Supercharge Your Email Marketing Plan with These Effective Strategies

If people could put a “NO ADS” sign on their digital mailbox they certainly would.

Whether you work in a B2C or B2B context, email continues to be one marketers’ favorite channels to engage and build customer loyalty. Not only is it a very effective way to convert leads into buying customers, it is also one of the best ways to maximize marketing ROI.

In this series of articles, I will be taking you through some key best practices to make sure you profit from this highly effective marketing tool. In this edition, we will be looking at the Subscriber List and Subject Line.

1. The Subscriber List

To build, grow and maintain a healthy subscriber list you must ensure that members in that list are real, opt-in and active:

• Real Subscribers: It is very common for visitors in your website to make typo mistakes when subscribing to your email list or to provide a fake email address — especially if they’re exchanging their email address against one of your offers (like a free eBook or discount coupon for example). To avoid this problem, you can implement a double opt-in process: right after the users provides their email address an automated email is sent asking them to confirm their subscription by clicking on a link within the email body.

When the user clicks on the confirmation link, make use of the Thank You page to engage the newly acquired subscriber with more interesting content that will nudge it further through the conversion funnel.

• Opt-In Subscribers: To be GDPR compliant you must always ask for consent before sending commercial email communications. In this context the purchase of email lists is not recommended — if people could put a “NO ADS” sign on their digital mailbox they certainly would. When people opt-in to receive email communications from your brand they expect to hear back from you, so be transparent: during the sign-up process let your subscribers know how often you’ll be emailing them and respect that commitment.

Don’t spam! Always give subscribers the possibility to opt-out from your email communications. Take this opportunity to remind them the valuable benefits they’d miss out if they opt-out — hopefully this can change their mind.

• Active Subscribers: A subscriber list is not fixed. Over time, the number of members in your list may grow or decrease depending on your ability to keep subscribers engaged with the content of your email marketing efforts. Sometimes people sign-up to your email list using their professional email address then change jobs while other times people just lose interest in your content and don’t engage with it anymore. In either case, one of the best ways to keep high engagement rates is to target mostly active subscribers: someone who has opened at least one of your emails over the past six months.

Don’t give up on your inactive subscribers just yet! You can put these subscribers aside and develop a re-activation strategy to gain back their interest. Take the time to truly understand why these subscribes have lost interest in your content and use these insights to improve the customer journey.

Make sure subscribers in your list are real, active and opt-in.

The health of your subscriber list will have an enormous impact on your deliverability rate and sender reputation. You can use Return Path’s free tool to know your Sender Score as well as their resources to know how to improve it.

2. The Subject Line

Making your way into your subscriber’s inbox can be quite a challenge and once you’ve finally made it in you still have to get them to open the email you put so much effort on.

A compelling and concise subject line isn’t easy to craft — it must be engaging, short and straight to the point. It is very likely that your subscribers will be checking their emails from their mobile phones so be sure to include the key message within the first 50 characters of the subject line.

Lastly, don’t forget to take advantage of the pre-header. A pre-header is the little text that appears just after the subject line. If you don’t predefine the pre-header in your email marketing tool the first line of your email will be displayed instead. Although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can be a missed opportunity to catch your subscriber’s attention. Think of the pre-header as a valuable extension of the subject line — a supporting element that can help increase the Open Rate of your email campaigns. For better results keep the pre-header below 100 characters.

A clear Sender Name plays a major role when it comes to improving your Open Rate. Make it easy for your subscribers to recognize you by using the same Sender Name you used during the double opt-in process.

Email Subject Line examples

Looking for more email marketing tips?

If you liked this post and want more email marketing best practices, my follow up post will deal with content and personalization. In the meantime, start by applying the lessons you’ve learned here and let me know it worked in the comments.

About this article

This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.