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How to Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
Throughout the years, email marketing has remained one of the most effective ways to convert prospects and existing customers into sales and revenue. Email marketing has the highest return on investment of all marketing channels, especially if it is done well. With the impact of COVID-19 grinding in-person marketing to a halt, marketers are putting even more pressure on the original “king of marketing”: email. But with the renewed focus, comes the responsibility to ensure you are executing with best practices in mind. In this post, we will be sharing our proven best practices to further amplify your email marketing strategy.
Firstly, you need to make a plan based on what you hope to accomplish from your email marketing strategy. Emails aimed at lead nurturing need to be handled differently than emails used to increase engagement and conversions. When planning your strategy, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are you sending your emails to?
- What is the reason for sending your emails?
- What types of emails will you send?
- What do you want your emails to look like?
- How often will you send the emails?
After deciding on how you want to build your email strategy, follow these email marketing tactics to improve your campaign success.
Use Personalisation for Customer Retention
Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered and personalised campaigns rather than one-size-fits-all campaigns (Campaign Monitor, 2020). Personalisation is a must for customer retention. It is common knowledge that it is cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. Personalisation nurtures your customers, keeping them engaged by staying relevant to their specific needs. You may personalise your email sends by utilising cart abandonment reminders featuring subscriber-relevant products, writing personalised copy that leverages existing customer data or providing location-specific images that make your emails hyper-relevant to your subscriber. Make sure your copy reads like it was written for a human, not just for an inbox.
Create Subject Lines That Improve Conversions
Just like the headline in traditional copywriting, your subject line communicates the promise of value. In other words, your subject line has to convince the recipient that the email contains information or messaging that will improve their lives or their business. In the case of email, your subject line determines whether or not your customers will open your email. Of all the personal data you can collect for targeted emails, one of the most important pieces is your subscriber’s first name. It is said that subject lines featuring the first name of your subscriber have a 26% higher open rate (Campaign Monitor, 2020). When writing your subject line, be aware of your character length. 50% of emails are opened on a mobile device and iPhones can only show between 35-38 characters in portrait mode. Because of this, it is best to aim for subject lines to be between 17-24 characters.
Explore Segmentation-Triggered Automation
Once you know a thing or two about your customers, it is time to segment them into categories based on their behaviour, interests and where they sit in their buyers journey. Use behavioural segments to segment users based on how they’ve interacted with your website in the past. Segments and behaviour data can then be used to trigger automated emails that deliver your most relevant content exactly when it’s needed most. You may consider automating emails such as subscriber birthday emails and post purchase emails.
Track User Behaviour with Robust Analytics
A website tracking snippet allows you to track users behaviours when they visit your site or follow links from an email. Tools like Google Analytics help you make sense of this data which you can then use to improve your personalisation and segmentation. With the help of these analytics and customer insights, you can connect the dots and help your customers go from interested to becoming a customer much more quickly. As you dive into your numbers, keep an eye on some of the essential key performance indicators (KPIs) for an email campaign such as open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate. These figures will tell you what’s working (and what’s not).
Turn to Effective A/B Testing
Torn between two great subject line ideas? Run them both and compare their performance. This is the beauty of A/B testing. You can find out what works best and then deploy it with the rest of your audience. As a starting point for your A/B testing efforts, try experimenting with your subject lines, as higher open rates often result in higher conversions. Keep everything about the two emails the same except the subject line and see which one gets more opens. Make note of your subject line approaches and then incorporate them into your future email campaigns and marketing content.
Email marketing is all about trying new things and pushing the limits of your campaign performance. If you manage to raise your metrics by even a fraction by following and adopting the above-mentioned tips, consider your efforts worthwhile. Keep in mind that there are other people at the end of your message. Shift from thinking about campaigns as just a numbers game and focus more on establishing and nurturing real connections with your customers. Interested in further developing your email marketing strategy? Please get in contact with our team! We’d love to hear from you!
