4 simple steps to boost your email campaigns

Your copy was perfect. The subject line as tempting as ice cream on a hot summer’s day. Your images are so crisp and stunning you’d think Annie Leibowitz was involved. So why did your campaign not hit the spot? If your CTR and ROI aren’t quite what you’d hoped they would be, let’s look at the other steps you need to take to ensure your email campaigns are a roaring success.

Look first to the database

A workman is only as good as his tools and when it comes to emails, a marketer is only as good as his database. It’s therefore important to review said database on a regular schedule to ensure that the information contained there is accurate and up-to-date. Dirty data has inevitably wound up that way due to obsolete, missing, or inaccurate information and it’s a costly, time-consuming process to clean it up again, so make sure your data capture process limits the scope for errors.

If you’re not sure what data capture strategies are going to work best for your industry, our Advanced Data Capture guide can help you identify what methods of data capture are going to be most appropriate or effective for your industry, based on your level of Email Maturity.

A solid segmentation strategy

You might think that a clean database is all that’s required for a successful campaign, but we need to go one step further and actually segment that database. Without segmentation, how do you know what to sell to which customer? A 25 year old single man will have very different needs to a 48 year old married mother of four, and by segmenting your database you will increase your focus and thus your competitiveness in that market segment.

Segmentation produces higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates, better deliverability and increased revenue. If your latest campaign hasn’t hit the right mark, analyse your results and investigate whether your segmentation is all it could be or if you perhaps could split those lists further. Remember, each layer of segmentation you implement adds another layer of customer understanding.

A/B Testing

In his Presidential campaign, Barack Obama sent out an email with the subject line “Hey.” Just one word. Hey. We hear it so often each day you’d think it would automatically relegate his email to the “do not read” list, yet that single word helped him on his way to raising 690 million dollars and ultimately the Presidency. “But how, and why?!” we hear you ask. Through A/B testing, Obama’s team had been able to test their subject lines, layout and content of their campaigns, ultimately leading to a subject line that was as simple as it was effective.

Whilst we can’t guarantee you’ll make $690 million from it, we can guarantee that A/B testing will help you determine if your campaign will gain the interaction you hope for, and whether the change that you’ve made to your campaign is the catalyst for the increase in revenue you’ve (hopefully) seen. Without A/B testing, you’ll have no way of knowing whether correlation equalled causation or not.

Optimised campaigns

This is a big one. Research from Experian showed that 51% of total email opens occurred on a mobile phone or tablet in Q1 2015. If your campaigns are geared up for desktop users only, that’s an enormous percentage of customers that you won’t reach simply because your campaign isn’t displaying properly on their device – in fact 89% of marketers are losing leads and opportunities through not optimising their emails! Your campaign analysis will tell you which customers have opened your campaign and on what device, again providing you with an opportunity for segmentation and more targeted offers.

You can see how email campaign success depends on so much more than just smooth copy and snazzy images, but it’s not uncommon for certain steps, such as send time and deliverability, to be overlooked either. To improve the success of your campaigns, use each point above as guidance but if you’re still struggling, download our Email Maturity Benchmarking Report to help you rate yourself against industry leaders and identify opportunities to improve your campaign sophistication. Find out if you’re one of the 1% who get it right!