In the world of instant messaging, quick replies, links, gifs, and tweets, emailing may seem like something antique. And in a way, it is – this form of communication is almost 70 years old.
But if you think that just because of its age, we as humans have outgrown it, think again! The following two facts might make you change your mind. First – about 270 billion emails are being sent every day; second –
Mailchimp, an email marketing service, was recently sold for $12 billion!
Now that we got this extremely brief history of email out of the way, you might want to start thinking more seriously about your next email marketing campaign. And we’re here to point out the six crucial elements of email marketing that may make your email campaigns a bit more successful and your life a little bit easier.
1. SEGMENT YOUR EMAIL LISTS
You don’t talk the same way to your parents, neighbors, and newly employed colleagues, so why would you do that to your subscribers? Segmenting your email lists will enable you to better target people based on something they as a group have in common – they may be new subscribers or located in New Mexico or maybe people who love to buy sweaters. If you divide all your subscribers into segmented groups, you’ll be one step closer to creating content they are interested in.
2. CUSTOMIZE THE CONTENT FOR YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Once your email list is segmented, you’ve only done half of the work. Dive into your audience’s preferences. Find out what they like, why they like your brand, and then give them what they want. If you skip this part, and you have done the previous step, you will end up with a beautiful shop window that promises a lot, but once your potential customer walks inside, they will end up quite disappointed. So make sure that once you do have your target audience defined, you adjust the
email content to match.
3. DO YOUR A/B TESTING
A/B testing is the only way to prove what your target audience prefers statistically. In its essence, it means that you create two email campaigns and send them to two different groups of people within the same list (which was first segmented, obviously). And then wait and see which one had more impact on the chosen group (more clicks, more shares, more links, more tags… whatever is your preferred measurement of success). Once you have the winner, you send it to more people. You can do more than one A/B test at the same time. The more data you have, the better optimized campaign you will have.
4. CLICK-THROUGH RATE INSTEAD OF OPEN RATE
Is there a difference between these two rates? Of course, there is. The open rate indicates when someone has opened your email, which is definitely a good thing (
you’ve probably nailed the subject line!) However, unless they engage with the body of your email – they probably haven’t read it or what you’ve written didn’t grab their attention as well as the subject. That’s why opening the email isn’t always the best metric, because you want people to interact with your brand, and that is why the
click-through rate is something that simply wins.
5. DELIVERABILITY OF YOUR EMAILS
It seems pretty self-explanatory, you send an email, and it gets delivered! But how? Even better – where? A successfully delivered email is considered the one delivered to your customer’s inbox versus the junk folder or caught in a spam filter. It’s when your subject line and the amazing content you created will be opened, seen, acknowledged, and clicked-through by your desired customer. So when organizing your email campaign, double-check if your emails are optimized for deliverability before hitting send.
6. HAVE A MOBILE-FRIENDLY EMAIL DESIGN
78% of emails are opened, read, and replied to via mobile devices, so it is important to have an email design that is optimized for these devices. How big is the font? Are the images loading quickly? Are the buttons visible and big enough so someone can tap them easily? These are just some of the questions to answer before clicking that send button.
That’s it! So what are you waiting for? Focus on these six elements of your email marketing campaign, and go, go, go! Grasp Metrics is here to help with your email marketing campaign metrics and analytics so your campaign can be a full-blown success!
