9 tips to improve your email marketing program
Email marketing is a fantastic, low cost, high return lever for marketers. Unlike most marketing channels, email can create valuable, personal touches at scale.
This blog is the first in a series to help you with your marketing planning for 2025.
Why focus on email marketing? It checks all the boxes!
- – Creates brand awareness
- – Generates leads & sales
- – Builds a connection with customers
- – Increases website traffic
- – Offers customer targeting opportunities
- – Provides A/B testing opportunities
- – Requires minimal resources
- – Drives measurable results
- – Offers an attractive ROI
- – Helps retain customers
- – Builds credibility
Here are 9 tips to improve the performance of your email marketing program.
Tip #1: Start with a strategy.
It starts with understanding your target customer segment and building a strategy around them. Who are you hoping to reach? What do they care about? What do you want them to understand? Once they know about it, what do you want them to do? When is the best time to share the information? What needs to be done to ensure emails are on brand?
Strategy is the foundation of your marketing. Without it, your marketing will be inefficient and could even harm your brand. Need help developing your brand strategy? Here’s my shameless plug: Connect with me! Strategy is my sweet spot!
Tip #2: Segment your mailing list.
A Mailchimp study found that segmented email campaigns increase open rates by 39%.
Segment your email list into smaller, targeted groups based on factors like location, purchase behavior, interests, and your relationship with each recipient. This allows you to tailor your messages and offers, making them more relevant and engaging.
The best emails feel personal. Flash sales site Gilt Groupe, for example, sends over 3,000 variations of its daily email, each tailored to past user click-throughs, browsing history, and purchase history.
Tip #3: Choose an email marketing service.
No one loves their email service, but you need one! Don’t set up your own system in house. Email services are inexpensive and offer tools to create, expand, and manage your email list. They can create email campaigns, help track leads, and provide insights on your performance.
Tip #4: Create hardworking subject lines.
Your subject line is your first impression. Keep it clear, engaging, and concise. Assume the reader doesn’t read the entire line. Do the first few words or numbers share enough to encourage the reader to open it?
Use numbers, capital letters, and other techniques to grab the reader’s attention and motivate them to open the email.
Tip #5: Test, test, test.
Run A/B or split tests to see which subject lines and designs get the best open rates and click through rates. Try different labels for call-to-actions to identify which ones attract more engagement. For example, “Save me a seat” may attract more clicks than “Register”.
Tip #6: Pick the launch timing based on your results.
Ignore industry averages. Focus on your results. Your goal is to beat your benchmarks. Understand that not all email is the same. You may send newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional emails. Each type may have a different day and time that drives the best results.
Newsletters tend to perform best when sent early in the week, around 5 or 6 am. However, this timing isn’t ideal for promotional emails with offers. Direct-to-consumer emails typically see better engagement on weekends. To optimize your email program, analyze past campaign results to identify when your target audience is most likely to engage and take action.
Tip #7: Use landing pages.
Did you know that 19% of email clicks are clicks on your logo? According to a McKinsey & Co. study on email marketing, “an email is part of a series of interactions with the brand. When developing emails, marketers should be just as obsessed with where an email sends the user.” Why invest so much time on an email only to drop the user onto the generic home page?
Customized landing pages – sending the user directly to the item or offer featured in the email can result in conversion rate uplifts of 25%.
Don’t forget to optimize landing pages for mobile. Google reports that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing. It gets worse. 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
Tip #8: Craft thoughtful calls-to-actions (CTAs).
Focus on the one thing you want people to do when they open your email. That’s the CTA that deserves center stage. Don’t push social media icons at the top of the email if driving traffic to them isn’t your primary goal. Remove links that drive people from taking the action you want them to take.
Tip #9: Don’t forget list hygiene.
Email distribution list attrition rates hover around 20% annually. Watch for hard and soft bounces. Your email marketing service will provide data on both. Remove hard bounces immediately. If you continue to email to hard bounces, the receiving email servers will view you as a bad sender and deliver your emails to junk.
Want to talk strategy before you revamp your
email program?
Let’s chat. laura@vivalabrand.com
