Email remains one of the most effective channels for marketers. According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company, email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than social channels like Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, marketers could still be using the channel more effectively. In fact, Forrester evaluated 98 email marketing campaigns and found that 94 percent failed to meet its email user experience best practices review.
As the email environment continues to grow more complex, there are several factors that marketers must consider when developing email marketing campaigns. Below I’ve outlined six tips that will help to ensure that your email marketing efforts don’t fall short.
Make inbox placement a priority
On average, statistics show that 22 percent of emails never make it to the inbox. Efforts to improve user experience are useless if the email is never seen. The first step in maximizing email marketing campaigns should be focused around achieving optimal email delivery rates. To do this, marketers must improve business processes around governance, deliverability, automation, reputation, and frequency, all of which play a strong role in whether or not a company is successful in getting emails through to their customer’s inbox.
Focus on “high value” activities
Email marketers should spend more time focusing on “high value” activities such as segmenting, targeting and creating relevant content instead of wasting resources on mundane tasks like monitoring, tracking and adhering to ISP rules for deliverability. These processes can and should be automated. Using technology to automate the deliverability component of email marketing campaigns will help marketers avoid technical issues and better allocate valuable human resources that are otherwise being used on monitoring and fixing problems that shouldn’t even exist in the first place.
Make the subscribe/unsubscribe process easy and intuitive
Google recently caused an uproar when it announced that it would be moving unsubscribe links to the top of emails. However, marketers shouldn’t be shaken up by this change. The last thing legitimate marketers want is people getting a message who don’t want it. This will only lead to higher complaint rates and does nothing to grow their brand. Providing clear, easy ways for customers to unsubscribe protects the value of email as a channel, and over time will boost the quality of a marketer’s list, which ultimately leads to more effective campaigns.
Support mobile-friendly formats and enable social sharing
Over 897 million consumers and business users worldwide have mobile email, and more than half of all total emails are now opened on mobile devices. As the communication landscape continues to change at a rapid pace, marketers must act accordingly and accommodate their mobile customers. Supporting mobile-friendly formats has become increasingly important in the success of email marketing campaigns. In addition, marketers that enable social sharing within emails will get more bang for their buck.
Balance user needs and business goals
Marketers must aim to strike a balance between user needs and business goals for email campaigns. Every user has a different need (e.g., save time, be entertained, be informed, save money) while businesses might be focused on creating loyalty, cross-selling, upselling, winning new customers, increasing repeat purchases, etc. One of the tricks to maximizing email marketing efforts is balancing these dual needs for each individual campaign to ensure that they’re not at odds with each other.
Use real-time data
Too often, marketers spend time analyzing data that’s two or three days old, which in this age means it’s oftentimes too late to make any impactful changes. Having access to real-time data on email performance and message disposition enables marketers to tweak campaigns as they are happening. Real-time data insight also allows marketers to quickly identify potential delivery problems or performance issues for fast resolution, thus enhancing the overall performance of the campaign.
Prioritizing each of the tips outlined above will help marketers achieve higher engagement, higher conversions and ultimately, higher revenue.