Email marketing is a driving force in cross-channel communications. Strategies often act as connectors to websites, social networks, and mobile. According to an Experian survey, email marketing is the preeminent way to draw traffic to your company’s website and increase sales.

“These days, email marketing is all about balancing individualized, thoughtful customer service with advancing technology,” said Julie Strickland, contributor to Inc. She provides some tidbits you should know about email marketing.

Content Matters

Don’t send your customers or prospects spam or irrelevant messages. Strickland suggests businesses track the behavior and gather subscriber preferences to ensure customers only receive the most effective information.

Use Personal Information

According to the survey, 70 percent of marketers ask for personal data but still send generic, uniform messages. Segment your email lists and use the personal information to tailor a communication experience for your customer. The more segmented your email list, the better you are able to personalize the subject line and provide relevant content to the recipient.

Think Mobile

Strickland says 44 percent of marketing email opens occur on mobile devices. She suggests you take time to consider email width, point size of sub-copy, and the space between links so customer experience is as smooth on their mobile device as on their computer.

Be Creative with Your Subject Line

Your subject line is one of the first two items visible and it can be the difference between an open, delete, ignore, or mark as spam. It should be something that will catch your audience’s attention. Words such as “Pinterest,” Pin us,” or “Pin it” in the subject line of an email generate open rates 11 percent higher than other mailings, and click rates are almost 25 percent higher, according to the survey.

Use Creative Elements

There are so many email marketing rules, but here’s one to break: Never send an email with mostly images. More than half of those surveyed used animated gifs in marketing emails. Audiences are different so the best thing you can do is test. Try different things and take a look at what works, and what doesn’t.

Don’t Forget the Links

We talked about this a few weeks ago, but don’t forget the links. They are crucial to drive action and conversions from your email marketing. Some examples of where to include links are your call-to-action, social media share and connect links, and your company website. The last may seem obvious, but you want to make sure to reinforce where the content came from.

Email marketing may not get the attention some of the newer tools get, but it’s still a terrific way to generate leads and convert more prospects for your business.

What are your experiences with email marketing? Do you have any tips you’d like to share? 

Image: Debarshi Ray via Flickr, CC 2.0