With an average return of $65 for every dollar invested in email marketing, email is definitely one of the most cost-effective digital marketing channels. With this scope of profitability, you need to make sure that your strategy is well planned and executed. Alexandre Sagala, President of Pertinence Media, gives some tips to validate the important elements of an email marketing strategy.
1. Right audience, right message, right time.
Whatever is your offer or the message you are trying to convey, if it is not customized as per your audience or is not sent at the right time, your campaign will not do as well as it could otherwise. This is for sure!
Still, many e-mail campaigns are non-segmented mass messages. Even a basic segmentation at the level of socio-demographic information (sex, age…), behaviors (had purchased, opened my last e-mail …) or interests (likes product X vs. Y) can exponentially improve the campaign results and reduce un-subscriptions drastically.
Go ahead and just start applying this strategy but before you do that, resolve to never again send the same email to your entire list.
2. Subject, subject, subject!
Pay close attention to your subject. It plays a huge role in making a good impression and capturing an audience’s attention. If the subject does not interest the recipient, the email will not be read and will be deleted. This is not what we are aiming for.
Here are eight subject line formulas you can try:
1. Question- “Are you a coffee lover?”
2. How to- “How to make good coffee.”
3. Urgency- “Hurry! Only three coffees left.”
4. Announcement- “We are offering a new variety of coffee.”
5. List- “30 Ways to make good coffee.”
6. Curiosity- “Little-known quick tricks to make a better coffee.”
7. Surprise- “What Elvis can teach you about coffee.”
8. Personalized – “[recipient name], are you a coffee lover?”
Do try these formulas and stick to those that work best for you.
3. Formulate your offers in an optimal way
The textual content of your email has a direct impact on the performance of your email marketing campaign. A less attractive but well structured offer always performs better than an attractive offer that’s badly presented.
ONE OF THE WAYS TO GUARANTEE A CONCISE AND EFFECTIVE EXPLICATION OF YOUR OFFER IS TO USE THE BAB (BEFORE AFTER BRIDGE) METHOD.
Before– How is the current situation? “Nowadays, it’s difficult to…”
After– How will be the situation in future? “Imagine if you could…”
Bridge– Now, bridge the two with your offer. “With … you will be able to…”
“Nowadays, it’s difficult to get certified eco-responsible products. Imagine if you could get them easily. With our home delivery service, you will be able to…”
Whichever method you choose, always present your offer in a way that it helps your reader.
Invest more time planning on the text and structure of your email content and your performance will automatically increase.
4. Encourage action with your visual elements
The way you structure your visual elements also has an undeniable impact on the performance of your emails. They prompt the reader to take the next step and therefore must be placed in an optimal way.
One of the methods to do this is inverted pyramid method. It is essentially a framework for structuring all the email elements (images, offer description, etc) in a way that it builds towards call-to-action (CTA).
Here are some visual examples to illustrate the concept.
5. Measure Your Campaigns
To ensure that you are making progress in your email marketing efforts, measure all your campaigns:
1. Open rate
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
3. Bounce rate
4. Churn rate
5. Visiting rate
6. Conversion rate
7. List growth rate
Also make sure that you have a post-click view of your campaigns. A simple way to do this is by tagging and tracking your links with Google Analytics’ UTM tags. This will allow you to see how the email content drove a reader to your website. For example, following a click on item A, your reader visited three pages and then made a purchase.
Evaluate your email marketing campaigns. Do you have all these elements in place? If no, there is still time to act and improve your campaigns, making them more successful and profitable.
