. If that’s the case, consider finding out what these subscribers are interested in and personalize the content to meet their current interests, demands, and expectations. 
• Unengaged – although these people open emails coming from you, they don’t interact with them in any way. Since such readers might start reporting the campaign as spam when they fully lose interest in it, make sure to send emails with moderate frequency, exclude transactional offers from the campaign, and build engagement up gradually by creating valuable “how-to” emails, trend reviews, or aggregating latest industry news. 
• Inactive – to avoid reputation losses, remove people who don’t open or interact with emails in any way for a couple of weeks from the list. 

To make sure you don’t lump engaged and inactive users together, separating readers into different email lists based on the way they interact with emails is a sensible practice. 

4 Practices For Improving Audience Engagement

As you can tell by now, audience engagement is crucial for stellar sender reputation and ultimately, email deliverability. As such, marketers should do their best to keep readers interested in the content and eager to get more. 

These 4 email marketing practices will help you build strong and long-lasting bonds with your audience. 

1. Implement segmentation

If you have thousands of emails on the email list, finding a topic that would be equally interesting to every reader is next to impossible. That’s why marketers use segmentation – grouping people into smaller, more refined lists based on clear criteria. Based on the results of segmentation, you can later test the relevance of website content, implement dynamic pricing, etc. 

Here are some ideas you can use for audience segmentation:

• Demographic segmentation – grouping subscribers by location, age, gender, etc. 

• Interest-based segmentation – find out who among your readers is interested in sports, politics, pop culture, and other fields and group people with matching hobbies in one base. 

• History of interactions with the brands – new, returning, and loyal customers should be on separate email lists. 

• Source – you can group readers based on how they found your email – via social media, thanks to Facebook marketing tools, after visiting the website, after hearing you speak at an event, etc. 

• Device – group mobile, desktop, and tablet users separately. 
• Behavioral – group subscribers based on their interactions with the brand – website visitors, social media subscribers, those with abandoned carts, etc. 

2. Test the design

Improving the design of your email is a powerful way to make the audience’s reading experience more enjoyable and fulfilling. You need to know how to create a good email template. Here’s how you can find out if the look of your template is engaging enough:

• Use testing tools to find out how the email looks on desktop, mobile, and tablet interfaces.
• Open the same letter via different browsers to make sure the look of the content doesn’t change. 
• View the email across different email clients to make sure the font is displayed accurately and all graphic elements are well-aligned. 

Overall, readability should be the cornerstone you build the email’s design upon. Make sure the font is large enough for people with visual impairments to read it, all infographics are readable and all links are easy to tap on for mobile users, and the style of the typography doesn’t distract users from the message. 

3. Create relevant content

It goes without saying that relevance is the chief factor determining whether or not an email will resonate with a reader. However, email marketers and business owners are often confused trying to figure out if the copy hits straight into the audience’s expectations. 

The good news is, establishing whether or not the content you share is relevant isn’t as challenging as it seems. Here are some practices to use as a starting point. 

• Create customer personas and make sure the content matches the interests of each reader type. 
• Define the key intent of the copy. 
• Use the Keyword Planner to find the most searched for words and phrases and make sure your content addresses the pressing issues and questions of the field. 
• Be to-the-point. The email content shouldn’t be long – if 3-4 paragraphs are enough to relay the main message, don’t bloat the copy out of habit. 

4. Track and react to spam complaints

Spam complaints are extremely harmful – they tank sender reputation and email deliverability. That’s why you need to determine why people report your content and be one step ahead of the game. 

To prevent and react to spam complaints promptly, offering good customer service, implement best tracking practices, such as:

• Joining the feedback loop. Most email clients allow business owners to get alerts whenever a reader reports an email as spam. The application process varies depending on the client – generally, you need to fill in a sign-up form, specifying your contact information and IP. 
• Start user onboarding slowly. All new subscribers added to your list should be “quarantined” – isolated from the rest of the list and added to a separate database. Send these readers a couple of introductory emails with a low frequency, increasing the number of letters procedurally. This way, people will get used to hearing from you and will not report new emails from the brand. 
• Watch inactive users closely. Tracking engagement is a part of spam protection since inactive users are more likely to get fed up with your emails and start flagging them. Pinpoint those who haven’t opened or interacted with the message for 1-2 weeks and remove them from the list to reduce the risks of being reported. 
• Find out which words or images are more likely to get an email reported. The list of stop-words email clients see as red flags for spam varies – rather than putting complete trust into whatever you find online, run tests for yourself, and document your observations. 

Conclusion

Audience engagement is a crucial part of email deliverability – if your subscribers aren’t interested in the content you share, eventually, email client providers pick up on it and send every letter you create to spam automatically. 

Being aware of the audience engagement cycle and following best sending practices is a way to connect with your readers and keep a high email deliverability level. 

The post How Audience Engagement Can Improve Your Email Deliverability appeared first on Email Uplers.