Some New Email Marketing Tips!

It’s been a while since I have written about email marketing and in this time we have made some solid improvements to some of our clients’ email campaigns that I would like to share with you all. Whilst the tips are based on common sense and at times involve having the right products / services to work with when making a campaign, in general they can be implemented by anyone sending out emails. So here we go:

Develop Your Subject Lines

Your subject line is often the one chance you will get someone to open your email. Having a good subject line is often not enough, you have to instil a sense of urgency in the consumer’s mind and give a reason to really make them want to click on your email. You also need to sum up the best or most topical / relevant piece of content in your email in the subject line. People will get many promotional emails every day and it’s becoming a real challenge to get your email opened.

The best way to find the best subject line is not simply though brainstorming and running with the best idea, you should be actively testing multiple subject lines with each send. You may have had multiple subject lines that have worked well in the past and in some rare cases, sticking to these with only small modification will work. For the rest of us it is more difficult than this and you need to use around 3 unique lines per send.  You can then send out a small proportion of your email list to a good sample of your email list and from there determine which has the best open rate. Then you can use this data to choose the email subject line for the rest of the send, ensuring you have gone with the best performing line for the bulk of your campaign.

This may sound tricky to do, but actually most good email providers will do this automatically on each send with the only work involving setting up the different subject line variants.

Segment Your Data

The ideal aim for any email marketer is to have a list segmented out to each relevant area of your business and emails to these people will then always be highly targeted and therefore well received. This can be problematic though and if the lists are not large enough to allow specific sends for only certain interests then you may have to settle for less targeted sends to the whole list.

If you do have the option to target emails then you should be doing this. This should be based on previous buying history, interests registered when signing up, areas of the website viewed previously and data collected from previous emails sent out. You will receive much better rates of open, click through and conversion if you can target people in this way, and also reduce the risk of these people unsubscribing from the list.

Once you have got your data into segments, you should store it in this way in your email system by either sub categorising your main list or using separate lists for each segment. Then when you create your next campaign, only send to the segments that will really be interested in this promotion. This also means you can create more campaigns over the month but individuals will not be bombarded with that many emails in too short a time period, which brings me on to my next tip.

Manage email send frequency

Striking the balance between keeping regular contact with the user and bombarding them with too many is a tricky task, but in general I would advise sending certainly no more than one email per week. For some industries this may even be too much and a fortnightly send is the right amount. A lot of companies try more than this, and even brands that should be able to get away with it by having rapidly changing stock and regular offers send too many emails in my opinion. Amazon is a real offender in my book and I only keep subscribed with them to monitor this situation, I long gave up clicking or buying on the email I receive every other day.

There is a debated technique that is built into a lot of email providers and that the is the “second chance send”. Essentially when an email is sent out to your list and x amount of people receive but do not open your email, you are given an option to second send your email with a some of the key features of the email changed to try and encourage them to open this time round.

This in my experience can be a really powerful tool and can boost enquiries / sales without the need for much extra work in terms of setting up a new campaign. It can however annoy people on your list and lead to much higher than usual unsubscribe rates. It is something to consider and use from time to time, but be careful about which emails you do it from, and which segments you send it to.

Summary

There is obviously more that can be done and I will pick some of these up in my next post. There is another big change happening in the world of email marketing and that’s Google’s priority inbox. Assessing what affect this is having on emails is key at the moment and is something we will be documenting soon. In the meantime check out Matt’s post on the key features of the system by clicking here.