12 Steps to Improve the Performance of your Email Campaigns
Whether it’s in the B2B or B2C world, it can be challenging for an email to stand out in the overflooded inbox of your target audience.
Here are some key things to consider when building an email campaign:
1. Create content
In order to get better performance and user engagement from campaigns, the emails should be informative and make the viewer feel like they are getting value out of reading your emails. Sharing content is the best way to keep an audience engaged while raising brand awareness.
Having a team dedicated to creating content continuously will help educate your audience and increase the cadence of email campaigns. All types of collateral can be valuable to your audience, from blog entries, news articles, videos, case studies, promotion, brand announcements, etc.
While considerable time and resources must be put into creating content, the output can be re-used and re-purposed overtime and throughout the different touchpoints of the customer journey.
2. Set KPI-based goals
Every email campaign should have a purpose that will help your team reach the goals laid out in your marketing strategy.
From generating web traffic, to raising brand awareness, nurturing leads or generating revenue, emails are one of the most effective ways to convert goals.
While most advanced metrics your ESP will provide are reduced to click and open rates, having access to more KPIs to evaluate the performance of an email campaign will be vital. This is why trying to lead / retain the audience to your own website will help you keep track of user activity and goal conversions.
3. Segment the target audience
The bigger the contact lists, the more generic and watered-down email campaigns will tend to be, leaving the door open for many missed opportunities.
Segmenting your target audience as much as possible is one of the keys to improve the performance of your email campaigns. One key word or one merge field can be the difference between a click and an un-subscription.
Segmentation allows for more campaign creativity and content that will be tailored to a specific segment of your database.
4. Define the appeal
The subject line and preview text are the first thing the audience will see in their inbox, hence the importance of nailing the appeal of an email from the get-go.
The best way to identify the best subject line templates will be to test different emails and look into campaign analytics. The open rate is the best indicator of the performance of a subject line.
An important thing to consider for the preview text is to make sure it doesn’t include any HTML coding. This is a common mistake for first timers when sending HTML emails. Thankfully, most ESPs allow users to edit the preview text so it doesn’t include any coding.
5. Define the copy
This is where the copywriting in the body of the email plays an important role that will dictate the reader’s engagement rate.
Whether the goal of the email campaign is to be educational, informational or promotional, the copy should be tailored to the audience, using key words of a terminology that will resonate with them.
The content in the body of the email should preferably be relatively short and straight to the point as the attention span of an email reader tends to be very short.
For HTML emails, the imagery and layout of the email should be displayed in a way that helps the reader intuitively understand the point of the email.
6. Add a human touch
It is assumed most marketing emails are sent by a system. Emails will tend to perform better when it is clear that the email looks like it’s coming from an actual person.
Signing off with a real person’s name is the first step, but more can be done including:
Have the email be sent from an actual email account with a person’s name rather than a generic address such as “newsletter@company.com”
Adding the sender’s name, title and company info in the signature. You can even throw in a profile photo to be even more personable and humanize the email.
7. Set up a dedicated IP address
Most ESPs will offer to use their own IP address to send emails. This can be an issue as the reputation of an IP address can potentially get hurt from the poor performance of other users.
An IP address with a poor reputation can result into your emails being flagged as spam and never make their way to your recipients’ inbox. It can also hurt the display of HTML emails.
Creating a brand new IP address dedicated to your email campaigns will allow you to better control and directly influence its reputation.
In order to maintain a good IP reputation, it is important to ensure emails are not sent to addresses that have previously bounced and with content that will less likely be marked as spam. Maintaining an open rate above 10% will also help.
8. Set up automated workflows
Different follow-up actions should be triggered depending on how the recipients engage with your emails.
For instance, the follow-up email will be different for the recipients that clicked on a previous email compared to those who didn’t click or didn’t open the email.
This is a service that is accessible through most ESPs and will help you get closer to your conversion goals based on the interactions with of your audience.
Automated workflows also allow to save considerable time in preparing follow-up emails throughout your campaign.
9. Clear and concise CTAs
The Call-To-Action is the bridge between an email and its conversion goal.
Having a short and precise CTA such as a button will allow the reader to easily identify the next logical step in venturing down the funnel of your goal conversion.
10. A/B Testing
It’s nearly impossible to nail the performance of a campaign in one single experiment attempt.
A/B testing allows campaign managers to analyze the performance of two different emails trying to achieve the same goal.
This strategy will usually focus on one of two KPIs; the Open rate or the Click rate. It will send two different email samples to a small portion of your contact list and help you determine which one performed best.
The winning version will eventually get sent out, ensuring the performance of the campaign is optimized.
11. Maintain your contact database
Most ESPs will automatically remove bounced emails, unsubscribed users and blacklisted contacts. However, some manual work might be required to keep the contact database up-to-date.
While it can be tedious, it will undoubtedly lead to better delivery rate and campaign performance across all KPIs, while help keep a good IP reputation.
12. Analytics
It’s always important to monitor the performance of each email campaign in order to optimize its performance, make adjustments and learn best practices for the next campaign.
Most ESPs provide advanced analytics but monitoring web traffic and user engagement across all the different platforms will help you refine the strategy of your next campaigns in order to better achieve goals.