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Improving the effectiveness of your email marketing

19 July 2011 | Kate Waite

Email marketing has evolved considerably as a marketers' tool over the last decade. Consumers are faced with hundreds of emails making them quick to delete or mark as spam anything which does not instantly appear relevant, interesting and readable.

Amongst the millions of emails being sent out every day is it still possible to make this marketing medium work? Most definitely.

In the 2011 Email Marketing Industry Census, published by Adestra and Econsultancy, 72% of companies rated email marketing as excellent or good in terms of return on investment. Apart from search engine optimisation (which just crept ahead with 73%), this is higher than any other marketing channel.  

Email marketing can be very effective as we have seen in recent campaigns for clients. It just requires some careful thought and strategy to ensure that in a crowded inbox your message gets opened, read and acted upon. There are many ways to improve your email marketing, here are a few of our favourites that have helped us generate some great results recently.
 

Segmenting your lists

Segmenting your list so you can offer readers a more targeted email is a very effective way to generate results.

For example, on a recent email campaign for Mahindra Homestays we split the mailing database by location.  We then sent out a series of emails promoting discounted accommodation in locations that were easily accessible to the recipients. For example, those living in the west of India received offers for popular holiday destinations on the west coast such as Goa or Kashid. This email had a great click through rate of 56% which lead to 116 booking enquires for the destinations featured on this particular email within five days of the mailing.



If your list currently has no segmentation then consider running a competition or doing a survey to your database to enable you to offer them more targeted emails in the future.

 

Working with social media channels

Many marketers see their social media and emarketing activity as two very separate channels, but they actually work well together with your social media platforms a great place to find new subscribers and your email database a resource of potential fans and followers.

We promote the Facebook and Twitter channels for Mahindra Homestays on their email campaigns, with an offer to encourage people to like or follow them. Monitoring the results shows some great success in integrating these channels. One mailing saw a 2000% increase in the normal daily likes to their Facebook page. The new fans were also seen to be very engaged, asking questions and conversing with each other about which destinations they should choose for their next trip.

Follower numbers on Twitter also saw an above average increase in the days following an email send, with new followers quick to ask for travel advice.

A/B Testing

One of the most important elements of your email is the subject line, it needs to motivate recipients to open it, and getting it wrong means your carefully crafted and highly targeted email doesn’t get seen at all.

There are a few golden rules when it comes to subject lines, keep them short and relevant, and don’t use terms that will cause the email to be flagged as spam being the essentials. When it comes to creating subject lines don’t leave it to chance or gut instinct when you can test what will work best for your list.

Split A/B testing on your subject line allows you to send out an advance email to say 10% of your mailing list. Of these 5% will receive subject line A while the remainder will receive subject line B. Comparing the results then allows you to see exactly which subject line has generated the higher open rate. We’ve used this technique very effectively on several campaigns, such as increasing the open rate on an email for Colorado Tourism by 194%.

Don’t forget you can run split tests on landing pages as well to boost conversion rates.

 

Design

A vital part of your email campaign is the design. Your email should look good regardless of the email client or access device your recipient is using so make sure you test it across multiple browsers. Depending on the mailing list we will typically test an email in up to 30 different browser / client combinations.



Email newsletter design itself will be covered in a blog post devoted just to this topic. Make sure you subscribe to our blog RSS feed so you don’t miss it!