We talk a lot about strategy on our blog, but there are everyday tactics that can give you instant success. Here are 10 tactics for email marketing success.
Time of day
How often are you asked what’s the best time to send an email campaign? Probably loads right? The correct answer is that there is no definitive time of day to send an email. Analyse your audience to identify when your subscribers are more susceptible to emails and look at your previous campaigns to identify what send times have worked well in the past.
Subject Lines
Subject lines can be over-rated, but a strong subject line should simply state clearly what the email is about, in a tone of voice that suits your brand. Remember, the most important thing is to give people that clear direction of what the email is about, not getting people to open the email on false pretences or out of curiosity. Opens are vanity, clicks and conversions are where the real results are.
Who is sending the email?
When you receive email, the first thing you look for is who it is from, then what it is about. Therefore, the from name actually has a greater importance than the subject line. Try a first name in the subject line alongside your brand name and you should see an improvement in results.
The Pre-Header
Most email clients now preview the first line of the email. Gmail does this alongside the subject line, Outlook shows this as a new email pops up in the bottom right of the screen. While it may not be as significant as the from or subject line, it does give you another opportunity to describe the content of your email and Maxemail enables you to specify this as you wish.
The Split Test
A number of these factors mentioned in this blog can benefit from a split test – putting any theories you may have to the test to see what works best. Whether this is testing two different subject lines or experimenting with different send times for your campaign, you can send your email to a small proportion of your database before sending the winning combination to the remainder of your list.
Resends
Just because someone does not open the email the first time doesn’t mean they are not interested. Remember the inbox is a busy, crowded place and you will find resending to non-openers can get you half the response again. However, make sure that the resend is not an exact replica of the previous message. Make some changes to the copy, perhaps some different imagery and tweak the subject to help grab the attention of the customer this time around.
Mobile Friendly
There are a number of statistics out there stating that more than 50% of your opens will be on a mobile device. Email is the number one most popular activity on smartphones, with your subscribers likely to check it multiple times a day. Make sure your emails are optimised for mobile to avoid missing opportunities with these readers.
Grab the readers attention, fast
It’s likely that your customers will only look at your email for a few seconds, therefore, you don’t have long to grab the readers attention. Design your email with the idea that you only have just a few seconds to get your message across and you should start to see big differences in your stats.
Generic Links
Your email landing in the inbox will nudge customers into remembering about your brand. That’s why it’s important to have links at the top of the email to the most popular parts of your site. These can account for 20-30% of all clicks in your email as a result.
Try plain text
Yes, you heard that right! In some circumstances with inactive customers who never respond, it might be better to send a personal response from a specific individual. Customers can switch off from endless graphical promo’s, so keep this in plain text, or at least rich-text, change the from name to an individual along with omitting any awful ‘no-reply@’ email addresses and you may find that you get a much better response.
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