Want to get the most out of your emails but don’t know where you’re going wrong or how to get started?
Podymos is here to help, with 5 ways to optimise email campaigns.
Emails are a great marketing tool as they allow you to get directly in front of your audience by arriving straight in their inbox. It’s a huge channel that’s only growing.
This article will show you how to connect with your audience through email and how to get the best results from your campaigns.
We’ll look at:
- Personalising your emails
- Curating your email content
- How to tailor your emails to your audience
- Monitoring your email subscribers
- Looking after your subscribers' privacy.
Personalisation
Personality is key when sending an email out to your subscriber list. No one wants to read an email that looks like it was written by a robot.
Adding that personal touch to the sender’s details and subject line can massively impact the success of the email. They’re the very first things that your subscriber will see and could be the difference between an opened email and an ignored one.
Make sure that the sender’s address has a name, as people are more likely to interact with a person rather than a company. This is adjustable on most email platforms, like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor.
As for your subject line (the opening line at the top of your email), keep it short and snappy, telling your subscribers what the email is about and giving them the incentive to read more. Be sure to use friendly and open language that won’t overwhelm your subscriber, such as “TRY NOW” or “WHILE STOCKS LAST”.
Keep it short and sweet
The content of your email is the most important part of your campaign, so ensure that your text is relevant to your audience.
Keep it clear and concise with a simple “Call To Action” (CTA) in which you tell your subscriber exactly what you’d like them to do. This should be in line with the objective of the campaign.
The human eye is automatically drawn to visual elements, so use plenty of images and graphics, rather than large chunks of text. You can keep your emails consistent by setting up a template so that your emails don’t become too text-heavy.
Another way to keep your content engaging is by adding links to images and text. Whether it sends them to your website, social media, or other articles that you’re referencing, it’s a great way to track engagement.
This can be done by looking at the click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of subscribers who have opened your email and engaged with it by clicking on at least one link in your campaign.
CTR is available to track on most platforms and is a great way to see how many people are interacting with your email.
If your CTR is low, you need to either create more engaging content for your subscribers to interact with or troubleshoot your emails as some of your links may be broken. You should also check your subscriber list to see if any of your emails have bounced.
Tailor to your audience
Segmenting your audience by dividing your subscriber lists into different categories is a great way to engage with your subscribers and keep your content relevant.
You can do this by collecting relevant information on your subscribers such as age, location, and gender. Building up your knowledge and understanding of your customers will help you to anticipate their wants and needs and send them relevant content.
Now you can target your marketing more succinctly and send the most relevant updates to the right people.
For instance, if there has been an increase in people from a certain city buying a particular product, you may want to consider telling other people in that area about that product too.
Monitor your subscribers
Subscriber interactions can tell you a lot about your audience, particularly what content interests them and what doesn’t.
Here are a few key things you should look for when monitoring your mailing list and why.
A loss of subscribers could indicate that some of your audience isn’t interested in the type of content that you’re putting out. You may need to curate your content to make it more relevant to your audience.
Look into the type of people who aren’t opening your emails and see what they could have in common; maybe they’re in the same demographic. If so, break them out into different segments and change your approach.
A high open rate (the number of people opening your emails) combined with a low CTR could tell you that lots of people are opening your emails, but they’re not interacting with them. This might suggest that they’re interested enough to open the email but not enough to follow through by clicking any links.
Test, Test, Test
We have all sent out an important email only to notice a typo when it’s too late. Sending multiple tests to yourself and colleagues before hitting send for real can save you a fair amount of embarrassment.
Check over your content, links, and images to see if everything is in order. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of using a checklist when reviewing your emails so you never miss a mistake again.
Catch those typos before it’s too late. It’s also important to check how your email looks on different types of devices, from laptops to phones to tablets. You need to be sure that the format works well on all devices as 81% of emails are checked on phones.
Privacy
Safety and looking after your subscribers are just as important as sending out emails with your latest news.
The best way to ensure that your subscribers are interested in your emails is to give them the option to double opt-in to your emails.
This means that they have to check two boxes rather than one to confirm that they want you to email them, as nothing is worse and will turn people off more than being added to an email list that they didn’t sign up for.
How to make it work for you
So, there it is!
Emails are a great marketing tool that can be used to spread brand awareness, update subscribers on new information, and promote products and services. If there were a few key takeaways for you, they would be to make sure that your emails are always personalised, engaging, and, most of all, fun. Keep your content short and snappy and filled with pictures and easy-to-understand graphics.
However, if you only remember one thing from this article, it should be that you should always test your emails before you send them. Send them to a friend or colleague, send them to yourself, and check them on your phone.