5 Proven Ways to Improve your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing has an ROI of 3,800%. What this means, is that for every $1 you spend on email, you generate $38. As such, numerous marketers, brands, and agencies swear by email. Email marketing helps businesses increase customer engagement, improve brand awareness, boost sales, and increase the bottom line.    

For email marketing to deliver the desired results, it must be done correctly. Regrettably, many enterprises struggle to create effective email marketing campaigns. As such, they get low open rates, low click rates, high unsubscribe rates, and high spam rates, which negatively impact ROI. Here we attempt to explore five proven ways to improve your email marketing campaigns.

1. Send Welcome Emails to Establish Strong Relationships

Welcome emails have, on average four times open rates and five times click-through rates compared to standard emails. Also, they deliver 320% more revenue per mail than promotional emails.

Also, welcome emails should be a fundamental part of your email marketing strategy as they are sent out to new customers, users, and subscribers. As such they are an incredible way to build relationships with your customers.

You may be wondering, how do I create effective welcome emails? Here are a few best practices:

• Send the email immediately after signup or purchase.
• Make the email as personal as possible. Including the recipient’s name is a good place to start.
• Inform the recipient what to expect –the content they will get, how often they will get it, and how to contact you.
• You can use the welcome email to get subscriber insights, such as why they signed up.
• Make sure to showcase the various ways customers can consume your content, by providing links to your social media accounts.
• Introduce users to your brand over the course of several days, providing high-value content that they can engage with.
• If you are sending to new subscribers who have never purchased, consider offering a discount in the initial email, then follow up with them later in the workflow if they have not yet used their discount code to purchase.

2. Be Relevant or Be Deleted

It is best practice to ensure that your emails are relevant to your email list. Otherwise, they will be moved to trash or even marked as spam which hurts your deliverability and ROI. In the current age of personalization, consumers expect businesses to know them and offer relevant content. You must deliver the right content to the right person, at the appropriate time.

‘Relevance is the marketer’s secret weapon, and the fastest path to revenue.’

You can add relevance to your emails by personalizing them. Personalized mails increase unique click-through rate by 41% and open rates by 29%. Also, 96% of organizations believe that personalization improves the performance of email marketing campaigns.  

3. Segment your List to Increase Engagement

Segmentation is vital to ascertain you offer relevant content to your audience. It is the grouping of customers according to their demographic data, interests, purchase history, or browsing activity.

Using this data, you can customize email messages to meet the needs of specific groups. Sending messages to targeted groups ensures that the recipients find them relevant, which ultimately improves outcomes. Research reveals that segmented email campaigns increase revenue by 760%.

For instance, if your business specializes in sports equipment, consider asking subscribers the kind of sports they enjoy. Then, depending on their responses, you can create personalized email campaigns for them. The campaigns can have segments like football, skiing, tennis, and basketball. Alternatively, if you have an apparel brand that sells to men and women, consider segmenting your emails based on gender and showcasing different collections to each. If you see that a sizable amount of your customers are in the unspecified/prefer not to say category for gender, consider delivering both men’s and women’s collections to them.

You can get information for email segmentation by;

• Asking subscribers about their interests and preferences in the welcome email.
• Requesting subscribers to complete a user profile.
• Segmenting users based on previous purchases.
• Asking existing subscribers to update their preferences.

4. Increase Open Rates and Clicks with Split Testing

Split testing allows you to test your email marketing hypotheses. Also, you determine the optimal solution for subject lines, content, CTA, and send time.

In email marketing, getting your emails opened is vital. Otherwise, all your efforts will be in vain. Split Testing your subject line and preview text is an excellent place to start. Research shows that 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line.

You can make your subject lines appealing by evoking emotions and personalizing them. For example, including the recipient’s name on the subject line boosts open rates by 18.30%. It is best practice to test different subject lines to identify the best one for your audience.

Next, test your content. While templates save you time, they can compromise the performance of your campaigns. It is best practice to create unique copies for your emails to suit your audience. Use templates to give you the right setting for your content.  

Test your CTAs too. While a CTA like ‘shop now’ may work for an e-commerce store, it may scare prospects who are not ready to buy. Therefore, consider testing different CTAs to determine the one that resonates with your target audience. A soft CTA such as ‘check out our shop now’ may work well.

Do not forget to test your links, images, and design layouts. Play around with different layouts for announcements, showcasing products, and sharing new blogs. It keeps your emails exciting and helps you identify the design layouts with the highest conversions.

5. Measure the Performance of your Campaigns to Increase Success

‘You cannot improve what you can’t measure’ may feel like an old cliché, but is the modern reality. It is best practice to measure your email marketing campaigns’ performance to determine what is working and what’s not, and make changes accordingly. Also, you identify whether your campaigns are achieving your email marketing goals.  

Among the prime metrics you should track include;

• Clickthrough rate: the number of recipients who clicked on the links in your email.
• Conversion rate: the number of recipients who complete a desired action such as filling a form, downloading an ebook, or buying a product.
• Bounce rate: the percentage of emails that could not be delivered to recipients.
• List growth rate: the rate your email list is growing.
• Email sharing: number of recipients who share email content on social media or forward it to a friend.
• Open rate: the number of recipients opening an email.
• Unsubscribe rate: the number of people who opt out of your email list.
• ROI of your campaign.

The Takeaway

Email marketing remains an effective marketing method today. With 3,800% ROI and 40 times more conversions than social media, email marketing is a powerful marketing channel.

However, simply because you have a subscriber list and some content does not mean you will harness the full benefits of email marketing. You need to optimize your email marketing campaigns using the tips outlined above.

Whether you are planning your email marketing on Klaviyo, MailChimp, or others, it will become very easy to implement the tips above.