Knowing how to boost email marketing performance is critical to maintain sales and keep your customers happy. Email marketing is the lifeblood of any business today.
Email marketing has been around for quite some time. These tips will help to increase your email marketing performance to get more people to click your emails. In order to increase your open rates, you could try to incorporate the use of emoji’s in your subject line, update your email accounts to include an eye catching and relevant profile image, correct use of pretext, split test subject lines and pretext, segmenting your email list, being personal and relevant as well as using the right tools to send your emails.
Have you struggled to increase your open rates open rates? Are your email marketing efforts not making enough sales from email marketing?
Would you love to hit send on your email marketing campaign and see upwards of 60% or 70% open rates on your entire list? How about a 20% click through rate from those emails? These stats could seriously impact revenue and sales targets for your business.
Well, a few short years ago, those numbers may have been possible, but today, we need to employ smarter, more realistic tactics to increase open and click through rates. We’ll cover click through rates in a future article on this blog. For now though, lets focus on maximizing open rates.
1. Include Emojis In The Subject Line 😊
From a business point of view, this may not seem practical and may not fit into the overall vibe of the business. I understand that. However, including emoji’s in your subject line, if well deployed, may get your customer’s attention and entice them to open your emails to see more. Emoji’s are not just about ❤️ or 💩. They are used to express ourselves with a bit of fun and excitement.
Use emojis where necessary to convey a deeper or subtle message which your subscribers will enjoy. Correct implementation of these will make a big difference.
2. Profile pictures
An often overlooked element of email marketing is the profile picture. If you are using Gmail or Gsuite, you have the ability to upload a profile image to your Google account.
See how Canva, an online graphic design and editing tool makes use of a gif as their profile image.
The animation of the Canva logo is subtle, yet eye-catching, and because nobody else in my inbox, and I’m guessing yours, is using this technique, chances are this little change will catch the eye.
How do you add a profile image to your email address, if it is not hosted with Gmail or Gsuite? Head to Gravitar.com, create an account with the email address you are using to send your email marketing campaigns with and add your profile image to the profile. Gravitar is a free service.
Depending on the email tool your audience uses to read their emails, your profile may not show up for them at all, but since the majority of your readers use Gmail, Outlook or other popular services, your profile image will be visible to them.
3. Make Use of Pretext Copy as a Second Subject Line
Ever noticed how the text in your inbox after the subject line, does not exactly match the text in the body of the email? Well, this is pretext copy. Some call this text the second subject line. Most marketers, even the good ones are not using pretext copy in their emails. Why? Is it too much to do? Is it too much to think of? I have no idea, but I think people don’t know what it is.
When you or someone else is sitting down to write your emails, use this basic template to prepare your email:
Email Send Date and Time: Subject Line: Pretext: Body: Salutation: P.S. (If any)
Creating a template for yourself will help you a great deal. You will not forget to include the copy, and you will be more organized than most marketers out there.
4. Split testing
If your email marketing tool has this feature, I would recommend using it to the fullest. The split testing feature allows you to really get to know your audience.
Split test every aspect of your email. If your list size if large enough, over 5,000 subscribers, you could follow this step by step process to maximize your email marketing efforts.
Let’s assume, for this exercise, that you are sending an email to 10,000 people in your list.
Segment the list, covered below, based on past behavior where you see fit and isolate audiences to split test the following:
- Subject Lines – 1000 people
Send subject line A to 500 people and subject line B to another 500 people. These two emails cannot go to the same people, or your results will be skewed.
Compare the Open Rates of the headline text.
- Pretext
Use the winning headline in this test.
Send an email using pretext A to 500 people and another email with pretext B to another 500 people.
Again, these are people who we have not emailed before in this campaign.
Compare the Open Rates of the pretexts.
You could Use the winning headline and winning pretext to test images and links in your email in a similar fashion.
Create different images for two emails that you will be sending. Ideally, these images should have been included in the previous 4 emails you have sent out.
Compare results at each stage.
At the end of the exercise, you will have the best subject line, pretext, image and links to use in your emails and can then send the email to the rest of the list to receive maximum results.
These tests can be performed all at the same time or phased over a few days. This depends on the size of your list.
What is Split Testing Useful For?
Email subject lines and pretexts can be used to test headlines for a number of other applications like:
- Book titles
- Headlines for Google or Facebook ads,
- Ideas for Blog posts titles or YouTube Video titles,
- To find the best headline for a billboard ad,
- And a whole host of others.
5. Segmentation
If your business has a slight element of sophistication, meaning you are not selling or discussing just one topic on your website, then you need to segment your email audience.
Again, depending on the tool you are using as your email marketing provider, you will be able to segment people based on their behavior from past email campaigns sent.
At a minimum, you could segment people just by the people who opened emails in the past and people who clicked your emails. Other lists such as unsubscribed, bounced, etc are also useful. Most email marketing tools will not allow you to send emails to unsubscribed or hard bounced people anyway and they should be removed from your email marketing list anyway.
More advanced segmentation could mean that web tracking allows you to see who on your list has visited certain pages of your website. Or if they had added something to their shopping cart and not completed their purchase.
Why is this relevant to boosting your email marketing performance and open rates?
Segmenting your list into smaller groups of people who have behaved or acted in same or similar manner allows you to speak to them in a more specific manner. An email to someone who abandoned their shopping cart would be written in a very different way than someone who was interested in just hearing news on a different and unrelated product. Don’t treat all your subscribers the same way.
Emailing smaller groups means email service providers do not see an influx of email to 1,000’s of people and thus your email has a higher likelihood of actually being delivered. We will cover email deliverability in a separate article, but it is very important.
6. Personalization
Personalization also speaks to the above point on segmentation and making your emails relevant. Personalize emails by including their name, and if possible some information about them or their interest.
Your subscriber’s names, last names, birth dates etc can be used in the subject line and may make all the difference to that person. Even though they may know that you use an email marketing tool to send your emails, they will recognize that a little bit of effort was made to make the email more personal and about them.
Email marketing tools like Klaviyo can integrate directly with your Shopify store which allows for advanced personalization based on the products your subscribers were viewing or have in their shopping cart. This works the same way a dynamic retargeting ad in Facebook works.
This extra level of detail, both in the subject line, pretext and/or body of the email may make all the difference in determining a winning or loosing email campaign.
7. Using the Right Email Marketing Service Provider
This is a subjective tip, but one that I think needs mentioning.
The tool you use to deliver your emails may determine how successful your email campaigns perform. Using tools that are used by the masses, such as MailChimp, is not going to have a higher delivery rate than other tools. They may be more expensive but they do more to protect and maintain a good relationship with email service providers. Again this is subjective, but if your email deliverability and open rates are low, less than 5%, consider testing a different tool, to try to boost email marketing performance. *Klaviyo* is a great alternate to Mailchimp for Shopify store owners
I trust that these tips will help you boost email marketing performance and sales for your business.
Which of these tips have you or will you try to help increase your open rates? Comment below.
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In 2014 after reading Tim Ferris’s book “The Four Hour Work Week” he set a 100 day goal to be self sufficient and to leave his home country and start traveling the world. He since lives in Bangkok running a 6 figure marketing consultancy working with clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, United Kingdom and the United States and other areas in the world.
