The success of your email campaign can be determined by a variety of metrics: purchases cost per lead, opens, or even post website traffic. Success really depends on your business objectives as well as customer engagement. Regardless of your metrics, it’s easy to isolate areas in need of improvement and give them a much-needed refresh. Many client’s emails grow stale and this is not going to gain the enthusiasm from your subscribers (and possibly lose subscribers) as ones that are ever evolving. Here are some email marketing tips and email marketing best practices that should help your business grow:
- Email Subject Lines – Why is it we spend weeks or more on the content and design of an email but pay 5 minutes on the subject line? I think the subject line is by far the most crucial part of the email because if it does not engage the user to see more your email is dead. Do you offer a discount or an incentive such as free shipping? Use them in your subject line. Are you personalizing the subject line? You should be as I have seen a 28% lift in click through rate when you use personalized email subject lines.
- Best Practice SEO – Does your email include images? Are you using alt tags? An alt tag is the text content that appears when a subscriber’s email client doesn’t render images. For those who create their html as image slices, be certain to include the alt tags, so that if those attractive images don’t render, the subscriber has an idea of what the message is and can decide whether or not they would like to download the images. The majority of email clients such as Outlook, do not render images on the initial display of the email it is critical to make sure you are describing your product/service in the alt area.
- Pre-Text Header – You know I am talking about right? That little paragraph of text above the email that seems like you can barely read it? Well you can and the majority of subscribers do. Pre-header text can be an email marketer’s best friend. Think of it as title of a book that can set your promotional offer, new product, or product feature or services. Most marketers use it today to offer a web version for those that may have rendering issues, and it’s probably the most valuable real estate in your email message. So instead of using the standard “If you are having difficulty viewing this email, click here” try content that conveys the same message as your email content:
- “The holidays are over – so what save 33% off on all orders!”
- “Help us grow – tell a friend and get free shipping on all orders!”
- Email Testing – Bottom line is you should be testing everything. Subject lines, design, content, alt tags, offerings, pre header text, and anything else. My motto “Test It and They Will Grow”. The Internet is not a “Set it & forget it” society. You need to keep testing to let your subscribers tell you what they want, not the other way around.
This should give everyone enough to work on for a little while so have some fun with your email marketing and enjoy.
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