While social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook seem to be all the rage lately, you can’t do without email in your marketing efforts.

A study found that, despite all the noise about social media, old school communication methods like email account for 75 per cent of all communications.

Whether you want to reach out to the press, solicit partners, or market your offer to prospects, you have to use email — and often, the same principle can be used to ensure maximum success with all your emails.

Below are five email outreach tips that will help your startup marketing efforts.

1. Embrace The KISS Principle

While it is easy to want to succumb to the temptation of writing emails that are wordy, “don’t”.

It is important to come to the realisation of the fact that you don’t necessarily have to include all the information you want your recipient to know in your initial email.

As such, you should keep your end goal in mind; if the end goal is to get a response, then keep it short and simple. If the purpose of your email is to get users to click to a product or offering, you should follow the same principle as well. Your email isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a sales page; rather, it should drive prospects to your sales page.

Here’s how you can employ the KISS principle for your email messages:

1. Keep paragraphs short and to the point.

2. Learn to use numberings and bullets to make your points stand out.

3. Make sure your email has just one purpose and call to action; you want to avoid having too many choices.

4. In a lot of cases, plain text emails will outperform design-heavy emails. You want your email to appear well and consistently across devices.

2. Use a research-backed approach to follow up with emails

Whether sending personal emails to influencers for strategic purposes or promotional messages, it is essential to follow up if you don’t get a response — and to do it the right way.

Following up becomes all the more important when you realise that, depending on your industry, average email open rates could be as low as 15 per cent. The marketing rule of seven also suggests that you might need to reach some prospects up to seven times before they notice and act on your message.

Also Read: The 5 elements of the perfect cold email

So what’s the best way to follow up then? By following up soon enough but not too soon. The sweet spot is 48 hours.

This is according to data from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, which is based on an analysis of 16 billion emails from more than 2 million users. The study found that 90 per cent of people will respond to an email within two days; if there’s no response then, you’re highly unlikely ever to get a response.

So, if you send an email and there’s no response, wait 48 hours and send a follow-up.

3. Make sure the timing of your emails is data-driven

Do you know that there is the best time to send emails?

Data from MailChimp’s Send Time Optimisation algorithm that analyzed billions of email messages sent to users on the Mailchimp server found that there are a best time and day to send emails.

Mailchimp’s study found that sending emails on weekends could result in a 50 per cent drop in engagement with the email message and that most people interact with messages they receive on a Thursday.

Furthermore, MailChimp found that most subscribers engage better with messages when the message gets to their inbox around 10 AM.

Your audience should most certainly determine when you send your messages, but people rarely engage as much with emails on weekends. Therefore you must avoid sending important messages on weekends. Besides that, use third-party data as well as your own internal data to find out when people best engage with your emails and leverage this data when sending emails.

4. Segment and automate

Do you know that automated emails get 119 per cent higher click-through rates compared to broadcast emails? Or that properly-segmented emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails?

One of the smartest things you can do when trying to promote your startup is to learn how to segment and automate your emails effectively.

In fact, in a particular study that compared general emails sent to an entire email database and emails sent to a segmented list, marketing research institute MarketingSherpa found that segmented emails resulted in 208 per cent higher conversions than batch-and-blast emails.

You can segment your email list in so many ways: most email service providers will let you segment your email list by gender, location, and activity of a subscriber based on interaction with your site.

Also Read: How to increase at least 15 per cent ROI by running a successful email outreach campaign

For example, you could send a different message to a male segment of your list from what will be sent to females.

You could also segment such that the message sent to someone who just recently subscribed to your list is different from that sent to someone who has been subscribed for a long time and has been engaging with your messages.

5. Focus on your subject line

Your email subject line can make or break your outreach efforts. In fact, research shows that more than a third of email recipients open email messages based on the subject line of an email alone.

If your email subject line is weak, it will affect response to your message. The following tips can help, however:

1. Make sure your email subject lines are specific and to the point. As tempting as it is to want to take advantage of readers’ curiosity, this could quickly backfire.

2. You might also want to try to make things a bit personal; research by Adestra shows that including the name of your recipient in your email subject line can increase your open email rate by up to 22 per cent.

3. It is also important to keep your subject lines short; the fewer the words required to pass across your message, the better. You don’t want your recipient’s email client to trim your email’s subject line and lessen its effectiveness.

–

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Join our e27 Telegram group here, or our e27 contributor Facebook page here.

Image Credit: Web Hosting

The post 5 email outreach tips to aid your startup marketing efforts appeared first on e27.