A few minutes after you’ve just clicked the “Send!” button on your first email marketing campaign you’ll begin the process of analyzing open and click data to see where you went wrong and what can be improved in future mailings. Let’s take a quick look at four best practices that you can use to help optimize your marketing emails.
Spend Time Crafting Your Email Subjects
Almost all seasoned email marketers will agree that your subject lines are a critical success factor that will significantly influence whether your emails get read, deleted or sent directly to the spam folder. As such, you’ll want to spend time writing (and rewriting) subject lines in order to come up with those that attract the reader’s attention and create enough interest to open the email. Once you have developed a batch of subject lines you’ll need to test them on small cohorts of your list to determine which have the best open rates and which should be tossed away.
Stay Away from Attachments of Any Kind
It likely goes without saying that you’ll want to avoid attaching files or anything else to your emails. Attachments can cause your emails to get flagged as spam or junk and even if they do get through they will cause your recipients to have to download a large file which may seem suspicious. If you need to attach a document or PDF, include a link inside of the email that a user can click instead of attaching the file to the email.
Use a Professionally-designed Email Template
Although many browser, desktop and mobile email clients will block embedded images by default they will generally respect your HTML code of your email template, including colors, tables, fonts and more. Avoid the temptation to use a drab or plain template and invest in a few different professionally-designed email templates which include a variety of fonts and color schemes so you can test each out to see which has the best response.
Test, Test and Test Some More!
Finally, it’s worth noting that email marketing optimization is never truly complete and that the best way to ensure you are maximizing your returns is to continually tweak and test new hypotheses to determine outcomes. You may find that something as simple as changing the color of the “BUY NOW!” button from green to blue results in a 2 percent increase in clicks.
By following the pointers above you’re sure to increase your email open and click-through rates. If you are interested in improving your content marketing plan, please fill out the form below so we can contact you and discuss the tips and tricks that MySMARTblog has learned over the years.
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