9 ways to make your email campaigns soar...
Summer is upon us and the weather has been hotting up. Now’s the time to reflect the heat into your email marketing; to drive new bookings and grow your subscriber list. Our digital marketing experts have put together a list of top tips and new features to make your campaigns sizzle.
1. GIFs
“A picture tells a thousand words”, but animated pictures tell a thousand more! A growing trend for 2017; animated GIFs. GIFs allow for movement in design, displaying products or services in action.
2. Video
Video is hot topic right now. Statistics show that video in email can lead to an increase in open rates of up to 19%, boost click-through rates by up to 65% and reduce unsubscribes by 26%. There are a few things you should bear in mind when using video in email: keep it short (under 60 seconds), small file size (no buffering!), turn the sound off (click to activate sound) and use it wisely (new product/service launch, interviews and announcements).
3. Interactive emails
The possibilities are endless… product images in rotating carousel format, interactive navigation, tabs, polls in an email, e-mail checkout, customer feedback and many more. But beware... an enormous amount of testing needs to be done to ensure they look consistent across devices.
4. Mobile Friendly
With the majority of us now opening emails on our mobile device or on the go. It’s important to optimise your email campaigns for mobile, ensuring you don’t miss out on that engagement opportunity. When creating a mobile friendly campaign be sure to consider: the subject line length, sender address, minimal content, image size, call to action prominence and allow for ‘clickable’ room.
5. Dynamic Content
Dynamic content allows for big data personalisation! Segment your audience into lists based on individuals’ demographics and characteristics, and target your campaigns by gender, age, food preferences...the possibilities are endless!
6. Quality vs quantity
Subscribers are mostly time-poor, scanning their emails for the most eye-catching and relevant content and if this isn’t found the email will be binned! On average, we have an 8 second attention span so if your email doesn’t capture the subscriber in the first few seconds, it’s history! With this in mind quality and standing out from the crowd is key. Best practices for quality attention-grabbing email campaigns: emotive subject line, tempting call to actions and be targeted with your audience.
7. Connect to Social Media
Download your email open subscriber list as a CSV file. Upload the list to your social platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Retarget the subscribers that opened your email campaign, matching intent and interest with specific ads. You can also promote your mailing list on social media; collecting new subscribers email via Twitter and Facebook, with tools such as the lead generation ad option on Facebook.
8. Email Automation
More and more businesses are setting up automatic emails once an action has been carried out. For example, a subscriber signs-up to your newsletter and an automatic ‘welcome’ email is sent. These emails are highly personalised and timely; driving visits to your website and further adding to your ROI. The beauty of email automation is minimal effort for a maximum impact.
9. Email Analytics
It doesn’t matter how wonderful your email campaigns are, if you can’t analyse the results how do you know your efforts are worthwhile? Every email campaign should have a goal, establish your efforts to work towards these goals. Examples of email metrics may include: click-through rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, list growth rate, email sharing/forwarding rate and ROI.