9 Easy Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Performance
Each email only gets a minor portion of the recipient’s attention upon making it to the inbox. Every essential element of an email, from the subject line to its format, has a significant impact on how users react to it.
Today, consumers receive dozens of emails daily, making it even more complicated for marketers to achieve impressive results through email marketing campaigns.
It’s no secret that marketing experts have to keep up with the latest trends and map out successful strategies to reach consumers and convert them into clients. But more often than not, a daily marketing routine doesn’t let brands fully utilize this marketing channel.
Email marketing provides a lot of critical data to businesses. It helps to evaluate their marketing impact, make improvements, and harness the power of their email marketing efforts.
As a marketer, you’re probably looking to create successful email campaigns, tap into your lead generation potential, and improve open rates and click-through rates. Here are some of the best practices that will help you improve your email marketing performance.
Learn from Industry Experts
How can marketers get access to all the actionable tips and uncover the best email marketing practices? Attending conferences is an excellent opportunity to meet other industry experts, focus on networking, and learn more about email strategies and design.
Conferences and email marketing events like MailCon help marketing experts connect with other attendees, spot new business leads, take part in panel discussions, and attend speaker sessions. Ultimately, conferences offer a tremendous learning experience and an opportunity to get a fresh perspective on email marketing tactics.
Create Clear and Appealing Subject Lines
From an email marketing perspective, a clickable subject line is a form of art. Since consumers are now bombarded with multiple emails daily, marketers have to come up with compelling and unique subject lines.
The ultimate goal, in this case, is to make consumers feel like they can’t help but click on your emails. So here’s a short list of tips on how to entice your subscribers and make them open your email newsletters.
- Come up with a clear, appealing, and understandable subject line
- Try to keep it under 50 characters
- Use first names or specific locations
- Make sure that the language you use meets the needs and interests of your audience
- Include but don’t overuse action-oriented words
- Try using emojis and symbols
- Make exclusive offers
- Avoid spam triggers
Write Addictive Email Content
The success of email marketing campaigns doesn’t solely depend on metrics and data. It also depends on the quality of the email content.
There’s no denying that the abundance of digital content makes it difficult for brands to capture the attention of prospects and stand out online. However, marketers need to ensure that their readers will get what they’re looking for and come back for more. Creating addictive email content can help marketing experts achieve that mission.
Addictive email content starts with a catchy subject line, followed by brief insights into the unique piece of content you’re advertising to readers. Regardless of your niche, delivering original and relevant content is crucial.
In other words, exclusivity is your best bet. If your subscribers get access to exclusive information that isn’t available anywhere else, there’s no way they will lose interest any time soon.
Use Clickable Elements and Memorable Visuals
Marketers are not designers. But, using engaging visuals in email campaigns is as important as mapping out an email marketing strategy. Take help from your fellow colleagues in graphics design.
Let’s face it: consumers enjoy interacting with digital content. Adding clickable elements like buttons with CTAs, text links, GIFs, or clickable images in different sections of your emails will help you make your content entertaining.
There are also other ways to make your email newsletters more engaging and visually appealing. For instance, you can use embedded videos, quizzes, polls, or infographics. It is especially useful since most readers use mobiles to check their inboxes.
Sure, opening emails on mobile devices requires a lot of scrolling and sometimes zooming. So offering your readers something actionable and entertaining right away is likely to lead to more clicks and higher open rates in the future.
You can also generate QR codes when you’d like to add a link to a survey, article, infographic, or simply more information than what is in the email. This is a great way to keep your email short while allowing readers to get more information if they are interested.
After all, no marketer would give up on an opportunity to add value to emails and deliver an entertaining experience for the sake of increased conversion and click-through rates.
Expand Your Email List
It’s crucial for businesses to increase their customer base and revenue. That’s why marketers are always looking for ways to grow their email lists. Adding sign-up buttons on landing pages, offering incentives, and using gated content are the most widely used tactics to expand the customer base.
Here are several helpful pointers that can help you get more prospects to subscribe to your email newsletters:
- Look into the existing database
- Launch ad campaigns on social media and motivate prospects to sign up
- Collect email addresses when promoting specific events
- Offer eBooks, whitepapers, and other gated content
- Collect leads at email conferences and industry events
- Offer exclusive access to webinars and other video content
Use List Segmentation and Personalization
Consumers sign up for emails for different reasons. What marketers need to do is consider those differences when targeting their audience and creating email campaigns.
But marketers need to go further than dividing their audience into groups based only on age, location, gender, and interests. Thinking critically and considering more considerable differences between subscribers can help determine trends and specific factors that impact the decisions and behavior of your readers.
Let’s look at the examples illustrating how you can segment your email lists and personalize email campaigns.
- Pay attention to the buying behavior of your subscribers.
- Personalize email campaigns based on the products and topics your audience mainly interacts with.
- Dissect every marketing touchpoint to understand your audience better.
- If applicable, segment an email list based on the titles and positions of your subscribers.
- Analyze the type of email content that resonates the most with your audience.
There’s nothing overly complicated about list segmentation. But if you’re not a well-versed email marketer, utilizing an email marketing platform or a marketing automation solution can help you organize your efforts and streamline the segmentation process.
Implement Email Marketing Automation
It’s no secret that automation works with triggers, and every trigger action is determined by the campaign rules marketers set.
Let’s say that a person subscribed to your emails. That’s a chance to capitalize on the sign-up momentum and start building relationships with a new contact. With an email automation solution in place, the opt-in will trigger a series of emails that consist of the welcome email and the invitation to connect.
Here are the examples of the most popular email sequences used by marketers worldwide:
- A sequence of welcome emails after an opt-in
- Series of purchase reminder emails
- Nurture email series
- Adding subscribers to a different email list after a specific number of opened emails
- Re-engaging email series
- Follow-up sequence
- Pre-event and post-event sequence
Automated email sequencing offers numerous benefits to marketers. First of all, it helps them yield better results by keeping prospects engaged and sending the right information at the right time. On top of that, automation streamlines the process, leaves no room for errors, and enhances workflows.
Monitor Campaign Performance
Marketing experts need to understand what works best for their subscribers. That’s why it’s crucial to utilize email analytics and evaluate the performance of email campaigns.
With the right email marketing setup in place, businesses can assess and improve deliverability, open rate, conversion rate, engagement over time, bounce rate, revenue per email, email sharing rate, etc.
Since marketers are always on the lookout for ways to improve email marketing strategy, getting access to email analytics makes it possible to learn more about customer preferences and identify revenue opportunities. Besides, marketers can use email performance data to pinpoint trends that can help make their emails even more appealing to the target audience.
Test Your Emails
Testing is essential to the success of any marketing initiative, including emails. Through A/B testing, brands can adapt their emails to appeal to any audience and determine what email templates, content, and subject lines resonate the most.
Testing can also come in handy if you’re looking to determine the best send times and days of the week. For instance, if your customers are in the buying mode on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays but interact with email content the most on Mondays, you can use this information to boost sales and significantly increase open rates.
It’s worth mentioning that the goals of your email campaigns may vary within your business over time. That’s why it’s essential to determine exactly what it is you’re looking to achieve with your email marketing efforts before sending and measuring your emails.
Final Thoughts
Designing emails that look clean, simple, but appealing can be a challenging task for brands. But ensuring that these emails also successfully deliver a marketing message at the right time to the right audience might seem impossible.
When done right, email marketing campaigns can not only exceed your expectations but also have a significant impact on lead nurturing, customer experience, brand credibility, and business growth.
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