Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways to communicate with your customers.

If you’re already comfortable with the basics of email marketing, you may be wondering what’s next for your email strategy.

Whether you’re crafting email campaigns to attract new customers or sustain current ones, these three tips will help you take your email strategy to the next level and reduce your number of unsubscribes.

1. Send Fewer Emails

Irrelevant emails are the number one reason people unsubscribe from your email list. When you’re planning out email communications, pause to ask yourself if an email is 100% necessary.

Could you communicate the information in a different way — like on social media or by combining your content into fewer emails overall? By reducing your email frequency and keeping that frequency consistent, your readers will know what to expect from your emails.

At FareHarbor, we send clients a monthly Compass Essentials email that highlights our new Compass guides and topics we want you to focus on.

Pro Tip: Create an exit survey for people who unsubscribe from your emails. Exit surveys allow you to capture information about why customers unsubscribe from your emails, and can help you curate your email content in order to lower your unsubscribe rates.

2. Write Short, Scannable Content

In addition to reducing your email frequency, remember that less is more also applies to your email content. Nobody wants to read a long email filled with CTAs and hyperlinks. 

Get to your main point quickly and use visuals to support it. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to have a strong headline and CTA “above the fold” of your email for your recipients to see without having to scroll.

Emails are perfect for making an announcement and then linking to a more in-depth resource like a blog post, activity page, or social media post.

3. Take Advantage of Send Time Optimization

Increase the success of your email campaigns by sending your emails at the best time for your users – the time when they are most likely to actually open and read them. 

Many email marketing platforms offer a timezone sending feature, allowing them to determine when recipients engage with your emails and send them based on when they’re most likely to be opened.

Send time optimization should be used for email campaigns, newsletters, special promos, and more. If the email marketing platform you’re using doesn’t include a timezone sending feature, we recommend testing and documenting the performance of different send times to help you determine the best time to send to your recipients.

To increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns, always remember, less is more. Keep your emails short and to the point while also keeping unnecessary emails to a minimum. This will help your customers know what to expect from your emails and develop trust in your brand.

Combine this with send time optimization to ensure your emails are getting to your customers at the right time for them.