Are you plugging away at email and finding that it’s not giving you the results you wanted? It might be time to try a more advanced approach. If you haven’t already, use these 7 tips to improve your email campaigns.
1. Try conditional content
You might have spent hours crafting the perfect content for your email, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for your entire audience. Your subscribers may respond differently to your terminology, imagery, or even offers. Conditional (or dynamic) content allows you to customise the content of your emails for different segments, without having to create entirely new campaigns. You can customise your email copy, images, links as well as call-to-action buttons, all from the one email send.
What does this look like? Think about using different product imagery depending on what your customers have purchased in the past. Try using CTA’s that link to different store locations depending on where your audience is based or even offers that are relevant to their interests.
Find out more about conditional content here.
2. Choose between hard and soft CTA’s
When creating your emails, it’s important to match the CTAs to your campaign goals and, most importantly, to your audience. This can mean choosing between a “hard” and “soft” CTA.
A hard CTA uses direct, commanding language to get people to take action. Think things like “Shop Now”, “Buy Now”, or “Sign Up”. While these can be effective to drive conversions, they can scare off potential customers if they’re not at the right stage to make a decision.
Soft CTAs on the other hand don’t direct people to make a purchase or decision on the spot, instead, they offer indirect ways to purchase. A soft CTA could be “Learn More”, “See Our Products”, or “Get More Information”.
Think about what stage your subscribers are at in the customer journey and what kind of language will resonate with them. If you’re unsure, you can split test your campaign with different CTAs to see which performs better with your audience. We’ll cover more on this below.
3. Use advanced segmentation
When you begin to build out your subscriber data you can begin to segment your audience by age, gender, location, interests, engagement, sign-up source and so much more. This allows you to send highly targeted and tailored campaigns to each and every subscriber. For example, show them the details of their closest store or related items to their last purchase.
Sending irrelevant information to the wrong audience segment can lead to increased unsubscribe rates and even being marked as spam, which can damage your domain reputation. Advanced segmentation means you can quickly and easily segment your audience by data like age, location, engagement rate, or interests, and create more relevant and powerful campaigns. The best bit? Segmented and targeted campaigns account for more than half (58%) of all email ROI.
4. Build cross-channel promotions
Customer journeys are no longer simple, or linear. The average customer will go through multiple touchpoints before actually making a purchase. For instance, when signing up for a new service, Google found that 91% of Australians interacted with brands via two or more different channels, such as in-store, website, and app.
If your email marketing campaigns aren’t including cross-channel opportunities, then you may be missing out on reaching a large percentage of your audience. Cross-channel promotions actually prompt customers to spend 10% more than single-channel promotions.
SMS, social media, Google Ads, and retargeting strategies can work hand-in-hand with email, reaching your audience where and when they are online for better results.
5. Streamline your campaigns with automation
If you’re not using automation, you’re probably spending a lot of your time creating, sending, tracking, and following up on your emails. Automating your emails allows you to front-load your work, taking the time to perfect your entire email series, and then sit back and analyse the results.
If you’re running an event for example, email automation allows you to set up your direct email marketing efforts and then focus your time on planning your event. Your series can include your invitation email, registration reminders, event timetable, countdowns, and follow-ups. You can decide on the date, frequency, audience, and triggers to send your emails so that everything flows automatically.
Find out more about the benefits of automation here.
6. Analyse your top KPIs
There are a heap of metrics that you can track to measure the performance of your campaigns. While the usual ones like clicks and opens can give you an idea on the reach of your emails, these don’t always reveal significant data or directly relate to your campaign goals.
Think about the aim of your campaign and how you might measure its success: this could be things number of trial sign-ups from eCommerce emails, or number of unsubscribes for win-back campaigns. These 6 KPIs are a great place to start.
7. Use click maps to optimise campaigns
Your campaign won’t be perfect straight out of the gate. Trying to choose the right type and location for your CTAs to drive the best performance is all about testing and refining. You can do this by using an email click map report to see what resonates best with your audience, and choosing the winner for your campaign moving forward.
This report will give you insight into subscriber behaviour, such as the types of messages or elements that generate the most clicks or if they generally don’t scroll past the halfway mark. Understanding this can also inform the structure and design of your other email templates.
Learn how you can take the guesswork out of your campaigns with our blog: 7 Tips For Crafting An Email Call To Action That Works.
Want to test out these advanced tips for your next campaign? Sign up for a free Vision6 account to get started.
