For every dollar a company spends on email marketing, it makes $44 in return.
If you’re not currently on top of your email marketing game, you should be.
So stay tuned for these 8 tips to improve your email marketing skills for print on demand.
Hey, it’s Nora from Printful’s Marketing Team.
Email is alive and stronger than ever with about 99% of people checking their email every day.
On top of that, 66% of people say that email marketing directly affects what they choose
to buy so it’s no wonder most marketers say that email is their biggest return on investment.
From writing subject lines that stand out to using segmenting your lists, we’ve got
some email marketing tips that will make you want to click open and save as important.
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Email marketing is possible whether you sell products from your website or in a marketplace like Amazon.
If you sell on a marketplace, include a link to your subscription page on your seller page
so customers can click the link and sign up for your emails.
If you sell from your own domain, use a form on your homepage to collect email addresses.
Offer quality content
To get started in email marketing, you need a list of email addresses from customers.
You can capture email addresses by using a pop-up on the landing page of your website
or by using chatbots.
But one of the most effective ways to collect email addresses is to reward people for subscribing
to your list by offering them a piece of content known as a Lead Magnet.
A lead magnet or a freebie is a piece of evergreen content that is valuable to your audience.
It could be as easy as a percent or dollar amount off of their purchase or the promise
of latest news and exclusive deals.
Your lead magnet could also be a checklist, ebook, webinar, or online course related to
what you specialize in.
On the Printful blog, we wrote a post about holiday marketing for ecommerce.
At the end of the article, we offered our readers a chance to download our detailed
holiday planning checklist.
They just have to put in their email address to subscribe to our blog newsletter, then
the checklist is sent to them.
It’s a great technique to capture email addresses!
Set up an autoresponder through an email software like ConstantContact or MailChimp, that way
as soon as someone provides their email address, they get the lead magnet delivered to them
immediately.
When capturing email addresses, include an opt-in button so that subscribers agree to
receiving your newsletter.
A double opt-in form is best to protect against spam-traps.
You’re also legally required to include an opt-out button at the bottom of your emails.
It’s generally a good practice as well to let your subscribers know what they’ll be
receiving and how often they’ll be receiving it.
Write catchy subject lines
People only take about 3-4 seconds to decide if they want to open your email.
A good subject line will improve your open rate.
An open rate is the number of people who opened the email over the number of people it was
delivered to.
An average open rate is about 20% so if your rate is between 15–25%, you’re doing well.
To achieve a high open rate, your subject line should be accurate and clear.
Avoid subject lines that say things like: “You’re a winner.”
69% of emails marked as spam are labeled as junk based on the subject line alone, so make
sure your subject line gives a good idea about what’s in the body of the email.
Your subject line should also be short and to the point.
Under 50 characters is an ideal length for a subject line so that mobile users scanning
their inbox can read the subject line in full.
As for the content of your subject line, make sure your subject lines use at least one of
four key emotions: urgency, curiosity, excitement, and joy.
Urgency causes a customer to act fast, curiosity gets them to click in order to learn more
, excitement triggers them to be interested in the content, and joy makes them feel good
about what they’re about to read.
For subject lines that drive results, use emojis sparingly and smartly, write numbers
with digits, use the imperative tense and be careful about humor as it could fall flat.
Create email series
Unsure of what types of emails you should send?
Start out with a welcome or onboarding series where you thank subscribers for signing up.
Tell them about your products and services and offer them a discount or a voucher just
for signing up.
A good welcome email introduces customers to the newsletter and gives them helpful next
tips to get them started with the store or service.
From there, you can send promotional emails, telling them about new products or deals you
currently offer.
Try out some trigger-based campaigns.
Set up a system that automatically sends emails based on the actions or inactions that your
customers take.
If you’ve already set up an online store, you may have had some issues with cart abandonment,
when a customer puts some products in their cart but doesn’t follow through with the
purchase.
Customers abandon their carts for many reasons: they were just browsing, they had an issue
with shipping, they wanted to compare prices or they experienced a technical issue.
Combat this by sending out cart abandonment emails where you remind them of what they’ve
left in their cart and suggest alternative products in addition to what they left.
Remind customers when the prices your prices have dropped or when various products come
back in stock.
You can also start an upselling series where you tell your customers about products that
are more expensive than the products they have ordered in the past.
Start a cross-selling series where you sell your customers a product relevant to their
purchase history.
If your customer has ordered a hoodie, let them know about the launch of your sweatshirt
line.
Include style and gift guides and tell them about industry trends.
Then spruce up your transactional emails.
Transactional emails have an open rate of 40-50% so consider making them a little more
interesting by including a discount code or providing your customers space to give feedback.
You can then use these reviews as social proof in your marketing and even integrate them
into your emails.
97% of consumers say that good reviews factor into what products they buy.
Sell your product just by showing how much other people liked it.
Write copy that pops
Your email copy should pop off the screen and keep the reader’s attention.
When it comes to content, storytelling can be an effective way of illustrating a point.
Write about your origin story or offer the reason why you’re bringing in a new product
or integration.
You can talk about how a your brand or a customer came up with a solution to a problem and make
sure to highlight how your product solved an issue by emphasizing the journey and the
resolution.
It will help your customers see themselves using your products.
Then, consider writing a “Reason Why” email explaining why you’re making a certain
offer.
For example, you could create an email celebrating the anniversary of when they first started
using their service and rewarding them for their loyalty to the company by giving them
$5 off their next purchase.
You can also write “Human Connection” stories where you tell short stories about
life or business that your customer might relate to.
Just remember to relate it back to your products.
Also remember to write your emails using your brand’s style and language.
If your brand is formal, write formally.
If your brand is more casual and sarcastic, make use of those dad jokes you’ve been
saving or a rainy day.
You’ll also want to keep the goal of the email in mind.
If you’re sending an email to fix a shipping error, better keep it serious.
But if the goal of the email is to roll out an April Fool’s day deal, have fun with it!
Use pre-existing content
If you’re not sure about what to write, you can recycle existing content and use it
in emails.
Have a new product that’s already up on your website?
Take out the most important parts of your product launch from the copy that’s already
up on your website and put them in the body text of the email.
Include a button that links to the product so that interested readers can learn more.
The same thing goes for if you release a seasonal collection or have a holiday promotion.
If you have a blog or a video presence, embed those into your emails as well.
Just by including the word “video” in your subject line, your open rates can double.
We at Printful send out email reminders every time we release a new video so be sure to
click the link in the description below to get our videos straight to your inbox.
You can also link to relevant content that you didn’t create, as long as you include
an thoughtful explanation as to why it’s relevant to your audience.
Doing this puts an original, personal twist on content that already exists.
Feel free to integrate your own social media posts into your emails.
If customers don’t already follow you on social media, it’s a great way to showcase
the content you post.
And don’t forget to include social sharing buttons!
You can take this opportunity to cross-promote your newsletter on social media as well.
You can post screenshots or summaries of your emails to let your customers know what they’re missing.
Make your emails interactive
From image carousels to videos and animations, there are plenty of ways to make your email
visually appealing.
For example, you could play around with animated gifs in the header or the footer of your email.
Or you can integrate forms for customer ratings and reviews.
Few people want to go to an external link to give feedback unless they had a terrible
or exceptional experience.
By integrating your forms and surveys, you capture not only more data but also more accurate
data from your customers.
You can also gamify your emails by adding in pop-quizzes, spin-to-wins or prize drawings.
If incorporating trivia or scratch-offs into your emails sounds like something you want
to try, you don’t have to be a graphic designer in order to use them.
Privy is just one easy-to-use software you can use to create interactive emails that
include fun features such as pop-ups or spin-to-win wheels.
Zembula is another user-friendly platform you can try as their creative and visually
appealing templates do most of the work for you.
Segment your lists
Segmentation is when you target people from your email list based on criteria such as
demographics or website activity.
It means that people get more relevant emails based on their preferences and actions.
Marketers who use segmented campaigns see much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Base your segments on information such as home address to include holiday shipping deadlines
based on their location.
Then target them so receive emails in their native language, currency, and prices.
Adjust your offers to the seasons in that person’s country so that they get advertisements
for bathing suits in the summer, whether that means July in the U.S. or December in South Africa.
However, avoid too much personalization in your segments as it could come across as creepy.
For example, you can state someone’s name as long as you incorporate it into the email
but using it as a hook might make them feel uneasy.
Be aware that 75% of people say personalized content came across as “somewhat creepy”
and 22% chose to look for “less creepy” brands.
A/B test
Once you’ve segmented your audience, make sure to A/B test to get to know your customers
even better.
That way you can send them emails you know they’re going to engage with.
You can test any part of your email, from the sending time to the copy on the call-to-action button.
A/B testing usually goes like this:
1. Decide which part of your campaign you want to test
2. Choose your sample size
3. Build two different variations of the same email, changing only one variable each time
4. Send half of your sample group one email and the other half of your sample group the other email.
5. Send the best-performing campaign out to the people who didn’t receive the test email
Stuck on what to test?
Start by figuring out what metric you’re most interested in.
If you want to improve open rates, test the subject line.
When testing subject lines, you can look at what types of sentences, sentence lengths,
symbols, tone, and emotions work best.
You can also check out what days of the week and times of the day get the highest click
rates and open rates.
If you want to improve your click rate, play around with the copy or the call-to-action button.
When it comes to copy, you can take a look at headings, body and images.
With your headings, test what length, structure and tone work best.
When it comes to your body text, you can look at what tense readers prefer.
Is the passive voice or the active voice better for your audience?
As for images, you can test the size, color or type of photo that your audience prefers.
Don’t forget to analyze your data after you test it.
Make a spreadsheet of your experiments, write down what works, what doesn’t and build on it.
That’s been our crash course on email marketing!
Are you new to email marketing or are you already a pro?
Let us know in the comments below along with some of your favorite email marketing strategies.
Hey! I hope you enjoyed that video.
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