Email Marketing Best Practices in Australia That Drive Results
Did someone once tell you that email marketing is dead? That emails were a lot of effort for little reward? Well you’d probably be surprised to hear that in fact the opposite is true: email marketing is actually thriving in Australia.
In 2020, open rates grew by 2% to almost 20.6%, while click-through rates increased by 0.3% to 3.1%. Globally, it is predicted that the number of global email users will grow to 4.48 billion by 2024. Emails are an extremely effective way to connect and engage with your customers and boost conversions. When email marketing is done well, it can complement other marketing efforts that are part of your strategy. Here are our top best practices for email marketing that will drive results!
Build Your Email List
The first step in email marketing is, of course, to build your email list. You can build your email list online or in-store if you have a physical location in Australia. The most popular online methods for gathering emails include sign-up forms and pop-ups on your website, and through organic and paid social media.
Sign-up forms on your website. Static sign up forms can be placed on high-traffic pages and areas of your website such as your footer, header, or at the bottom of a blog post.
Website pop-ups. There are many types of pop-ups to choose from, but three that work particularly well on a website to capture the visitor’s attention are scroll-triggered, exit-intent and time-based pop-ups. Time-based pop-ups will display after a specific amount of time, for example 30 seconds after a visitor arrives onto your website. An exit-intent pop-up will appear just as your visitor is about to leave your site. This is a great opportunity to give your visitors a reason to stay or submit their details for a deal. A scroll-triggered pop-up will appear once a user reaches a certain section on a webpage, for example, once a user reads 60% of a page. Email marketing tools that you can use to create these pop-ups will look at visitor actions like where they move their cursor to within the page, or how long they remain idle on your website.
Gamification. You can create excitement, build engagement and encourage visitors to take action (make a purchase) by using interactive elements on your website like a quiz, test, or a spin to win game. For a visitor to receive their quiz results or win a prize, all they need to do is submit their email!
Social Media. Both organic and paid social media are helpful for building your email list. You can add call-to-actions to your bios with a link to your sign-up form on your website, you can host giveaways on your organic social, or you can run Lead Generation ads through Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn. These are just a few examples of using social media for email marketing, so if you would like to know more, get in touch with our team and we can work with you to create a social media and email marketing strategy for your business!
Send Welcome Emails
With new subscribers, you want to make a great first impression, and a welcome email is the perfect way to do this. You want to make sure you send an email that is valuable to your subscriber, and you want to send it as quickly as possible before they lose interest. Within 48 hours is ideal; research shows that 76% of consumers expect to receive an email once they subscribe to your business.
First of all, you’ll want to thank your new subscriber for signing up. You then might want to set out what they can expect to receive from you, like the frequency of your emails, and what these emails are likely to contain, such as tips and advice, notice about sales and so on, as well as how to use certain aspects of your website (like setting up a profile). If done as a series of emails, these are usually called “onboarding emails”. To convert your new subscribers into paying customers, you can direct them to pages on your website that might be beneficial to them through a second welcome email. For instance, if you are an e-commerce business, you might want to include and link to some products or product categories in your email. You can ask your subscribers to stay up-to-date with your business and follow you on social media. Finally, you can use a third welcome email to share a discount code for your new lead to use on their first purchase. It might be worth mentioning your offer in your email subject line, for example, “Welcome to XX - Here’s 20% Off Your First Purchase!”. We talk a little bit more about email sequences below.
Set Up Email Sequences
Sending multiple emails in stages are referred to as an ‘email sequence’, and they help you educate or set expectations for new customers (or onboarding as mentioned above), build good relationships with your subscribers, re-connect with customers who’ve not been engaging, or help to nurture leads towards converting.
These are a great way to target specific audience types too, with messaging specific to them and their purchasing or engagement behaviour.
Most email providers will allow you to automate this too, creating email workflows that can get triggered when they perform a certain behaviour.
Focus On the Subject Line
Speaking of subject lines, these are critical for any email marketing campaign in Australia. It’s what convinces a subscriber your email is worth opening. In fact, you could say that your subject line is more important than the content within the actual email. Some effective subject lines include:
- Special offers or discounts. For example, “25% off your favourite products” or “Try us for free!”.
- Urgent or FOMO. Get people to take action immediately with a subject line such as, “LAST CHANCE for 50% off!”.
- Questions. Asking your subscribers a compelling, open-ended question can spark conversation.
- Personalisation. Personalising a subject line with either the subscribers name or their most recent purchase shows that you are delivering relevant content or adding value to their experience.
- Humour. Adding a funny subject line can help with your click-through rate, however, what may be funny to one person, may not funny to another. But, that’s not necessarily a bad thing depending on how aligned with your brand / you you’d like your audience to be.
The list of subject lines is endless. Ultimately, you want to choose one that grabs your audience’s attention, includes action verbs, includes up yo 50 characters, and incorporates an emoji.
Mobile-Friendly Design
Optimising your emails for mobile is increasingly becoming more important for email marketing campaigns in Australia. In 2019, 60% of email opens were from mobile devices, and roughly 49% of website traffic came from mobile. No matter where your audience is - on public transport headed to work, or at home on the couch - they constantly have access to their mobile devices. With this in mind, you should aim to create extremely mobile-friendly emails that are easy to scroll through and visually engaging.
Nail Your Timing
A question we often hear regarding email marketing is what is the best day and time to send an email? Research generally says that the best days to send an email in Australia are Thursday and Tuesday, and the best times to send an email are 8am, 1pm, 4pm and 6pm. However, these days and time slots might not necessarily work for your business. You need to consider your industry and audience, and what might work for them. You also need to consider that perhaps these optimal times means that every other business might be following these recommendations, therefore saturating your audience’s inbox. While you can definitely follow these guidelines, it is best to test and adjust your schedule based on how your audience responds.
Plan Your Content Ahead
If you would like to share monthly or fortnightly emails, planning your content ahead of time is a must, especially if you are running seasonal and timely email campaigns. For instance, you might want to craft specific offers and content to suit the Christmas period or even the Winter months. Creating a yearly email marketing calendar allows you to map out your strategy and ensure you are sending the right messages at the right time.
Speak to Our Team About Creating an Email Marketing Strategy in Australia
Once you start following these email marketing best practices, you’ll see even more success with your campaigns. If you would like anymore advice around developing an email strategy for your business in Australia, please get in touch with our team. Our content strategists have experience in running email campaigns for a variety of clients and business types. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you!