Originally published at thinktank.personagraph.com.

One of the best ways out there to get a more engaged existing user base for your app is through email marketing. Although 84% of all emails sent are spam, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools out there. This effectiveness is, of course, only in place when you have a person’s explicit permission to send them emails. With an app it’s as easy as pie to get people to sign up for your newsletters, tips & tricks, special offers and all other messages you want to send to the users of your app. Follow one golden rule: always ask for permission!

What to send

As you can probably imagine there is no standard template of what sort of emails you can send to your app’s user base. It all depends on your app. Luckily you already know two extremely important things about your user base. 1: They are interested in what your app has to offer (because they found your app among the 1.2 million others and subsequently even installed it). 2: They opted in for your email newsletter. With this in mind you can start making conclusions about what your user base might be interested in, of course in relation to your app. In addition, Personagraph provides you with the most accurate data on your users’ demographics and interests which make your efforts so much more targeted. When you are just starting your email strategy it’s important to remember to go for quality content that is generally related to your app’s category. By doing this and a lot of A/B testing you can start to find out what tickles your users most. For example, you can send emails with tutorials and emails with high scores for your game app. Which of the two performs better? What about an email with tips and tricks compared to one with news about an update for your productivity app? By constantly measuring open rates, click through rates and the effects on your app’s performance metrics you can find the right direction and start creating a loyal follower base that appreciates your emails.

Best practices

When you start using email marketing for your app it’s needless to say you have to optimize these emails for mobile. The goal is to get users more engaged which is easiest when they already have their phones in hand. Naturally, you cannot choose whether a person will read your email on a smartphone/tablet or on a computer but you can make sure that it looks great in all formats. A key element of optimizing for mobile is keeping the character count of your subject line to a minimum. This because space is very limited. Mail Chimp, a hugely popular email software service, advises to keep subject lines under 50 characters. The subject line is of crucial importance because over one third of recipients judges whether they open the email or not based only on these few words. It should come as no surprise that people are very impatient with emails. If you want recipients to perform a certain action with your email make sure to have your “call to action” in the begin, they likely do not read your entire message. It is good to be frugal with words in general and use images. However, use images smartly! Mobile friendliness will be all determining and big image files can also increase your spam score. Be sure to follow the legislation and rules regarding spam! Once you get flagged as spammer it is a long and tedious process to convince the email providers that you’re actually legit.

Target and personalize

One strategy that is guaranteed to boost open- and click through rates is to know your audience and target them with relevant messages. As mentioned above, Personagraph specializes in user understanding and will provide you with all the necessary data. For example, the Personagraph dashboard shows that you have a big active segment of single males between 20–25 years old that are interested in fitness and consumer electronics. You can use this information to shape your email to this customer segment. Think about their situation. Are they going back to school? What are the current issues that keep them occupied? What music are they listening to? It all depends on your app what sort of questions you can ask yourself based on these user profiles. The answers you can give form the inspiration you need to send interesting and targeted emails. Another effective strategy is to personalize your emails for individual users specifically. Think about Amazon sending you offers based on what products you have been browsing this week. This takes more expertise but the payout is usually worth the investment. Of course you don’t have to do all this manually. There are great email software services available that provide great tools for your email strategy.

Email software services

There are many providers of email software services but Mail Chimp is without a doubt the most famous one. Others top providers are Get Response and Active Campaign. They let you design your emails, create templates and autoresponders. Also, you can easily track all sorts of metrics that tell you exactly how effective your mails are in cranking up user engagement. Another valuable service is that you are provided with advice on subject lines, what times are most effective to send emails, and how your email is rated by anti spam software.

There is a lot you can do when it comes to email marketing and the above may seem like a massive undertaking. However, most of it comes down to deeply knowing your audience. Besides that it is best to focus on achieving small goals at a time and gradually developing yourself and your emails. Over time, your app will have a big, loyal user base!