Four secrets to successful email marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels in marketing but in order to succeed it’s vital to use best practices. Why are they a secret?
With over 293 billion emails sent in 2019 alone, email marketing can seem like a daunting and almost impossible market to successfully tap into. With the emergence of new communications channels such as social media, marketeers may consider email not as important. However, email marketing has remained strong and powerful, continuously growing with over 3.9 billion users worldwide.
Not only is that more than half the entire global population, but that’s more users than Twitter, Facebook and Instagram combined. If return on investment (ROI) is more your focus, email alone has been shown to bring 3,800% return, according to the DMA – £38 for every £1 spent.
You can obsess over statistics and open rates, but an email campaign is not going to be successful without following simple best practices. With this, many brands still don’t know what steps to take to go the extra mile with their email marketing. So ultimately, what are the secrets of success? If you don’t know them, then get to know them.
1. Send at the best time
Simply by taking the time to understand your subscribers’ schedules and testing your send times can help you to gain the optimum engagement rates. The average marketer will routinely send the same email on the same schedule, without showing any improvement in open rates or click rates. Make the most of subscribers’ habits and test the timings of your campaigns.
2. Testing really does work
You can also refine your testing even further through A/B testing or multivariate testing. Two or more variations are sent through to a small sample of your recipients, then whichever version delivers the most successful results (whether it be unique opens or clicks) is rolled out to the remainder of your recipients. One of the main advantages of this is that you can optimise the results of your campaign almost instantly, without risking its success.
3. Check, and check again
Emails, like all marketing communications, are a direct reflection of your brand and it is therefore vital to leave no room for mistakes. Designing and sending an email can be extremely difficult, compiled up of different elements that are susceptible to going wrong for all manner of reasons.
There are tools on the market that can help you visualise how your email will land in the inbox. Are you emails mobile-responsive? Are they rendering correctly on all inbox providers? Whether you’re testing Internet Explorer or an iPhone X, checking your emails helps you ensure that all critical elements in your build are perfected before you hit that send button.
4. Keep an eye on your deliverability
Your emails may be sending successfully, but are they hitting the inbox or are they hitting the dreaded spam folder? The higher the volume you send, the more common it is to receive higher bounce rates.
The reason is that, unless your recipients are engaging with your content, your inbox will deem this as irrelevant and automatically send this to the spam folder. On average, the more successful email service providers out there will manage to achieve an inbox placement rate of 83%.
Other specialised email service providers, such as Communicator, achieve an inbox placement average of 97%. This is where predictive intelligence comes into play; splitting mailing lists up into segments and creating engagement scores amongst recipients, to deliver to highly engaged recipients first.
This way, more emails reach the inbox. That means reputable email brands benefit from highly successful delivery rates, and who wouldn’t want to achieve 17% higher inbox placement than their competitors?
Don’t just take our word for it, learn more about how to optimise your email marketing in Marketing Week’s Knowledge Bank, here.