Email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to communicate with your audience and increase revenues. The channel gives you the data to get to know your customers, track their behaviors and determine their interests. But your email program is only good if people are reading your communications. If they don’t open and read your emails, they aren’t getting your message. There are several tricks you can employ to improve the effectiveness of your email program and boost response rates.
- Improve Your Subject Lines
A subject line is your first point of contact with the end user and it needs to be catchy. Make sure that your message is clear and representative of what is inside the email. There is nothing worse than opening an email that promises a sale and instead is pushing new full price items. Also make sure that the language is concise and compelling enough to stand out among the other messages in the user’s inbox. Remember, consumers get dozens of emails from brands a day and often scroll through deleting until they find something that captures their attention. The subject line should represent your brand’s voice, whether that is snarky, funny, playful or authoritative.
- Send Relevant Offers
Don’t send a customer an email for tickets to a game of a sport that they don’t like and don’t send an email promoting an item they have already purchased. Ensure that the content you send to each customer is relevant to that customer. Use the data that you have to make sure that the offers and messages that you are sending are what your customers want to receive. Otherwise you risk the email getting deleted, the customer unsubscribing, or worse yet, being marked as spam. Not the response you are looking for.
- Optimize For Mobile
Mobile might be the most over-hyped thing in marketing but that’s because consumers spend all day scrolling on their phones. If your emails aren’t mobile optimized then put this item at the top of your list. Consumers are reading the majority of their emails on smartphones, so your emails should be designed to accommodate these devices. Subject lines and preheaders should be shorter. Images and videos should fit within the constraints of the mobile phone. Being mobile friendly will help improve responses.
- Ensure Your Email Has a Clear Call-to-Action
When a customer looks at your email, they should be able to determine the call-to-action right away. Are you introducing a new line of products or are you having a 25% off sale? This should be clear at a glance. In addition, it should be very easy for customers to see this call-to-action and click through accordingly. Perhaps you want a large colored button on the top of the email, or the image of the product is hyperlinked. However you do it, just remember that having a clear call-to-action is at the heart of a strong response rate.
- Check Links & Landing Pages
Before you send your email out the door, be sure that the links work and that they connect to the correct landing pages. This very basic element is intrinsic to increasing revenues. If you are promoting a pair of black shoes in your email and the customer can’t find the product when they click back to your e-commerce shop’s homepage, then their likelihood of buying drops. Be sure that these very basic campaign building blocks are accurate and ready to go. Your analytics will improve exponentially when these elements are in order.
- Personalize Content
You probably know a lot about customers in your database, so use this information to tailor content to their preferences. If you know the types of products they have purchased in the past, then consider sending emails with complementary items that they may need. When you release a new product that is popular among people who have purchased another item, send an email to this group. The more you show your customers that you understand what they are looking for, the more likely they are to open and click through your emails.
