Email marketing can be tedious. You put so much time and effort into creating the perfect email, but the email(s) just don't show the performance you want. Or maybe you're not really sure how to properly measure success in the first place.
It can be overwhelming to think through the whole process of optimization and everything to consider - especially if you are just a "one man/woman show" within your company and also have other tasks and duties.
To help you with this, we've put together some useful tips to keep in mind the next time you're sending out emails / newsletters or creating an email marketing strategy.
Setting a goal is crucial to your email marketing strategy. It is equally important to set a goal for each and every email you send.
Many people will say that their goal is to "increase awareness," but how exactly do you measure that?
If their email is just filled with text, but doesn't include an opportunity for conversion (e.g., through a call-to-action in the form of a link or button), is open rate their gauge of success?
Therefore, give your readers a "second action" to take. Do you want them to follow them on social media? Do you want them, after reading your email, to look further on your website to explore the topic in more depth? Do you want them to go to a specific landing page where they then trigger a conversion by filling out a form?
You can break your email strategy down into different campaigns with different topics and goals.
Now they can measure how their different campaigns are performing and understand what is working well for them (in terms of their pre-defined goals) and what is not.
Emails are meant as a medium for sending short notifications / messages, not as an extension of their website. They should be short and concise and not take on the proportions of a large tome.
It is important to understand that you do not need to provide every single detail on a particular topic/message/subject. You should limit yourself to the most important information one should know about that topic.
Put yourself in the reader's shoes: do you read long emails that are sent to you? If a reader were to look at their email for just 10 seconds, what would be the most important information you wanted them to take away?
Emails are meant as a medium for sending short notifications/messages, not as an extension of their website. They should be short and concise and not take on the proportions of a large tome.
It is important to understand that you do not need to provide every single detail on a particular topic/message/subject. You should limit yourself to the most important information one should know about that topic.
Put yourself in the reader's shoes: do you read long emails that are sent to you? If a reader were to look at your email for only 10 seconds, what would be the most important information you would want them to know?
Make sure your email looks visually appealing. If someone only has 5 seconds to judge whether your email is relevant/important to them, where should their eyes ideally be looking?
The so-called "pyramid format" is very helpful here. It starts with a headline. This is followed by an image, text (say a few paragraphs) and a call-to-action (CTA). This can take your readers to any destination
- Font colors: avoid too light /pastel colors. These are difficult to read. Are you using the colors of your brand that you have defined in the corporate design? Are the colors you are currently using aligned with your brand? For CTA's, links, headlines, and important text, use bold colors that stand out.
- Font size: Make sure your text is easy to read. Use larger text for headlines and CTA's.
- Break into paragraphs: Divide your text into "easy to digest" sections / paragraphs. Smaller paragraphs are much easier to read than a whole "wall of text".
- Use bullet points: they are a nice visual addition. You can use them to highlight important benefits of your product/service/service.
- Bold vs. normal font: Here are a few examples of content where you can use bold: Headlines, CTA's, links, important bulleted lists, and deadlines.
- Call to Actions: CTA's are very important. They allow your readers to take another action (besides opening your email) and they provide touch points for conversions (allowing you to move your potential customers further down the sales funnel and thus closer to a possible first / further sale). Furthermore, CTA's are usually the elements that your readers notice in the first few seconds of skimming your email.
- Use images and logos: Images and logos are a great addition to their email, as the human brain can grasp images and other visual content faster than text. Adding images also helps their readers relate to their brand.
The open rate is very interesting because they will never really manage to measure it properly. Various email clients don't even capture if an email has been opened at all.
The open rate does not count those who open a text-based email (images are not displayed). So it is not advisable to use this as a primary metric.
However, you can and should optimize the increase of open rate. This is mainly done by following best practices for the subject line and making sure you send the email to the right contacts.
Remember, open rate is very important when it comes to getting the reader one step closer to a conversion, or helping them engage with your company and get to know it better.
To get the best subject lines with the highest open rates, keep the following best practices in mind:
Don't forget to optimize your subject lines in A/B tests! A/B testing is very important for the performance of your emails. Marketing is often about trial and error. A/B testing allows you to understand what your visitors want and don't want.
It is very important to know who you are emailing. If they know their readers intimately, you can (with the help of their buyer personas) target content to their needs. This allows for a more personal and targeted approach.
By segmenting their list, they reduce the number of readers the email is targeted to. This allows them to better tailor the emails to them. Such emails have a higher likelihood of their readers engaging with them and their business.
Also, make sure their readers want to communicate with them in the first place. Purchasing email lists, or adding email addresses to their database without prior permission, is definitely not advised, even from a legal perspective.
Do you have contacts you haven't heard from in a while? Maybe you should think about removing them from your list and instead push them into a "re-engagement" campaign (contacting existing contacts again to win them back) to target them more effectively. If you constantly send emails to contacts who don't interact with your emails and don't read them, this will damage your domain authority (bad for SEO optimization!). This can also lead to your emails being considered SPAM.
The click-through rate is a good metric that helps you understand how well your emails are performing. This is because this metric shows you what your customers are actually doing with your email, they are performing an action.
A few lines above we asked them the following questions:
Do you want them to follow you on social media?
Do you want them, after reading your email, to look further on your website to explore topics in more depth?
Do you want them to go to a specific landing page where they then trigger a conversion by filling out a form?
It's proven to only use CTA's when they are appropriate. You're not doing yourself any favors by not giving your readers the chance to take a second action in their email. If they opened your email, they are also interested in your company and services.
You should make the most of the attention they are given.
As you can see, there are many components to writing a "perfect email".
And even if you write a perfect email, it will not behave as you want it to. You will have to tweak and adjust it again and again because the behavior of your readers is constantly changing.
However, on the whole, it is important to have a well-structured email composition (clear, error-free presentation) and a solid email marketing strategy, as they can significantly support your overall marketing strategy.
We hope that the above tips were helpful for you and that you can optimize the performance of your next email sending with the easy to implement measures!