As a marketing agency we deal with numerous campaigns, from multiple clients concurrently. Therefore, it would be easy to sit back and take our foot of the gas a little once we had pressed go on a campaign and let the automated marketing take control, whilst we get the next one out. However, we know this does not work. One of our main daily challenges at Sherpa is Optimisation. We optimise everything we do…whether that is for our clients, or for ourselves; whether it is for web content, SEO, email marketing or paid traffic. So focusing on just one of those categories, what are the six key ways in we can optimise our email marketing?
1. Test and refresh the headlines
It is important when running an email campaign that the email headlines are thoroughly considered. This doesn’t mean working hard to think of one great subject line for each email in your sequence, it means thinking of a selection of great subject lines for each email at each point in the funnel and AB testing them to see which performs best in terms of open rate. When running campaigns on behalf of clients this also gives them more choice and in turn you as an agency more autonomy when running campaigns.
2. Mobile Optimisation
This seems like an obvious point but sometimes the focus is so much on website responsiveness, that emails are overlooked, but over 50% of emails are now opened on a mobile device. Are your emails responsive and does that landing page work accordingly? Does your cookie notice work on a mobile site or does it cause issues as they cannot see the ‘accept cookies’ button, causing them to abandon your page. In fact, over 70% of emails which do not display correctly are deleted with three seconds of opening them. Making sure your email campaign is fully mobile optimised is a key point in successful email marketing.
3. Standardising Call to Action buttons
Sometimes it is easy to forget that your prospective customer is on a journey and your marketing must act as a guide which leads them to your required destination. Therefore providing them with purposeful direction is a must. Being customer centric and considering the customer’s ease of navigation will help. Therefore, make sure your messaging is consistent. This includes any text on the Call to Action buttons. Although it may seem like a good idea to mix up copy and offer different actions, keeping it consistent will help give the customer more purposeful direction. If you want to make your CTAs stand out even more, try personalising them. Hubspot found that a personalised CTA will increase conversions by 202% when compared to a standard CTA.
4. Sending Schedule
When we send our emails is as important as what we are sending! There are numerous pieces of research on the best time to send emails, but it all comes down to knowing your audience. Obviously, if you are marketing to teenagers, then sending anything pre 9am won’t work! Try a variation of send times and monitor which has the highest open rate. Many commuters will sit on the train and look at emails, so perhaps sending early morning is a good idea. And in turn, look at the timings between emails. Are you giving your recipient enough time to digest the first email and download your content? The send gap is important, so if a four day gap isn’t resonating, then lengthen it to six days. This will come down to trial and error for many companies, we have been doing this for a long time and different timings work for different clients…it is all about the customer and the product you are selling.
5. Consider Plain Text Emails
A plain text email is often overlooked as we are all so used to received beautifully formatted html emails. However, this humble version of the email will often unearth more responses as it doesn't look too much like a marketing email when compared to HTML. We are generally bombarded with marketing emails, so your customers have grown accustomed to receiving emails with images and client logos, so a plain text email on top of the brand recognition from the previous html emails will help to cut through the noise.
6. Landing page copy
You’ve optimised your email, people are opening and clicking on the CTAs, but when they hit your landing page they are not converting…what’s the issue? Well, we are all guilty of not being as concise as we could be. Can you condense the content on your landing page so there is no repetition? Are your propositions near the top of your landing page? Why not try different formats? Instead of having a single block of text with a lead magnet form beneath, why not try a two column option which has the form alongside the text? Again, AB testing is never a bad thing.
These are just a few tips, to help optimise your email marketing, but don’t forget that the optimisation shouldn’t stop there. Make sure your entire campaign is fully optimised from email and landing pages to social posts and paid traffic ads. If you are running any sort of marketing campaign, whether it be direct or through an agency, make sure optimisation is at the forefront of everything you do.
If you would like to discuss how Sherpa can transform your marketing, please get in touch…
- via email on letschat@sherpamarketing.co.uk
- by giving us a call on 01234 964000.
- or by clicking here.
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