Bhagya Lakshmi

Simple Tips to Increase The Effectiveness of Email Marketing Campaigns Ever since the dawn of the digital age, we have been witnessing some of the most amazing technological transformations in the various spheres of our life including work and personal spaces. What we all thought to be impossible just a few years back, like the Internet of Things, is actually becoming a way of life now. We are literally living in the midst of technology now. When it comes to business, new kinds of technologies have filled offices and have even outgrown old technologies, rendering them obsolete. Whether it is in sales or purchases or marketing, what you see today is probably not what was used a few years back. Far more effective and insightful tools have come into use and for good. Marketing for instance, has a number of new tools now like SEO, content marketing, social media, online ads and what not. Earlier it used to be just a few advertisements on print media that did the trick for marketers. However, one tool that still remains to be one of the most effective marketing strategies in spite of advancements in technology is email marketing. It was something that was expected to get buried under new technologies and tactics, as and when they came though. According to the Huffington Post, for every dollar spent on email marketing by brands, they generate almost $41 in sales, which is much more than mobile marketing which helps to generate $10.51 for every dollar spent, social media which gets $12.71, display advertising with $19.72 and SEO marketing with $22.24 for every dollar spent. It shows how effective and worthwhile investing in email marketing is and how it still reigns as King in terms of marketing strategies. That’s precisely why you need to focus on email marketing more and leverage its manifold benefits for your business as well. Simply sending out emails through campaigns is not enough though. You are missing out on a lot if you don’t utilise it to the fullest. You need to make sure that your message gets sent, opened, read and acted on, along with its distribution. How can you do that? This is where the three important metrics of email marketing need to be used: open rates, click-through rates and forward rates. A quick word about the three crucial metrics Open rate – Open rate is basically the number or percentage of people who actually opened your email from a given list of recipients. It allows you to know how many of them are really interested in you and the content you send them. Click-through rate – Click-through rate measures the number of people who actually clicked the link within your email. It can be measured in two ways: either by dividing the number of people who clicked the link in the mail, by the total number of recipients, or by dividing the number of people who clicked the link by the total number of people who opened the mail. Shares – As the name suggests, it measures the number of shares that your email gets, either by forwarding or through the social media. Now that you know what you need to measure, let’s see how these can be used to increase the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. Tips to improve your email campaigns - - - - Create categorized lists – Your subscribers probably have different needs for subscribing to your mailer. Hence it is only sensible to categorize your subscribers according to their areas of interest. Some typical categories you could create can be: - according to buying behaviour – what they normally buy, what price range they buy from, when and how often they buy etc. - according to demographics – age, gender, job etc. - according to sign-ups – new customers and old customers Apart from these, you can also segregate your subscribers according to what they would like to see or what they usually open like news or discount coupons, or promotions, events etc. You can use open rates to figure this one out. For example, if you have a press release to send out, arrange for it to be sent to an exclusive media subscribers list, rather than the entire lot. This will increase your open rate and click-through rates. As a matter of fact, according to a research conducted by Mail Chimp, segmented or categorized email campaigns have a 13.07 per cent higher open rate than regular campaigns. Don’t use words and images that set off spam filters – It has been found through thorough research that simple text-based emails that have links to relevant products or pages have better chances of being opened and clicked by users. Emails that contain unnecessary promotional images or words do not work anymore. Moreover, words like “free money” or “winning” and the like trigger the spam filter of most email programs. A noteworthy fact here is that almost 100 emails get flagged as spam every single day. Now, you don’t want to end up in that list do you? Make sure your emails are mobile responsive – Considering how increasingly mobile we are all becoming, it only makes sense to make your websites and your emails mobile responsive. In fact, several studies have proved that up to 65% of all emails are first opened on a mobile device. Hence, you need to create emails that are easy to read, easy to load and easy to scroll through on mobile device. Another important thing is to make your CTA (Call to Action) button also easily clickable on a mobile device. There are several email marketing services that allow you to test your campaign to see how it looks on various devices. Have CTAs that include the subscriber’s network – This can be done with emails that are meant to convey promotional offers and discounts. You can extend the offer to the recipient’s friends as well by including a “Forward to a friend” CTA. This can also be used for emails that contain any kind of content that is standalone and does not have a CTA per se. Keep these pointers in mind while planning your next email marketing campaign, and you are sure to see improvements in your metrics.