Email marketing is complicated, but get it right and it can deliver significant incremental business. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of factors to consider when planning and executing your email marketing strategy, but here are 6 things you could do to improve your next campaign.
1) Go responsive
Take a look the reports from your recent campaigns and check what % of opens you’re getting on mobile devices. Some of our clients are seeing as high as 75% of opens on mobile devices. If your emails are not responsive, they may not look great and worse still, they may be difficult to read and click through. For more information on designing mobile responsive emails, just give us a call.
2) Clean & update your data
Is your data clean & up to date? If your database isn’t huge, spend an hour or two going through it manually making sure you the fields in your database are consistent, that names match emails and that there are no obvious typos in the email address (ie yahoo.con etc). For bigger lists and a more thorough clean up, you could use a data cleansing company. Make sure you regularly update your data, adding in new contacts and removing those who can’t or don’t want to be contacted any more (ie bounces & unsubscribes).
3) Rethink your design & layout
Over 50% of email clients block images by default, so you need to consider what your design looks like with images disabled. Keep your branding, key messages and CTA at the top (ie above the fold). Consider what will be visible in the preview panes on different devices and clients. For example on an iPhone in portrait view, the first 90 or so characters of your email are displayed beneath sender alias and subject line. Ideally you want your key message, offer or CTA in here to elaborate on your subject line – don’t waste that prime real estate on browser view or unsubscribe links.
4) Segment your data
Segmenting your data into groups and tailoring the messages uniquely to them could improve your engagement rates. For example, you could separate those who have opened an email in the last few months from those who haven’t. Rather than continuing to send the same things to your non-openers, you could concentrate on increasing engagement through useful content, polls, competitions or “welcome back” offers. If you have enough data, you could segment by gender, age, product/services they have bought before, then play around with images, tone, offers, CTAs, colours etc etc to improve engagement.
5) Mix up your messages
The reason we do email marketing is to generate business right? There are many way to achieve this though, and sending offer after offer may not give you the best long-term performance. Mixing up your messages and creating campaigns which stand out from your norm can increase engagement levels and produce a better result on your next offer. Try a newsletter, give something away, do a poll/survey or write an article summarising recent relevant industry news.
6) Test, Test, Test…
Split testing on a regular basis can have a significant impact on your results. Testing things like day of the week, time of day, subject lines, sender alias, HTML vs plain text, different layouts & designs or even different CTA button styles & colours. For example, if your sender alias is your company name, test using a person’s name instead and match it to the sender address to make it look more personal – ie if you’re using “CompanyName” and “sales@companyname.com” test this against “PersonName” and “PersonName@companyname.com”
For more email marketing advice, or a to book a FREE review of your email strategy, give us a call or fill out the form.
By Sam Crowther
