Discussion

3 effective methods for optimising email campaign performance

It’s absolutely brilliant that email marketing campaigns are so accessible these days and that it’s relatively easy for anyone with the right tools to set campaigns up and produce great results.

There’s a flip-side to anyone being able to easily produce great results though, and the same can be said about experienced marketers that expect the same results each time.

The aforementioned flip-side being that nothing ever changes and while you’re happy with results they never improve. Plus, there’s always the risk of performance levels dipping!

Email marketing evolves, your subscriber base changes and so bringing in a few effective optimisation techniques will help to ensure email campaign performance is always on the up.

Here’s 3 types of features that you when introduced into your email marketing strategy will help to optimise email campaign performance.

Personalisation

Merging in names and other pieces of information into email content always goes down well with me. Especially when I receive emails from the brands and services that I’m loyal to.

So while personalisation is all good and well received, there’s others things you can try and here’s a few ideas…

Subject line emojis

Emojis look cool and they can be used to emphasise your subject line. This one has a carrot banged on the end just in case people don’t know what veg is but you get the idea!

Subject Line Emoji

Email preview text

We’ve gone for the double whammy of subject line emoji and email preview text just for good measure.

What’s nice about email preview text is that you can control the content that appears underneath the subject line in the inbox.

If you don’t specify the content the email app (in this case Apple Mail) chooses what it thinks is the first piece of text and usually it does a terrible job.

Email Preview Text

Conditional content and images

The idea with this feature is to send one campaign but the content varies depending on what you know about each recipient.

Let’s say you want to email all of your gym members and you want Platinum members to see content that is different to regular members – this approach will allow you to do that.

Not all ESPs have this feature but if they do, it’s easy to create conditional content – here’s more info on how that works with Instiller.

Personalised content and links

I know that I’ve already said that personalisation was basic but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective, because it really is.

Personalising visual content works really well and you can extend it to personalising links so that when people click, the web page that gets displayed can identify that person and personalise the content so that it’s tailored to what you know about them.

Connecting the journey between email and the website is always going to improve the user experience and will lead to achieving much better results.

Dynamic images

There’s loads of cool ways to use dynamic images in email marketing campaigns and services like Nifty Images & Fresh Relevance make it a doddle to set them up.

Animated countdown timers are also a great way to introduce a more personalised and dynamic element to your emails.

Countdown Timer

Split testing

Try sending variations of subject lines and content in a split test. Then it’s then down to the recipients to tell you what works best.

I mean, they are the best people to ask after all!

There’s lot you can do with split testing and here’s a full blog post to give you more inspiration.

Automated retargeting

Email marketing automation is really powerful and can be used to take care of welcome series emails, reminders, anniversary & birthday emails and many other nurturing sequences.

Sometimes though, what you need will be simpler and it might be that a day or two after sending an email campaign you want to target groups of people that match these segments…

  • Did not open
  • Opened but did not click
  • Clicked any link
  • Clicked on a specific link

Automating these follow-up campaigns will extend your reach and generate more response.

Automated Retargeting

Give these things a try

Optimisation is always going to be worth the effort and you’ll soon find what works best for you.

The key to email marketing success is driving engagement and these features improve your chances of being able to achieve just that.

 

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