For most marketeers, email marketing is their daily concern when it comes to interaction with their prospects and customers. Emails can be segmented, personalized and automated, while maintaining relevance for the conversation with the customer. But to maintain the effectiveness of your e-mail messages, it is important to understand the added value for your subscribers.
For most marketeers, email marketing is their daily concern when it comes to interaction with their prospects and customers. Emails can be segmented, personalized and automated, while maintaining relevance for the conversation with the customer. But to maintain the effectiveness of your e-mail messages, it is important to understand the added value for your subscribers.
Optimizing e-mail campaigns is a process
E-mail is a communication mechanism between two landing pages. The first landing page / form is the opt-in to convince people to communicate and have a communication with you. The second landing page comes into view when an e-mail reaches the goal of increasing the interest of the subscriber and the landing page guides / providing additional information to them. The general process to be followed in an email campaign is therefore:
- You record an e-mail address of relevant prospects
- Let them open your e-mails
- Interested them to click on your call to action
- Provide more information on the landing page
- The following hierarchy when optimizing your e-mail campaigns is:
E-mail reception> E-mail Open> E-mail clicks> Landing page
Offering added value to your e-mail recording The role of a form for recording e-mail or other opt-in methods shows that it is worth talking to you about the problems that you are currently facing. In addition, the e-mail capture tool must show prospects that there is more value compared to the subscription costs.
Although your subscribers do not pay money to be added to your mailing list, the costs in this regard are their email address and the risks or fears associated with sharing the email address, since email marketing is notorious for spamming. And in addition, the trouble of taking some time out of their schedule to look at your email.
You must therefore offer sufficient value to the subscriber on the page for recording leads to bridge the registration costs for them.
Ideally, you start collecting the name and email address when your prospects subscribe. Now send a welcome e-mail asking them to fill in their profile. This helps you to get sophisticated information about your subscribers. You may experience slight friction right now, because most people may not be willing to share their information and by saying that you can serve them better with polished email copy, you can significantly reduce unwillingness.
In addition, depending on your industry and what you offer, you can also perform progressive profiling, whereby the page that your subscribers visit will gradually request a new form field each time they visit it.
For example, the first visit collects the first name and e-mail address, the next visit asks for the company name and the strength of the employee. At a subsequent visit, you will be asked which products they might be interested in to find out more. In this way you gradually obtain additional information about your subscribers and it is only possible if you have reasons why the subscribers visit you repeatedly.
Optimize your e-mails
In the case of emails, there are generally many factors that weigh in terms of performance and efficiency. Yet optimizing emails becomes simple when you simplify it, that an effective email manages to get 2 promotions from the subscriber.
- 1st is that your e-mails are opened
- As a second action, try to get a number of openers to click on the call-to-action button
What calls someone to open an email?
The first element that influences the open interest is the from-name or the sender's name. When you receive an e-mail from someone you know, you are more likely to open the e-mail. Sometimes marketers forget that e-mails were not a marketing mechanism from the start, but as a communication channel, and thus humanize by adding a recognizable Van name.
Tip: Always provide a recognizable name.
The other important e-mail elements that influence open rates are the subject line & the preheader. Every marketer knows that the subject lines and header must act together as the hook for someone to open the email for further reading. But what is to be understood here is that, since every email marketer will try to create suspense using their subject rules, it is difficult for your subject rules to give sufficient value to the open rate when competing with others in an overcrowded inbox. Although other factors also come into effect, testing your subject line is sometimes as simple as just looking from a busy inbox and figuring out what would come out.
This is particularly challenging because most marketers tend to analyze their subject lines when they set up an email in their ESP or email platform and it looks so great and attractive. But that's not how the e-mail is perceived in the subscriber's inbox and that's why you always send a test mail to someone in your team and ask them what they think of the subject line when they are in a crowded inbox.
Tip: send an e-mail to a crowded inbox and reject how effective your e-mail subject line is.
One of the hidden elements in your e-mails that significantly increases the open rates is valuable and useful content. Although a recognizable Van name and curiosity-raising subject affects the open rate, when you send 3 emails with content that your subscriber expects to help, the 4th email is not only opened due to subject line and Van name.
Tip: send quality content that your subscriber is looking for and your open rate will be automatically improved.
What you have to do is go up. When you see the other e-mail, you get stuck above it and e-mail grabs, you can hold or talk, you know the effectiveness of messages. I just want to know specifically. It is the e-mail conversion that is reduced here and that is that.
How can someone make someone click or take action in your email?
The clickthrough rate of your e-mail only depends on the effectiveness of the message that you transfer from your e-mail. As soon as your subscriber opens the email, you must take action and that depends purely on the effectiveness of the messages. MECLabs have formulated a comparison about optimizing the effectiveness of e-mail copies.
Relevance for the customer
The level of relevance that you can include in your email copy is based on the information you have about your subscribers. With different information collected you can segment your subscribers into multiple lists and understand what they may be interested in.
For example, if you are in the travel and hospitality industry, ask people to subscribe to a different list based on where they want to travel. Based on the answers you divide your list into 3 segments, namely Florida, California and Hawaii. If you now send an email with information about theme parks or places to go to the Florida mailing list on a small budget while you send a separate email with a list of resorts or luxury travel packages to the Hawaii mailing list, gives you relevant information to your subscribers.
You also realize that people who are interested in traveling to Florida are more interested in the budget, while those who belong to the Hawaii mailing list are more interested in the luxury aspect. In this way, you optimize the next email copy to show the price of different packages in the Florida email list, while focusing on emphasizing the luxury for those who have an email list in Hawaii.
As we discussed earlier about optimizing e-mail recording, by gradually collecting other information, you build a customer profile of your subscribers and this greatly helps in providing relevant information.
Offer value
Offering value is the value proposition why your subscriber must take action. This is a great opportunity to test what is more important to people and what they are going through. MECLabs conducted a test on the offer value and promoted a Content piece for B2b viewers.
In one variant, another had information about the piece of content that the subscriber can click and see.
In the second variant, the subscriber jumped directly into the content with the e-mail copy with a few paragraphs and the subscriber can click to read more. In this way the subscriber read part of the actual content and this variant had a higher clickthrough rate compared to earlier because the subscriber understood the value of what they would win when they clicked. While this may change from case to case, the offer value is exactly what the subscriber is looking for, they must click.
Incentive to take action
This is the often abused tactic of companies and therefore most countries have strict SPAM laws. Instead of the incentive and the offer to go hand in hand, companies abuse the incentive if they do not have proper precaution. While free shipping or large cashbacks are a big incentive, companies often provide such incentives when their product does not offer great added value. The incentive must supplement your offer value.
Frictional elements of the process
Friction and anxiety (discussed later) are two factors that reduce the chance that the subscriber clicks the call-to-action button. Friction are involuntary factors that reduce the user experience for the subscriber.
Broken layout and loading speed are two main frictions that can influence the conversion ratio. Regardless of how relevant the offer value and incentive may be to the subscriber, if they cannot read the e-mail, it acts as the deceleration force in the conversion rate. This is especially possible if your e-mails do not respond. Your CTA button would have been made small enough to be non-tappable on mobile devices or worse, if you have an image-based CTA button and the images are turned off, the subscriber may not be aware of the button and does not click it.
Fear elements of the process
Anxiety elements are a force of delay caused by humans. It indicates the fear or anxiety that your subscriber will experience if they are not sure what they are starting when they click on the CTA button. This can also happen when the landing page loads forever and the subscriber fails halfway.
You can reduce this by setting clear expectations about what would happen when they click on the CTA or what they can learn on the landing page.
Which statistics should be considered during optimization
The statistics that you need to check depend on the KPI (Key Performance Indicator). A method that is usually good for the e-mail itself is the CTR. Open rate can be informative, but it is not always 100% accurate. Open rate is calculated with a pixel being downloaded when you open the email and it will not be possible when the images are disabled or viewed in the Outlook preview window.
Click frequencies on the other hand are more accurate because it means that someone has taken an action and it is therefore more effective to measure. This applies when calculating income. Depending on your goal, click frequencies are also subjective. Click frequencies are also a good measure to measure. Imagine that the purpose of your e-mail is to let customers reserve a ticket. The incentive you offer is a free iPad via sweepstakes. You will observe many people to click, but how many actually book a ticket is crucial.
If you send another email as part of A / B testing, saying that you have the best train tickets in the world and you see a drop in clickthrough rate, the incentive was good, but the offer value was not good enough.
But as we said before, email is just a medium between two landing pages, so the actual measured value is the number of people interacting on your landing page and that would determine the fine line between the amount of V / S quality.
Ultimately, you can lead fewer people to your landing page. You can receive an email that receives fewer clicks, but due to a higher quality email message, they actually take the action and buy the product, right? That means that your e-mail campaign is optimized in the right direction.
Shut down
So that's what we call the method for optimizing email campaigns by increasing open rates by sending relevant emails and improving clickthrough rates by calculating the effectiveness of email messages. Here you will find links to some great case studies for optimizing email campaigns.