6 Ways To Improve Your Email Campaigns

With 61% of consumers claiming to receive at least 30 marketing emails each week, it’s becoming more challenging than ever for brands to cut through the noise. Luckily, there are various efforts that can be made to help your email campaigns stand out. We’ve rounded up six of the most effective ways to help increase both your open rates and conversion rates.

Learn From Previous Campaigns

One of the most valuable ways you can improve your emails is by taking time to analyse your previous campaigns. Most email platforms offer reports that include open rates, click-through rates, the number of unsubscribed recipients and more. Look at your campaigns with the highest and lowest engagement levels, then consider the possible reasons behind the results. For example, if a campaign has a poor CTR, it may be because your call-to-action isn’t clear enough or the campaign wasn’t well targeted.

A/B Testing

Once you’ve analysed your previous email campaigns, the next step should be to start running A/B tests. This allows you to compare two versions of an email campaign to discover which delivers the best results. Depending on what you goal is, you can send different versions of your campaign. For example, if you’re wanting to increase open rates, you would test different versions of your subject line. However, if you want to increase the CTR you could perhaps test different images or colours of a call-to-action button. Make sure you only test one element at a time so you know exactly what’s affected the results. It’s also best practice to test large samples so you can gain more accurate results.

If one email gets a much better response than the other, this insight can add to your understanding of how to optimise future campaigns. It’s important that you continue to carry out A/B tests as the effectiveness of your findings could change over time.

Timely Topics

Email campaigns that are well-timed have a better chance of being opened and read. Think about which events are relevant to your brand and products, then fit them into your email content calendar. This could include specific holidays, industry events, awareness days or season changes.

Tailoring content around current news and trends is another great way to capture your subscribers’ attention. If you focus on topics that are relevant to your target audience’s interests, it can help you connect with them. Allow some flexibility in your content calendar so you can fit in these unpredictable events.

Subject Lines

The main deciding factor for whether or not a recipient will open a marketing email is based on the subject line. Research suggests that just 31% of consumers open more than half of their emails. That means your subject line really needs to capture the interest of your target audience. Considering how much spam can fill up inboxes, you don’t want to write anything that sounds to salesy. An example of this is “Until midnight: Treat yourself to 15% off by using the code EASTER2017”. Instead of this pushy approach, keep it short and simple while getting straight to the point of what your email is about.

Keep It Mobile Friendly

More than half of emails sent are opened on mobile devices, so it’s essential that your campaigns are optimised for mobile screens. This includes making sure that images are compressed for fast loading times. You can use online tools such as TinyJPG to reduce the file sizes without affecting the image quality.

Make sure that your email can be read easily on mobile phones. A font size of 13 or 14 is ideal. Also keep in mind that the small size of mobile screens can reduce the length of subject lines displayed. It’s therefore best to either keep subject lines short (40 characters max) or at least have your most important messaging within the first 40 characters.

Automations

Newsletters and campaigns that are sent to an entire mailing list, known as batch and blast, are in decline. Why? Because consumers are getting tired of the constant stream of them flooding their inboxes. According to a recent survey, 85% of people find less than half of their emails interesting or relevant to them. This not only leads to poor engagement rates but it can also affect their opinion of your brand.

Recently, many switched-on companies have started to take advantage of a more effective email strategy: automations. This allows you to set up targeted emails that are automatically sent based on a subscriber’s activity. For example, they could receive an email featuring products related to a specific category that they’ve purchased from. We would also recommend setting up a welcome series which sends to subscribers when they make their first purchase. Use this to tell your brand’s story in 3 or 4 different emails, perhaps including the manufacturing or creative process. This type of automation helps new customers gradually get more familiar with your company.

People respond better to triggered emails compared to batch and blast because they’re much more relevant and timely. Most email platforms offer automations (at a price), and can provide an excellent return on investment.

Need Help With Applying These Techniques?

Our marketing team at Digital Six have experience in implementing email strategies for a variety of ecommerce companies. If you’d like us to help you get the most out of your email campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

All statistics were sourced from Dotmailer.