Have your email open and click rates been suffering due to your stale email marketing strategy? Switch things up with these 20 fast tips for improving your stats.
1. Experiment by A/B Testing Your Subject Lines. Ensure that you get the most out of these tests by using two subject lines that differ in their objectives (e.g. fear-inducing vs. special offer).
2. Segment Your Lists. This allows you to closely monitor which groups of people are attracted to which types of content. In addition, you can send specialized e-blasts to smaller lists, drastically improving your open rates.
3. Use a Reply-to Email Address that is actually Managed. Don’t set up a ‘do not reply’ email address for your company blasts. Instead, set up an alias, such as CustomerService@Company.com to manage the replies that come in.
4. Integrate Google Analytics Goal Tracking. Determine what the main goal of each e-blast is and set up tracking in Google Analytics to help monitor that goal. By doing this you can easily see which sign-ups, emails, downloads and more resulted from your email marketing campaign.
5. Incorporate Video. For a fresh new way to take on email marketing, begin adding videos to your e-blasts. This sort of interactivity is sure to increase open and click rates.
6. Test, Test, Test! Whether you test your emails using multiple email clients, a large testing team or a specialized platform, like Litmus, as long as you are testing you are doing something right. Better yet, set up a process utilizing all three of these tactics!
7. Don’t Forget to Send Recipients to Social Media. Make your social media icons an official part of your email template to encourage cross-platform engagement.
8. Make Use of the Header. Subject lines offer limited space, but the header provides ample opportunity to put a little more information in the preview!
9. Create Big CTA Buttons. Hyperlinks can be easily overlooked but a big “Buy Now” button is hard to miss.
10. Send Targeted Emails. As mentioned above, segmented lists offer many benefits such as the ability to send targeted emails. If you have a list of people that you know are interested in a specific product, don’t be afraid to send them a targeted blast.
11. Be Useful. This is an obvious one but it needed to be said. So many times we are in a hurry and end up bombarding our customers with information we find important rather than taking the time to find out what they really care about.
12. Don’t Get Lazy with Your Subject Lines. Be creative but stay focused on the goal! Think about what entices you to open an email and remember this is where A/B testing comes in handy.
13. Analyze your Statistics. All of this hard work and testing means nothing if you aren’t analyzing and learning from the results.
14. Include Multiple Links Back to Your Website. Your website is home base and your email marketing strategy is just another way to drive traffic there. Including multiple links back to your website in the form of hyperlinks, buttons and linked images will increase click-through rates dramatically.
15. Make it Easy to Scan. People are strapped for time these days, always on the go and expecting bite-sized pieces of information. To accommodate this, make your emails easy to scan with bulleted lists, images and small paragraphs.
16. Create Specialized Landing Pages. If you have a particular campaign you are running on your site, drive people to that specialized landing page. If you are advertising specific products, create a landing page to direct email recipients to. Make it easy to convert!
17. Include Personalize Introductions. If the emails on your email lists have names associated with them, take advantage of this information and personalize your emails.
18. Plan Ahead with an Email Marketing Calendar. Flying by the seat of your pants won’t do with email marketing. You need to create a cohesive calendar that incorporates all of your digital marketing activities and keeps you ahead of schedule.
19. Keep Tabs on the Best of Breed in your Industry. Track down the leaders in your industry and subscribe to their email lists to keep track of what they are doing. Let their great ideas inspire yours.
20. Make it Mobile-Friendly. Need we say more?
If you need assistance with managing an email marketing strategy or incorporating any of these tips, please contact Informatics.
