Known for ages as an effective way to reach audiences and persuade them, email marketing continues to be a powerful force in the world of marketing. Despite the fact that we may think we ignore the piles of emails we receive each day, email marketing has been shown to generate higher click-through rates and better returns on investment than virtually any other form of advertising. Perhaps it is due to the fact that email marketing methods revolve around lists of subscribers who have expressed prior interest in your products and services (at least, that’s how it should be). Some strategies in email marketing work better than others, however, and we’ll discuss a couple of each in the following article.

Loyalty

A variety of metrics that gauge the success and lifetime of email campaigns was conducted by Moz and revealed in the 2014 Industry Survey. The number one element that positively influenced marketing according to respondents was loyalty. Email campaigns that are designed to acknowledge and reward loyal customers, readers and subscribers had poor performances less than twenty percent of the time. With a success rate above eighty percent, it comes as no surprise that brands seek to build loyalty not just through email, but through all mediums – the appeal of a brand and the desire to be associated with it has profound effects on consumer habits.

Birthdays

Whether you are pinging noise or carefully-crafted content via email, you will most likely notice an increase in its performance when you target individuals with it on their birthdays. Many brands do very well whenever they send out free discounts, products or coupons to their subscribers on their birthdays. While they are very unlikely to use them immediately, a limited-time offer may prove to be an excellent way to boost year-round engagement and sales in select niches.

Winning Back

The least successful area in email marketing is, unsurprisingly, the act of winning back formerly engaged or interested users. Once individuals have engaged with your brand and since then have “disappeared”, then there is a one in three chance that your campaign to engage these individuals will end in utter failure. Truly positive results are only observed around 30% of the time, making this approach little more than pinging noise and a losing strategy overall. Instead of focusing on reconverting the converted, it’s a much better strategy to broaden your horizon in search of new subscribers.

Opt-ins

Whether you are using mobile, the web or social media, opt-in campaigns for new products or lines do not work well at all. In many cases, brands feel as if they can convince their current subscribers to try out or support something new – all because they are responsible for the creation of both. In reality, however, interests are much more nuanced and these campaigns often do not produce the types of results people expect. Truly positive results are not any more prevalent with this strategy than with win-back strategies, but the rate of complete failures is somewhat lower.