5 Steps to Ensuring Your Email Campaigns Earn Results

Email marketing is a cheap and effective way of getting your promotional messages across to potential customers. It has the highest ROI (return of investment) of all marketing channels. The power of email marketing has been steadily growing over recent years, and in 2017, more than 86% of businesses indicate that they plan to increase their upcoming email marketing budgets. It is estimated that around 269 billion emails are sent every day, so with this in mind, getting the content of your emails to stand out is harder than ever. In this post, I will offer 5 steps that will help your email campaigns achieve the best possible results.

1. Get More Opens and Clicks with Split Testing

Split testing can be a useful and educational technique to test your tactics and monitor their results. Testing a variety of subject lines, content, calls-to-actions (CTAs), send times, and so on can help you understand what your customers react to, and will educate you for future projects. There are always different split tests to carry out so the more data we can compare will help us achieve a greater insight as to what our customers are thinking.

The first hurdle we need to cross is getting our email opened so having an enticing subject line is crucial. Your subject line should always aim to evoke emotion in your recipients. If you get people to feel an emotion such as amusement, curiosity, excitement, joy, or even fear, they’re more likely to open your email. Test different options to see which works best for your specific audience. In my experience, personal subject lines get higher open rates. The easiest way to create a personal subject line is to add the recipient’s name. It makes the email seem like it was written specifically to me (even though we know it wasn’t), giving the impression of a more intimate relationship between you and your customer.

Next, you should test your content. Many e-commerce businesses use the same layout and design over and over again for their emails. This is more time and cost efficient, but you still need to think long and hard about what the content will be. It’s important to make it feel as varied as possible in each different campaign so the customer feels they are reading something new. Repetitive content will often result in lower open rates and eventually unsubscribes.

2. Segment Your List and Drive Maximum Engagement

Sending relevant information to your customers is a proven way of achieving higher click and open rates. Once a user has signed up or purchased a product, you can ask them to choose their preferences by asking what their interests are and what kind of content they’d like to receive moving forward. Using this data, we can segment our customers into specific lists which will help us to more accurately target our future promotions and offers.

Segmented email campaigns have shown to drive a 760% increase in revenue, so this is clearly an important tactic to drive your business sales. If you run an online fashion shop, why not ask customers what their favorite brands are, then create personalized email campaigns focusing on these specific brands.

There are different ways to ask subscribers this information:

• Ask in your welcome email • Have subscribers complete a user profile • Send a new email to existing subscribers asking them to update their preferences • Segment based on previous purchases

3. Write Effective Welcome Emails to Build Stronger Relationships

Welcome emails are a crucial part of your email campaigns because they set the tone for your relationship with your customers. Your welcome emails should always be sent immediately after signup, when your customer is still enthusiastic about your products. If we act quickly, we can hope that the customer will offer more vital feedback, offering the change of segmenting, so lets take advantage of this. Your welcome email should be personal, including the name of the recipient, and an actual sender. Its a good idea to avoid using a ‘no-reply’ sender name and use perhaps use your full name (including surname) as it has been proven that when a persons name appears in someones inbox rather than for example ‘Sales Department’, the customer will be more curious to open and read further .

Next, your welcome email should set expectations for what customers can expect to get in your future emails. Let them know what content they’ll be receiving, how often you’ll email them, and how to get in touch with you. Don’t make unrealistic promises here, for example if you promise weekly newsletters and offers, be sure you have the time and resource to do this, otherwise you could end up disappointing some customers and this will result in receiving negative opinions of your service. Instead of promising weekly offers, promise regular offers. If people signed up to your service in order to get a free gift or another offer, this is where you would give it to them.

Ask people why they signed up, or why they made a purchase. These insights are extremely useful when you’re segmenting lists. If a recipient decides to unsubscribe after the first welcome email then although this is not the result we want, It can also offer us data that we can react to.

4. Avoid Gmail’s Promotions Tab and Get Your Emails Opened and Read

1 billion people now use Gmail worldwide. When they log in, tabs sort promotional emails from regular emails in their inboxes. Emails filtered to the promotions receive less attention. If we can optimize our emails to appear in the primary tab, we will achieve higher open rates. When filtering emails, Gmail looks at the content of your email such as the number of links, images, whether you use ‘spammy’ words like ‘free’, ‘low risk’, ‘urgent’, and ‘winner’. They also look at previous engagement with your emails, for example, how often your customer opens them.

Getting people to respond to your emails, is a guaranteed way of telling Gmail that people want to read your emails. Ask your customers for feedback and make it as simple as just replying to your email. If you don’t want to ask for feedback, you can add a simple sentence telling people to add your email to their address book to ensure they’ll keep receiving your emails.

5. Keep Your Designs Simple, and Your Code Clean

Although an eye catching design will look professional and draw attention, it is more important that the content displays cleanly without errors. Modern email clients such as Outlook and Apple Mail can handle most modern types of CSS and give your developer the tools they need to design an eye catching piece of art. Unfortunately however, it has to be considered that a large chuck of your recipients will be receiving the email using old versions a variety of different email clients. These recipients are just as likely to place a big order as recipients using the latest versions. It is important that the email will render across old and new versions of any email client. This means our designs will have to be more restricted but if a higher number of recipients will be able to read the message, it is well worth the sacrifice. Here are a some rules to follow to keep your code versatile.

Keep your template simple – Your email campaigns should focus more on your message, not the look and feel of your email. Just like it is with your website, content will always be king.

Keep email width under 600 pixels – This ensures that users of email clients such as Outlook can view your email in their vertical preview pane.

Optimize for mobile – It’s crucial to consider your mobile audience when utilizing email marketing. Most people are reading their email on-the-go.

Design with tables – While it’s no longer best practices to design web pages with tables, they’re essential when designing emails. It’s the only way to have your design render correctly across multiple email clients. Please be sure to adjust the size of your table, within the source code, to correspond with the responsiveness of your email.

Use inline CSS – Email services that are browser-based, like Gmail or Hotmail, will strip out your DOCTYPE, BODY, and HEAD tags, so use inline CSS instead.

Avoid CSS shorthand – Get your CSS as traditional as possible to make sure it is honoured in older email clients.

Avoid external or internal CSS classes or IDs – Anything that starts within a ’style’ tag will have mixed results across email clients. Instead, use inline CSS.

Avoid Javascript or other dynamic scripts – Even if a SPAM filter allows your email through, most email clients will not allow these scripts to function.

Avoid Flash or video embeds – The ability to view rich media in email is turned off by default in most email clients. Instead, include an image of your video player (with a play button) that links to the rich media on a website page.

Avoid using invisible text – This is a common trick that spammers use, so it’s now an instant red flag for SPAM filters.

In Conclusion…

There is no right or wrong way when it comes to email marketing. Every business and every customer is different. Using some of the advice I have covered here will hopefully help you to maximise your results and understand the behavior of your customers, helping you to achieve better results future campaigns.