Amplify Your Emailing Skills and CTR: Strategies for Improved Email Performance

Intro

For brands involved in the eCommerce marketplace, email marketing is an essential part of your strategy. However, with people receiving tons of promotional email messages daily, cutting through the noise is a challenge for businesses. Today, email campaigns are still a relevant marketing tool, but one that requires more than just technical know-how; they demand a deep understanding of your audience, expertly crafted content, and strategically optimized campaigns. Being able to craft a quality email campaign goes far beyond just grammar and visuals, there are deep analytics to consider when sharpening your efforts in email marketing.

A vital metric in this process is click-through rates (CTR), which is how you measure you’re conversion success in your email campaigns. If you’re looking for strategies for enhancing you’re email marketing efforts, you’ve come to the right place.

Understand your audience

With any of your marketing efforts, including email marketing, it’s vital to have a deep understanding of your audience so you can better target your campaigns to those consumers. Understand the demographics of people, their purchasing habits, and their preferences when it comes to online shopping. Having a thorough understanding of your audience can help you strengthen your connection and increase your click-through engagement rate. When you create messages that aim to work through your audience’s desires and concerns, you can not only boost engagement but also cement your brand’s reputation as a brand that values its audience and their input.

Additionally, don’t just send one large catch-all email marketing campaign. Instead, group your email list into segments based on what you learn, and create multiple campaigns so you can effectively address their unique needs and interests. Alter these campaigns based on the season or deal you are trying to market, along with specific language and products that will appeal to specific audiences.

Subject lines are your first impression

Whether you are marketing for an electrical business or a retail store, a compelling subject line has the power to increase open rates, get your audience interested, and compel them to complete your desired conversion. Craft attention-grabbing subject lines that convey value and pique the interest of your recipients. Additionally, consider personalizing your subject lines when it is relevant and possible to do so to increase your campaign’s relevance to your target audience. Lastly, remember to keep in mind spam and flagged keywords and keep those out of your subject line to prevent your emails from getting sent straight to spam. Therefore, it’s best to avoid punction marks, like an exclamation mark, or question mark, and avoid using all capital letters as some may associate it with advertising emails.

Make your email copy clear and concise

People get sent tons of promotional emails on a daily basis, with most getting ignored or, even worse, sent to spam and blocked. To prevent high unsubscribe rates, differentiate your campaigns to stand out from the sea of emails.

Keeping your content clear, concise, and to the point shows your offer transparently, so your email list knows exactly what your email is about. Utilizing succinct email content is so important for your audience’s engagement. The moment you lose your reader is the moment the sale ends. Using short paragraphs, bullet points, and headings improves readability and has a better chance of holding your audience’s attention, which is especially important today when attention spans are shrinking.

Personalization is key

We talked a little about personalization when it comes to subject lines, but it’s also valuable to personalize your email copy as well. Personalization when it comes to email marketing may look like including your recipient’s name, including relevant details like products they’ve purchased in the past, suggesting other products they might like, or reaching out based on previous interactions, such as cart abandonment. By utilizing analytics tools and customer insights you can alter your email content that can perform on a personal level, which can strengthen your ability to create effective connections. Personalized offers and recommendations based on their purchasing history can also vastly improve your customer experience and can increase your likelihood of upping your sales numbers. Leveraging dynamic content in your efforts to personalize your email content allows you to customize your email marketing campaigns based on the user data you collect.

Optimize for mobile

With over half of the market making online purchases from their phones, tablets, and apps, it’s crucial to ensure your email marketing campaigns are optimized for mobile. If your website and email content don’t work properly for mobile users, you’re in danger of potential customers bouncing off of your website to seek out competitors with better-performing content and websites.

To ensure your email marketing efforts load properly for mobile users, test your emails on various devices to ensure compatibility. Streamline your content to be able to properly show on mobile screens and have content that can be engaged easily with taps as opposed to clicks. Providing seamless customer experience from computer to mobile device is paramount in upping your sales conversion rates as a whole.

Run A/B tests

A/B testing, also referred to as split testing, is an important test to run on your email marketing campaigns. A/B tests involve creating two versions of the same email with one differentiating factor. This may be two different subject lines, different imagery, a call to action, or whatever factor you think is the most impactful in your campaigns. Bounce ideas around as a team to see what kind of content you can utilize in these tests to get a good idea of how you can enhance your outreach.

After running your test, analyze the metrics of your campaign, with particular attention to your variable. Did one version result in higher open rates? How about a higher bounce rate? Or, did more people click on links in one version than in the other? These factors are all important to understanding what best resonates with your audience.

Clean up your email list regularly

As time goes by and you build your email list, people discover your business and sign up for promotional messages from your business. However, over time, many people on your list become inactive or uninterested subscribers, meaning you’re wasting time and money by including them in your campaigns.

Regularly clean up your email list to remove these inactive subscribers. Prioritizing engaged contacts will enhance your deliverability and can help guide you toward a more accurate look into your campaign metrics. You can also work on specific re-engagement campaigns to get old contacts back in the loop on what your brand can provide them. There are many analytic tools out there that can find disengaged points of contact in your campaigns as well. Maintaining a healthy list is essential to improving your deliverability and engagement rates.

Monitor your campaign analytics

Overall, when it comes to your email marketing efforts, ensuring you continuously monitor your analytics, like tracking your open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, helps you improve your future efforts. Analyze your data to identify patterns in your data and find areas where your campaigns need improvement.

Evaluating your data and metrics thoroughly helps you understand where your subscribers open and interact with your emails. Additionally, consider how time zones and certain days of the week may affect your campaign results so that you can optimize campaign timing. Carefully analyzing campaign results and data unlocks so many important insights that will help you better resonate with your audience in future email campaigns.

Use feedback and surveys

Collecting feedback and surveys provides valuable insights into what you’re doing right with your email marketing campaigns and identifies areas that could still be improved. Surveys also offer a way to better understand the preferences, concerns, and expectations of your subscribers. Include satisfaction surveys in your emails to gauge how subscribers are feeling about your content and products.

When evaluating your survey feedback, use your net promoter score to measure customer loyalty and identify promoters of your business as well as detractors. Additionally, for your unsubscribe process, include a survey to understand why people are unsubscribing. This can help identify customer pain points and make adjustments like frequency of contact, content preferences, and satisfaction to reduce unsubscribe rates.

The art of emailing

In the challenging landscape of digital communications, mastering email marketing is an ongoing pursuit. However, by consistently refining your strategy, having a deep understanding of your audience, and testing and analyzing feedback and analytics, you can elevate the success of your efforts and amplify your CTR. Being a sharp email marketer is a learning process. The best marketers are consistent learners, always keeping their eye on industry trends and new insights from the marketing world. With these tips in mind, you are better equipped to navigate the world of email marketing and achieve the results you want.