Top 5 Rules to Improve your Email Campaigns
A few years ago, with the growth of social networks as the new internet acquisition channels, marketers were quick to announce that email marketing was dead. This has proven to be far from true and in fact, it is more alive than ever.
According to a study made by EMA BtoC 2016, 87% of the web users interogated said that they had at least once bought a product online after receiving a marketed email.
Even considering all the new marketing tools that we now have at our disposal, email marketing will still give you one of the best returns on your “marketing dollar”.
But only if you do it right.
Chose an appealing and customized subject
Your subject will depends of the kind of conversion you are looking for when sending your email. For instance, if you are looking for an answer or a call from your prospect, you might chose to mention the said action in your subject.
If you are looking for a click on a product’s sale, then you might consider displaying your unique selling proposition in the subject.
Regardless of the customization, the three following points should always be taken into account:
- Be clear : Your subject should contain less than 45 letters.
- Avoid spam words such as : Free, Sales, Dollars, etc. if you don’t want to end up in the spam folder.
- Use punctuation and special symbols to catch the eye but don’t overdo it or your email’s new home will be the spam folder.
Prioritize content over design
Optimize your content and not only the design! A beautifully designed newsletter needs quality content to convert. Of course, the design and the ergonomic of your mail is important but the sales argument is the king.
In a few seconds, your reader should be able to understand the benefits that your company could bring him.
Here is a list of advises you should follow in order to improve your emails content:
- Display your main information at the beginning of the email to keep the reader’s attention.
- Customize your message by integrating a “Hello [Name of the reader]” and by offering products and services adapted directly to your prospect’s needs. Your prospect should believe that the message is addressed to him.
- Be careful with the images you use. Some electronic mailbox such as Outlook block directly image’s display. Your core message should then be visible by text and not by image only.
- Avoid spam words.
- Your unsubscribe button should be simple and clearly recognizable. (Yes, you read right!) Understand that you will ultimately reach people who are not interested by your services (especially at the start, when your target isn’t clearly defined). An unsubscribe is way more preferable to a spam’s report for your newsletter reputation.
Include Videos
Even if video marketing has been growing in the last five years, using videos in email marketing is still quite new (and linked to the uprising quality of internet data). Each day, americans watch about 8,000 years of video content on Youtube and 713 years worth of videos on Facebook.
According to an emarketer report, four times as many consumers would prefer watching a video about a product or service as opposed to reading about it. Now it has been estimated that using videos in email marketing messages increase the click-through rate by 3 times.
The only roadblock ? Some email systems are still not yet compatible with video playback.
Do not worry, we have a temporary solution: send an animated GIF thumbnail in your email message with a button that looks like a video player. It will redirect the reader to a landing page with the embedded video on auto-play. It is a bit rustic, but it has the advantage to bring more traffic to your website.
Segment your subscribers in groups and optimize your targeting
Regardless of the quality of your message, if your target is not the right one, you will have bad results. When you are about to launch an email campaign, you need to ask yourself one simple question:
“Will the people i am sending this be interested in what i am offering / proposing / talking about ?“
If you just have one huge database of subscribers that you’ve collected over the years, you can be sure that you have a lot of different subscribers profiles and that a lot of them are not in your core target.
First step, start separating your reactive subscribers from the ones who never open their emails. You need to create tailored emails in order to fully use the conversion potential of both segments.
The ones who never open their emails will need a specific “reactivation” campaign, with call to actions focused on your company’s unique selling proposition or services. You will need to use particularly “click bait” subjects in order to make them click again on your emails.
But the segmentation and targeting job should not end there. Each subscriber is subscribed for a reason. Review the data you collected about your customers and sort customers segments out (New clients, partners, male, female, regular customer, subscriber that never opened a mail, etc.)
Here are two examples of a good subscriber segmentation use:
Create a “welcome journey”: an automated email campaign for new customers. If your subscriber is a customer, you can automatically send him an email J+3 asking about the shipping of his product, on J+15 you can then send a customer review email about the product and try to sell him additional and related products.
“Are you happy with your product ? Here are 2 related products that might interest you.”
Use your customer information to create customized and customer service emails. For instance, you can send a birthday email on the right date with a voucher to use.
Think responsive
According to a study made by the SNCD in 2015, 52% of web users read their emails on their smarphone. Hence, it is necessary to adapt the design of your emails in order to guaranty an excellent readability on both desktop and mobile devices.
Responsiveness means that you need to simplify your messages, prioritize information and chose the best call to actions and images. On a responsive email, you don’t have much space, use it wisely.
Designing responsive emails takes more time and right now, all the mailing features are not adapted to this kind of feature. Nevertheless, more and more email service providers add features and updates promoting responsive emails.
If it is only an ergonomic bonus today, it will without a doubt become a necessity in the upcoming years (like google did with responsiveness and SEO).
So you better start now!
We hope that these advices will help you optimize your email campaigns and gain an edge over your competitors. Don’t be scared to test different kind of contents, subjects, etc. until you find the right kind of email for your target.
If you found our article interesting or if you would like to chat about web marketing, feel free to give us a call or leave a comment below! Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you can be notified when our next articles come out.
Meanwhile, you can check our article about 5 ways to drive more traffic on a website. Email Marketing is only one tool among many !
