Digital Wavefront

If you design, develop or deploy email campaigns, we encourage you to read on. If you’re short on time and would like to get straight to the point, click here for a chart of the different components that affect various email metrics.

When it comes to email campaigns, there’s more than meets the eye. Barring other items like design, audience, frequency, etc. the success of your email campaign depends on:

1. Subject line
2. From Name/Address
3. Content
4. Offer

Here are 3 email optimization techniques can dramatically increase the performance of your email marketing campaign.

1. Deliver More – Carefully Select Your Subject Line + From Name & Address

One of the biggest email challenge facing companies is successfully delivering the email. With more than 97% of the daily email generated considered spam, your first task is just to get the message through spam filters. Email deliverability can be improved several ways:

a. Carefully select your From Name and Email Address. If the person doesn’t recognize your “from name” or “email address,” he/she is far more likely to delete it upon receipt or for the email to get deleted by spam filters en-route.

b. Setup an SPF [Sender Policy Framework] record for the sending domain [your-from-address@your-domain.com]. Here’s a guide to implementing SPF or you may contact your ISP or enlist the help of your IT department, or give us a quick shout!

We had to create an SPF record on a campaign for a large healthcare client, because the emails were being blocked by Postini, a email and web security and archiving service owned by Google and http://blog.digitalwavefront.com/2011/06/3-ideas-to-boost-your-email-marketing/used by our client.

c. And finally, take some proactive measures. If a customer signs up for your newsletter or the occasional promotional email, tell them in advance where the email will originate from [e.g. offer@your-company.com] and request that they whitelist the email address.

Tip: Asking users to whitelist your email address is an easy way to improve deliverability.

2. Get More Opens – Master Your Elevator Pitch

Once your email is delivered, you have to first entice your customer to open it and then give them a reason to read it. With the average person receiving ~100 emails a day, it is important to keep your email short and your content relevant. This helps get your email noticed and cut through the Inbox clutter.

a. Elevator Pitch: Most people have email preview turned ON. Email Preview is the equivalent of an elevator pitch for your message. If you don’t include relevant content and a compelling offer within that prime real estate (7-10 words or so), the email is likely to end up in Trash. Use your company’s elevator pitch to drive the value proposition clearly and concisely.

Tip: If you suffer from low open rates, this is one area to focus on for improvements. Testing different subject lines is another option.

b. Email Format: You could play around with HTML/Text formats, but I’ll save you the trouble. HTML outperforms Text. There will be exceptions to this rule, but more often than not, you’ll be kicking yourself for not sending an HTML message. Our tests have shown a 35% higher response rate (opens) for HTML than Text. For HTML emails, don’t forget to create web-based versions of the email.

Tip: Use a tool like Litmus to verify whether your email will render well across the most popular email clients.

3. Click More with Relevant Content & Offers

Your next job is to get the reader to click on the different call-to-actions within your email. Make sure your content reads well, there are no typos, and your offer(s) are both compelling [e.g. a current case study or an industry whitepaper have proven to perform well] and targeted, in-order to maximize the click-through rates.

Let’s say that your prospect universe is 100k and you aren’t sure which offer will elicit a strong response. We recommend an A/B test to a small segment. In this case, A/B test 2,500 emails with Offer A and another 2,500 with Offer B. Compare which offer performed better and then send the remaining 95K prospects that version.

Although there are no guarantees that your results will match your initial test, at least your decision will be supported with real-world data.

Tip: Change 1 variable at a time, to make sure that you are able to attribute your test results correctly.

In summary, here’s a quick 20-second takeaway!

3-tips-to-improve-email-marketing