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What strategies can you recommend for enhancing performance of email marketing campaigns?
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If you want to increase the performance of your email campaigns, then relevance is the key to success. Dan already had some good suggestions above, but to take it to the next level you need to not only follow his suggestions, but first SEGMENT your subscribers as well. The best subject line for one group may not be the best for another group. Start by segmenting your database into obvious groups; an easy way to do this is collect preferences or survey your audience to find out what is relevant to different types of customers. For example, men might want content that focuses on traditional male interests like sports, cars and of course Women! While women may want topics relevant to them such as fashion or balancing family and work priorities (and of course cute guys). Another example might be segmenting based on age such as health care, retirement and financial topics for Baby Boomers vs. shopping, music and cool ways to connect with friends for Teens.
Regardless of how you segment, you want to find what resonates with each group/segment. Once you have your groups/segments use testing to determine things like the best subject line or call to action copy for that particular segment.
One segmentation strategy that I like to use is to segment customers by LTV or profitability so I can focus my marketing dollars in line with customer value. I would advise you to spend the most time/money on the customers that spend the most with you. If 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue doesn’t it make more sense to spend more acquiring and retaining those types of customers vs. spending more on acquiring and retaining customers that result in a loss for your organization? Focus your efforts on your core, high value customers, reward them with relevant content and special “VIP” promotions and you will find that it’s your marketing program that really reaps the most rewards in the long run.
Hi Elijah - To build on the great responses from Luke and Dan, here are a few tactics that work really well (this is from a B2B perspective):
-Content: The better and more relevant the content, the better the response. A recent customer of mine found that video and case studies outperformed white papers. Have you reviewed what content is working and what isn't? The type of content should also be tied to the stage of the buyer's journey that the recipient is currently in. This ties into Luke's point on relevance
-The message: Does the message provide an educational, thought leadership type approach or is it simply all about your company? Always put yourself in the shoes of the email recipient and think about what would convince them to open and respond to your email. It's the "what's in it for me" factor. Focus on your recipient's pain points and how to solve those and less on the benefits of your product or service
-Personalization. I'm not talking about "Dear so and so". Real personalization has the email coming from the Account Manager, Support representative or sales rep that has or will interact with the email recipient. By automating this process and having the email come from a real person, you can increase your email response 4X. There are some tricks here as well as to when to use this type of personalization.
-Email Deliverability. This is an area that is difficult to consume as it's not tangible but it can make or break the success of your email campaign. Questions that should be asked: Is your email list clean? Having a messy list can lead to spam complaints, hard bouncebacks, "unknowns" (non-responders), and spam traps. All of these factors can reduce your email reputation and prevent your emails from landing in the inboxes of the people that are keen to get your emails. You need to ensure that you know what your Sender Score is, if the emails you send have authentication, if you are receiving spam complaints, and the if you are hitting spam traps. Your email/marketing automation provider should be able to assist here.
-Test - I hate this one as everyone always says it but I can't stress how true it is. If you don't believe me, have a look at a few examples over at www.whichtestone.com. You'll see that you never know what will work better unless you test it.
Hope that helps!
It may be a basic answer, but a killer subject line that makes the recipient open the email is really, really important. I would suggest you come up with 2 or 3 and test them for the best open rates.
After subject line, make it really clear what you want the recipient to do. If it is to click and register, make that really obvious. And then have the registration or landing page be very clear and focused (no extraneous navigation).
In all of this, I am assuming you have a good, permission based list. If you don't, back up and start there - because the list will have more impact than anything else.
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