Optimising your email marketing is something you are already capable of doing, even if you have never looked at email marketing in depth before.
The main goal behind email marketing optimisation is to compel your subscribers to open your email when they have 10, 20, 30 or more emails in their inbox. You need to optimise your emails and make them entice so that yours take priority over all other emails.
You may think that some of these techniques sound very simple… that’s because they are! Yet, many people ignore them or neglect to use them properly and lose out on conversions as a result.
Take your time to look at each of these techniques alongside your email marketing campaigns and decide whether you could be making any improvements.
The Subject Line
Starting at the very basics of not just email marketing but email in general, we have the subject line.
The subject line is possibly the most crucial aspect to any marketing email. Your subject line needs to be concise, straight to the point and grab your reader’s attention straight away. Your subscribers will see the subject line before anything else, so why would they bother to open your email if it is not enticing? It is the only piece of information which subscribers will consider when deciding whether to read your email or bin it!
Right off the bat, a subject line should be relevant to who you are sending it to. It should address your reader’s needs. For instance, if you have had a group of customers who have all looked at a certain product recently (such as a winter coat, for example) you may decide to go with a subject line such as –
- Did you forget about that winter coat you wanted? Or
- Ready to get ahead of your winter wardrobe?
Other ways to optimise a subject line are to add the recipient’s name and use actionable language which is explicit and immediately engaging.
General Personalisation
By making your emails more personalised and relevant to the people reading them, you are easily going to improve conversion rates. If a customer or client feels valued and that you have taken your time to reach out to them as an individual, they will reward you with their loyalty.
Demonstrate to your subscribers that you know something about them or their interests. You collect a lot of information when a person signs up to your email list or buys one of your products, so use that information to write emails which they can relate to.
Personalisation does not just mean using somebody’s first name! Use all the data you have on your subscribers and try and incorporate it into your email marketing (in a non-creepy way, of course!) and collect data at every possible opportunity. Track pages customers are visiting, items they have favourited and anything else you can, then leverage this to personalise your email marketing efforts. It really is as simple as this!
Create Opt-Ins and Re-Engagement Emails
What good is optimising your email campaigns if you are not growing your email list? Create avenues for opt-ins all across your website; don’t rely solely on manual sign-ups by visitors and collecting email addresses through sales.
Whilst this does not improve your opening and clickthrough rates in the context of optimisation, it increases and improves your lists and increases long-term clickthrough rates.
Over time, you will find that certain subscribers no longer engage with your emails. This is quite normal as time goes by, but you don’t have to accept that person as a lost cause. What you can do is send a re-engagement email to fire up some leads which have gone inactive. Re-engagement emails should be heavily personalised to increase the chances of getting that person back on board with your brand.
Ensure Content is High-Quality
Whilst you need to make your emails concise and straight to the point, this does not mean you need to sacrifice overall quality!
Great email copy concisely conveys what you are offering or have to say and does this in a compelling way which drives emotive results. When you are writing email copy, you should be using brief language which is interesting and engaging. Don’t be afraid to cut out excess bits of information – chances are your subscriber will come to visit your website and learn more anyway if you can engage them through short, high-quality email copy.
Generally speaking, so long as you are using bullet points, short paragraphs and emotive language, you cannot go far wrong. Avoid superfluous and irrelevant information; it will not be read and will mean future emails may go straight in the bin!
Incorporate Calls to Action
Readers are more likely to clickthrough your emails and visit your site if there is a call to action at the end. This is possibly one of the most important aspects of the email itself – the whole point of your email marketing is to compel readers to perform a certain action and this is exactly what a call to action is for.
Your call to action is where you turn your reader into a visitor to your site and hopefully a customer. Your call to action should be short, sweet and focussed. It should only consist of the very action you want your reader to take (such as reading a page on your site or visiting a certain product category). Use actionable language which is urgent and friendly (“join now!” or “visit us for…” are two examples).
The call to action should stand out from your email and be distinct. Don’t opt for a plain old blue link and instead use buttons or flashy graphics which fit in with your email’s overall look, feel and theme.
Whilst We’re Talking About Design…
Your emails should be optimised to work on all devices. Your subscribers could be using any email app to read your email and they’re not going to bother if it does not open properly, fit the page or if the text is all scrambled.
Responsive design is a hot topic on the internet today and it is something I use whenever I am creating a new website. Responsive designs ensure content appears consistent across all devices and it is not difficult to incorporate into an email’s theme. Although not every device will support responsive design, most modern ones do and by using it, you can create emails which appear differently depending on the device it is being viewed from.
To make it easier on yourself, keep your email’s layout simplified, ensure only relevant content makes its way into your final draft and don’t use font sizes which are too big or unnecessary – Comic Sans MS does not look good, no matter what device it is being viewed from!