What can you do to improve ROI for your email marketing campaigns?

5 Tips For Successful Email Marketing

Just like any marketing, there are no guaranteed successes with email. Spam traps, gone-aways and un-responsive messaging are just some of the barriers to your campaigns.

So what can you do  to improve ROI for your email marketing campaigns?

 #1 – Contact the right people

You’ve spent time building a customer database that will hopefully help you deliver results. The reality is that this platform could be wasting your precious marketing budgets if it’s not kept up to date to suppressgone-aways, deceased records and incorrect personal details. Identifying these records through a number of methods to remove nuisance and unused contacts can optimise your results and keep you off the dreaded blacklist. Not only that, by keeping your database clean, you keep your business GDPR compliant and only spend money on contacts that will actually receive your message with interest.

For those looking to give their business that extra push, look to prospect data.If you can identify prospects that match your customer base, you can enhance your data with fresh prospects and give yourself a larger audience of qualified recipients. Great for improving conversions from mailings into sales.

 #2 – Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)

 You’re busy, we’re busy, they’re busy. In today’s world, everyone is occupied. Getting your email to the right contacts is the first hurdle, but email marketing is a 110m race. Hurdle 2 is an interesting subject line, 3 is engaging visuals but 4 tells a story.

Most of us have a quick scan of an email before we deal with it, taking in the headings or first few sentences to decide if the content is relevant to us. We don’t have time to read an essay on why we should use your product or services, so keep it simple. Highlight your USPs and keep it concise. If you have more relevant info, direct prospects to a landing page (see point 3.).

You should think of your email as an elevator pitch, where you have minimal time to get your listener on board. Once you’ve got their attention, use your website and landing pages to deliver the full proposal.

 #3 – Calls to action (trackable)

You can write the best marketing message in the world, but without making yourself easy to contact, it could all be in vain. Having obvious and easily accessible calls to action means your prospects can be easily funneled into your website or contact forms.

Following on from point 2, the use of CTAs means you can keep your email simple and direct users to landing pages stacked with more information and sales messages.

Having too many different calls to action can trigger spam traps, but a few strategically placed buttons can be the difference between good click-through rates and watching your marketing flop.

We recommend placing a call to action above the fold for maximum engagement.

 #4 – Designing for your target audience

B2B and B2C audiences receive emails in different formats and on different devices.

We can predict that the majority of B2B recipients will open your mailing in the dreaded client that is Outlook.As Outlook is powered by Word, any funky CSS styles you’ve applied to your website can be waved goodbye in email too!

You can also assume that in a business capacity, readers are more open to engaging with longer messages, opening up the possibility of explaining your products or services in more detail.

When it comes to consumer mailings, over 60% of people open their emails on mobile devices. Because of this we need to be sure our HTML is responsive and optimised to display accurately on devices of all sizes.

You can, however, be more frugal with images and should use this to your advantage, whilst keeping a 60:40 text image ratio to avoid hitting spam traps.

 #5 – Build a landing page

Creating campaign-specific landing pages means you can simplify the information in your email marketing, to provide concise and appealing snapshots of your offerings. By including additional information on a landing page, you provide reason to include CTAs on your messages and move prospects through your sales funnel.

Not only can a landing page increase your conversion rate but can also increase click-throughs and engagement from your digital marketing.

Following these tips can not only improve your email campaigns as we head into 2019 but also increase your brand awareness as a whole. Finding the perfect formula is never easy, with so many factors to consider, but by ensuring the basics are handled, you can give yourself the best chance in the new year.