Nine Top Tips To Improve Any Email Marketing Campaign

In his latest post for B&T, the founder and director of Shout Agency, Michael Jenkins (pictured below), offers some top tips for marketers whose game is email…

Anyone can send emails, but if you want to make the most out of your email marketing campaign’s performance, you must be on the cutting edge of the latest techniques. Here are nine tips to create an email marketing strategy that will boost your ROI and keep you ahead of the competition.

1. Personalise for performance

Personalisation is the crux of a successful marketing campaign. It propels your brand forward past your competitors, and helps you connect with your target audience. The obvious first place for personalisation is in the subject line. Use the recipient’s first name or some other personal detail to catch their eye immediately. In the body of the email, you can use specific details such as information about prior purchases they’ve made.

2. Segment for success

Get to know your customers so you can create segmented email lists based on various buyer personas.  Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customer. When you identify each persona’s desire, needs and challenges, you can craft customized content that resonates with each persona. Doing so, increases your audience’s experience and helps improve your conversion rate. Keep them as simple as possible and don’t overdo it. The number of buyer personas you use depends on your business; 4-6 is average.

3. Create consistency

Consistency is vital for the success of any marketing strategy.  If your customers expect an email from you, they are more likely to open it. Send out emails at random intervals and your emails will probably get marked as spam and you lose your audience. You need to develop an email marketing schedule to maintain consistency and help build rapport with your customers. But don’t just be consistent with your scheduling you must also be unfailing with your content. Make sure your emails contain information that is interesting and useful to your audience, meeting your strict brand guidelines.

4. Add automation

You can maintain consistency in your scheduling by using automated follow-up emails. You can set up workflow emails that are triggered by your leads’, and customers, behaviour. For example, let’s suppose you sent out an email thanking visitors’ who signed up for a free trial on your website. You can follow this with a series of emails over the next few weeks, providing them with additional information and giving them an opportunity to contact you should they have any questions.

5. Manage metrics

Do you know the effectiveness of your marketing strategies? You won’t unless you run an A/B test on your emails. Test one variable at a time, such as subject line, calls to action, personalization, body text, closing text, and images. Each of these variables can a have a massive impact on the success of your campaign, and A/B testing will allow you to tweak your emails to perfection.

6. Seductive subject lines

Don’t underestimate the power of a great subject line. Some 35 per cent of email recipients open email based on the subject line, and those that include the recipient’s first name have a higher click-through rate than those that don’t. Your recipients are already bombarded with emails, so you need to stand. Taking time to come up with an impactful subject line will pay off, so let your creativity run free and grab your audience’s attention.

7. Manage mobility

Most of today’s consumers read their emails on a mobile device. Keeping mobility in mind will add to the success of your email marketing strategies and will mean that your campaign reaches the widest possible audience. You can make sure your emails are mobile friendly in the following ways:

• Keep subject lines short
• Keep the body of the email under 600 pixels wide
• Use a large font size
• Avoid menu bars
• Display small images
• Use a single column template

8. Customise

Create recency and frequency with your database by creating a custom audience across Facebook and Google. When the custom list is created, you can then specifically target your database with a tailored message that will create cross-channel alignment and a stronger content marketing strategy.

9. Report regularly

Tracking and reporting are key factors in any successful marketing campaign. You need to know your stats and use them to your advantage. The purpose of email marketing is to develop a long-term relationship with your clients. Keeping abreast of your analytics will give you a bigger picture of engagement trends, so you will know exactly what your audience is interested in and which goals you are reaching.

The more effective approach you take with your email campaigns, the more customers you will retain and the more leads you will convert. Use these tactics to keep ahead of your competition and stay on the forefront of email marketing.