Email Marketing 101: Optimizing For Higher Conversions

Exceptionally popular among digital marketers, email marketing is an age-old strategy that still effectively helps businesses convert their prospects as well as engage with their customers. If used methodically, it can offer a massive return on investment. Used inefficiently, and email marketing can be a waste of time and money.

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Since email marketing strategies can be such a hit or miss depending on the execution, the quality of the leads and email list, and plenty of other factors, it becomes imperative to meticulously optimize your email campaigns for maximum email marketing conversion rate. Following these tips can help you boost your email click-through rate and meet your conversion goal: 

Always Use A Landing Page

Don’t just send people to your website and expect the magic to happen. A good email marketing campaign should be tightly bonded with a relevant landing page. This will vary for different types of emails. For instance, abandonment emails should ideally lead the person to where he left his cart. When email recipients arrive at this page, it should be clear what you expect them to do. This will significantly reduce the bounce rate on your landing pages.

Landing pages are also your opportunity to offer incentives such as deals and ungated content, which can help you convert faster. They also offer the chance for personalization and for converting email subscribers for a specific or targeted offer. If your email directs readers to a generic site that doesn’t deliver a tailored experience or has nothing specific to offer, they’re not going to be enticed. You don’t have long to grab them with an offer before they inevitably click away.

Create A Persuasive Subject Line

It’s important to get creative when thinking of a subject line so as to ensure that it isn’t just clickbait, but persuasive enough to encourage readers to open your email. You want to appeal to their curiosity when the email lands in their inbox, otherwise there’s every chance they might skip to the one that catches their eye. 

Always be specific and direct with your customers, and never overpromise. Keep subject lines short, and try to use human psychology to come up with actionable, trigger words that make readers click. 
This article offers a great guide to creating a subject line to encourage opens. It discusses the need to avoid spammy words like “make money” or “winner”. It also highlights how you can use emojis to evoke an emotional response and pop out in an email inbox.

Use Visuals To Grab And Retain Attention

Visuals can be vital to your email campaign. People respond incredibly well to visuals, and they are proven to significantly improve engagement and average conversion rate. In fact, a study has shown that adding images to any communication can result in a 650% higher engagement rate than text-only posts which is much higher than the average email conversion rates.

Take your chance to catch the eye both in the email itself and within the landing page. You can experiment with emojis, stock photos, illustrations, GIFs, and more. And you don’t need someone to generate these for you as you can get them for free from online image banks. Alternatively, there are also free tools available that can help you create stunning graphics. 

Below is a brilliant example of an email that provides a clear call to action and also makes use of appealing visuals to convey the desired message. 

Different colors evoke different emotions and can help convey your brand message effectively. Do you want to instill excitement among your readers? Colors such as red can create this buzz. Do you want to give the feeling of elegance to your email? You should use colors such as white and black. 
Color psychology is important to your visuals; get more insights on how color choices can help you increase conversion!

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Use An Effective Call To Action

While it sounds obvious; the importance of clearly stating what you want your readers to do can’t be stressed enough. People respond to calls to action; it adds a level of clarity and encourages them to go through with a purchase or at least move further down the sales funnel. 

Make sure your CTA is powerful, clear, short, and actionable. Apart from this, personalized CTAs have proven to improve conversions by over 200%. So, dig a little deeper, and customize your CTAs based on parameters such as your readers’ location, interests, demographics, etc. to grab readers’ attention and get them to take the desired action. Here’s an example of a CTA that truly stands out:

Create A Sense of Urgency And Scarcity

This is one of the oldest techniques in the book. Creating a sense of urgency can help you convert better by encouraging readers to take action quickly. For instance, if you are offering a particular deal, you can have it for a limited time and add a countdown clock in your email to emphasize the urgency.

Scarcity is another great trick. If you’re using a promotion, why not offer a discount code which only the first 100 customers get to use? These methods give people the feeling that they are getting an exclusive offer while encouraging fast action.

Take a look at the below example. The messages ‘Online Only’ and ‘Hurry, ends Wednesday’ create a sense of urgency as well as the exclusivity that drives readers to go ahead and make their purchase quickly. 

Make Your Emails Personal

If you collect customer data that help you know them better, you can send them more relevant emails that they would readily open and enjoy reading. You can target your readers based on their location, demographics, interests, whether they are a prospect or loyalist, and many other parameters that can help you tailor your email content better. 

This can be as simple as having someone’s name appear in the email. People feel more connected to a brand when it addresses them as a person, and hence are more likely to respond. 

Below is a snippet from an email from Just Eat, that uses a customer’s name to draw their attention.

Focus On The Frequency Of Emails

People often get annoyed and tend to unsubscribe if they are constantly receiving promotional emails. Therefore, getting the frequency right is essential to engage with your audience and maximize conversions while keeping the unsubscribe rate within control. 

This article talks about how different the ideal email frequencies can be when it comes to different industries and also highlights the various factors that can help you decide the ideal one for your business.  Since there is no ‘One size fits all’ solution, you need to base your email frequency on factors such as the goal of your campaign, your customer purchase lifecycle, your audience segmentation, industry best practices, etc. All you need to ensure is that your emails add value while achieving your campaign goal.The frequency of your emails is something you can A/B test to figure out what works best for your conversions.

Check Open Rates And Email Deliverability

Email addresses that have been collected don’t necessarily have value. If an email address isn’t in use, you may as well remove it from your database as there is no chance of it leading to any positive outcome. All it will be doing is skewing your campaign results. Smart email validation services can crawl the internet and data from email providers to see if the address on your list is active and in use.

Another figure to pay close attention to is the open rate. If your campaign has a high open-rate, but a low conversion rate, it could be time to tweak your email design and copy.

Split Test All Important Elements

Split testing is your best friend as a marketer. It is your opportunity to compare and figure out what works for your readers and business. You can split test elements as simple as the graphics on your landing page or within an email, or the way you have worded your CTA. If one variation is getting you a significantly higher conversion rate than the other, you’ll be sure about implementing the change. 

So, draw data-backed hypotheses, run effective tests, and use the insights you collect to optimize your email marketing campaigns for conversions. Split testing allows you to understand what works for your specific mailing list and whittle down your marketing efforts.

Optimize Your Campaigns For Mobile

More than 50% of emails are now opened on mobile devices. If your emails are not optimized for a responsive design, you could be missing out on engaging with over half of your audience. 

If you don’t optimize for mobile viewing, you can see why people might click away. Text can become difficult to read, and things can be formatted incorrectly, which makes your email look unprofessional.

The image below shows how responsive design can make it easier to see the content, with no awkward squinting to see the smaller text. 

With these handy tips, you are all geared up to optimize your email marketing campaigns for conversions, So, get the ball rolling, create delightful emails that engage better and convert faster.