Special Announcement: It's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to my guest poster, Saurav Nayak from Ranchi, India who is going to provide you with some very interesting email marketing hacks that you really should consider.

Please see Saurav's bio at the bottom of this post as well as a link to his site. As someone who is interested in email marketing I hope you'll get a lot from this email marketing hacks for 2016 post.

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Email marketing has been around since 1990 and has been a powerful source of reaching out to customers for every type business and trade.

In the 1990's marketers, with a lot less effort, could easily get significant amounts of leads for their business.

However, as the technology evolved digital marketing has taken a completely different turn.

Competition these days has become very tough in digital marketing.

There are also lot more competitors out there who are also selling the similar product as yours and they also use email marketing campaigns to attract customers.

Now marketers have to try using some of the latest tools to make their business a successful one.

If the marketers use the traditional techniques and strategies then the chances are more likely that they fail in their business.

Some people even say that now “email marketing is dead” but let me tell you why email marketing is still the most powerful tool you ever had.

According to the following stats
• 54% of marketers rate email marketing as most powerful and least difficult tool for digital marketing.
• 97% of marketers say that email was their primary channel for lead generation.
• There are 3 times more chances that your post may be seen by users on email than on social media.

Discover here Is List Building Killing Your Business?

New strategies have now evolved and are used by most of marketers and business owners to attract customers.

Now marketers have to try harder to be successful, so if your marketing plan is not attractive and new, chances are there you might end up being frustrated.

New email marketing strategies have also come with lot of challenges for the marketers.

It's important you keep up to date with the latest email marketing hacks to protect the value of your mailing list.

[Tweet ““Amen' is like the Send button on an email.” ― Steve Toltz,”]

Email Marketing Hacks for 2016

If you are using an email marketing campaign to promote and expand your business then you’ll surely face the problems I have shortlisted below.

I have also given appropriate solution for each problem so that you could grow your business and achieve the objective of your business.

Now most problems that marketers face during email marketing are:-
1. Getting New Subscribers: It is the first and most important stage of running an email marketing campaign.

The biggest problem many new (and established but new online) businesses face is that they don’t have many email addresses stored on their database.

Running email marketing campaigns cost you per subscribers so it is important that you have the right selection of audience. It is advised to add the person who regularly visits your website if at all possible.

Optin monster, Sumome, Lead pages and thrive leads are most popular and used optin tools for collecting Subscribers.

They invoke pleasant and attractive pop-ups, Slideups, menus and popovers to make visitors subscribe to your blog.

If you are using one of these tools than you can increase your subscription rates considerably.

The benefit of using these tools is that you can place the optin location at places where users are likely to click or invoke through readers behaviour like Scrolling up, reaching 60 % of web page etc. This ensures that reading experience and subscription rate both are improved.

2. Increasing Open Rate: The chances may be there that the users’ mail box is already filed with multiple similar mails that you provide then your mail will be unopened.

The subject line plays an important role in increasing open rates. Personalized subject lines are more likely to be opened by the user. Users want to read the emails with concise and short subject.

3. Improving Deliverability: Passing the spam folder has been major problem for all the marketers.

Your entire effort and money is wasted if your mail is directly reaching users spam folder.

• Keywords: There are some keywords which are easily marked as spam like sell, buy, money, cash, earn, prize, click, free, unlimited, subscribe etc.

 

Avoid using these words as much as possible in your subject line.

• Tools: Email delivery tools like Mail chimp provides you an efficient way that your mail doesn’t reach their spam folder. It continuously change the SMTP of your mailing server so that users filter can’ track them.
• Non-existent Email Addresses: Many of users change their email due to various circumstances. You should mark these email address and clear them from your list to improve efficiency.
• Full Inbox: There may be chance that the inbox folder of receiver is full. You can’t do much for this problem.

[Tweet ““Email. It's quicker, easier, and involves less licking” ― Douglas Adams”]

4. Low Click Through Rates: Although users open your mail it doesn’t guarantee that they click through the link provided.

To avoid these issues, following are some tips:-
• Choice: Always understand the interests of the user and provide them what they want to read.
• Time: The timing of the email that you send also affects their click through rates, because people ignore reading extra information when they are busy. Sending emails on office hours should be avoided.
• Frequency: The Click through rates also depends on frequency of your mails. Try scheduling your emails with various Email marketing tools for better result.
• Appearance: Try to make your mail look appealing for customers. Animated gifs raised click through rates by 26%.

5. Retaining Customers: Making your customer loyal to your firm can only be practised through satisfying them.

If your product solves their problem then they will remember you for much longer time.

Many companies fail to provide proper support and assistance to customer when they need.

Running campaigns and surveys easily tell you the customer problems.

Solving customer problems and being interactive with them facilitates your firm to build trust and faith on customer’s mind, which is important for long term objective for any business and trade.

As more and more companies are doing the switch from off line to online, customer retention ratio – popularly known as the Churn Rate gets affected.

As an established business, having a strong offline presence, customer loyalty becomes meaningless when it comes to online e-commerce competitiveness.

Online customer retention is an entirely different ballgame where technology plays a major role and that's where email marketing hacks for 2016 really comes into play.

In a situation like this, using several such email tools to keep a connection with your customers, is the only way out.

6. Cost: Every mail you send for email marketing cost you for sure.

In order to have a profitable business you should have a good ROI to keep running email marketing campaign.

If you have less lead through email marketing then it is essential to cut down the cost by changing strategy.

Some useful strategies you can use to cut down costs are :
• Segmentation: Segmenting your audience for each mail helps you to lower down cost and have larger ROI.
• Track and Test: To run an efficient email marketing campaign it is important that you constantly analyze the stats like delivery rate, conversion rate, open-up rate etc. and according to data change and implement strategy.
• Incentive: Attract new customer and loyal customer through discount and coupons. Customers are always attracted to amazing offers and it increases the sales by considerable amount.
• Revise: Keeping mail list updated at regular interval of time make sure that your money is not wasted.

7. Design: How you create your Content also plays an important role in lead generation rate.

The design of emails surely demands some time and effort from you but also produces more result.

The tools like Mailchimp, Aweber, Sumome, Getresponse are really helpful in designing a pleasant looking Email for Marketing.

These tools have various features to customize your mail based on colour, layout, Images, graphics etc. A well designed Email helps to get more leads.

8. Mobile Responsiveness: With Rapid growth in Smartphone users it is worth focusing area for any marketer.

If you are running email marketing campaign and you don’t take actions to increase its mobile responsiveness than surely you are missing most of your leads.

According to the most recent data 53 % of all emails are opened through mobiles. 91% of people check their email daily on mobile devices. This makes mobile responsiveness one of the key email marketing hacks for 2016.

[Tweet ““The smartest people can write the worst emails.” ― Paul Babicki”]

9. Automatic Site Response Email: Whenever the customer sends an email it is important to reply them quickly.

Keeping them waiting for a long time can have negative effect on your business.

There are various tools like Mandrill, Sendinblue, Sendy, Tiny Letter and Mail Poet that could make your task easier and save a lot of your time through automatic response mail.

Response emails sent via domain’s own SMTP is flagged pretty quickly and as a result those emails start to end up on the spam folders.

To make sure these emails reach your customer’s inbox – tools like mandrill, mailpoet, sendgrid etc. are pretty effective.

Every business wants to grow and expand, role of digital marketing in fulfilling this task is very important in competitive market.

Email marketing dominates the other marketing techniques due to its high lead generation rate and salient features. These new email marketing hacks strategies will boost your business with less costs required to reach your objective.

Guest Poster Bio Details:

Saurav Nayak is a full time professional blogger as well as being the the Content Manager at Temok in Ranchi, Jharkhand, India

Make sure you also visit with him on Twitter and Linkedin

It's Your Turn

Did you find this email marketing hacks post useful for your email marketing campaigns?

Do you have any suggestion or feedback?

Are you having email delivery problems? If so what have you tried to overcome this current big issue?

What have been your expereinces with “click through rates?” Are they falling for you in recent times?

Please feel free to share your thoughts with us.