Most people know that email marketing is one of the most effective ways to capture audience interest and drive conversions. We’ve all seen the incredible numbers telling us that every $1 spent on your email campaigns converts into $42 in ROI. However – that’s just an example of what you can accomplish with email marketing – not a guarantee.
Generating the best returns on your own campaigns means learning how to use your email strategy as effectively as possible. A great ROI relies on things like excellent segmentation, fantastic A/B testing and regular commitment to optimization.
Today, we’re going to look at some of the simple things you can do to make sure that your email marketing efforts are driving the best return on investment.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Create a Clear Strategy
First, it’s hard to measure success if you don’t have an existing idea of what success should look like. This means that every email marketing campaign needs to start with a clear goal, and a plan. The next time you begin building your marketing campaign, ask yourself what you’re actually trying to accomplish with them.
For instance, if your main focus with your current email marketing campaign is to attract attention to your upcoming sale, you can’t just measure clicks, open rates, and conversions. You’ll need to focus on how many people click into your sale specifically from your email messages. This means creating dedicated links for your email strategy.
Whatever your goal is, make sure you know how you’re going to measure your success. You can usually find tools within your email marketing software to help you too. For instance, if you’re trying to improve customer service with your email, you can ask for reviews within your emails with tools like Active Campaign.
Step 2: Segment your List
People will always respond better to messages that seem tailor-made to their needs. Sending the same email to everyone just increases the chances that your audience will end up ignoring you. Fortunately, the proof constantly shows that sending emails to specific segments helps you to gain more conversions. Segmenting your email audience means you can also personalize your content based on the specific interests and needs of each customer. Segmenting your list can improve your revenue by several hundred percent, according to some studies.
You can segment your audience based on previous products your customers have purchased, or items they’ve added to their basket in the past.
Sometimes, segmentation can be even simpler, like sending different messages based on your customer’s gender or age. It’s up to you how granular you want to get. Just remember to keep track of your results so you know if your strategies are really working.
Step 3: Make an Emotional Impact
You can even go further with your relevant, segmented emails by making them feel as personal and humanized as possible. Studies show that emails with personalized elements achieve around 50% higher open rates – just when you add someone’s name to a subject line.
As well as sending different emails to different groups of people, think about how you can add more granular personalization details for an emotional result. For instance, you could consider sending regular emails to your audience on the anniversary of when they signed up for your newsletter or sending an email on someone’s birthday with an exclusive offer.
Start with something simple, like using your customer’s name, and just work your way up from there. When you set up emails to trigger certain behaviours, you can even send custom emails when your audience fails to check out with the items in their basket or forgets about something they need to renew on your website.
Step 4: Constantly Expand and Improve your Email List
The more customers you’re reaching out to with your carefully targeted messages, the more likely it is that you’ll end up with valuable conversions. There are a few stages to expanding and optimizing your email list. First, you need to collect a wider selection of leads. This means having a landing page where you convince your customers to sign up to join your network.
Experiment with a range of pages and lead magnets to ensure you’re collecting as many possible customers as possible. If you have multiple user personas, you might even decide to use different landing pages for each possible customer. Some lead magnet examples include everything from downloadable guides and eBooks to discount codes.
As well as growing your list, you’ll need to ensure you’re also refining it. This means getting rid of anyone who isn’t still interacting with your business. While it can be difficult to remove people from your list, remember that anyone ignoring your messages or sending them to their spam inbox is just wasting your budget.
Step 5: Experiment with Different Kinds of Content
As your list continues to grow, with various segments and customer types to consider, you might find that you generate better results by experimenting with new kinds of content. A standard newsletter with some basic links back to your blog posts might work well for some customers.
However, if you begin to attract a younger audience, you might find they’re more attracted to GIFs, videos, and fun animations. Adding video to your email can improve your engagement rate by up to 300%, and some studies suggest that using video in your email subject line is enough to increase your conversion rate by 65% on its own.
Track the results of each campaign as you add new pieces of content and see how various segments of your audience respond to the new experiences. You may find that adding more video to emails to your younger audience increases engagement, while it causes older audience members to unsubscribe.
Remember, no matter what kind of content you add to your emails, you’ll still need to ensure it works properly on all devices, from smartphones and tablets to laptops.
Step 6: Upgrade Subject Lines and CTAs
Ask most email experts what the most important tools are in your message for conversion and engagement, and they’ll probably mention one of two things: your subject line or your CTA. Your subject line is the first chance you have to connect with your audience and convince them that your message is worth reading. Around 33% of recipients say they open emails due to a subject line alone.
Similarly, another 69% of customers also say they report emails as spam based on the subject line. Getting the balance right to engage your audience but not annoy them is absolutely essential. Based on what you know about your audience, A/B test some subject lines with different words, personalization features, and even emojis.
When it comes to the CTA, this is your opportunity to leverage the engagement your customer has already shown in your company when they opened the email. A CTA needs to be quick, simple, and direct. Like your subject line, it’s worth experimenting with a few options through A/B testing.
Sometimes a simple “Shop Now” is all it takes if customers already trust your company.
In other situations, you may need to convince your customers that they want to click by reminding them of the benefits that come with following your instructions. Remember to ensure that any CTA you use stands out from the rest of the email.
Step 7: Use Data to Transform your Campaigns
Data is crucial to today’s email marketing campaigns. It can help you to grow your email list by showing you what kind of customers are most interested in your brand. Data also helps you to determine which words, phrases, and buttons your customers are most likely to respond to.
With your email marketing software, run A/B tests to examine every part of your email and how it affects different segments of your audience. You can test things like your CTA button and copy, the information you include in the body of your email, and the subject line.
You can even collect information directly from your customers by asking them to provide feedback on your email campaigns and what they like. This might require you to send out some surveys and polls, but listening to your customers almost always pays off.
The more data you gather, the more you can make informed decisions about boosting your ROI.
Transforming your Email ROI
No matter what kind of marketing or promotional campaign you’re investing in for your business, you need to feel confident that you’re getting the right results. Committing yourself to constantly improving your email ROI means that you’re always optimizing your marketing messages. Today’s email marketing tools even make this process a lot easier by ensuring you have the tools required to make intelligent email decisions.
Even if your ROI seems okay right now, the tips above could help you to take your email campaign’s value to the next level. Everyone benefits from a higher return on inv
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