According to a report by Statista, 52% of marketers reported that their email marketing campaigns achieved a twofold increase in ROI. This staggering number proves that emails are among the most effective modes for engaging and converting prospects. With over 347.3 billion emails sent daily, the email marketing channel can be competitive, with renowned brands competing for attention in the inboxes. This makes it imperative to pay attention to and improve your emails and optimize your overall email marketing process. This email marketing optimization will help you achieve your goals faster and more efficiently.
In this guide, we’ll discuss what we mean by email marketing optimization, why it’s so important for the success of your business, and provide you with actionable tips to follow for the success of your email marketing efforts.
What does email marketing optimization mean?
Email marketing optimization refers to the process of refining and improving email campaigns to obtain the best results and fulfill desired goals. It includes assessing and modifying different elements of the email campaigns and streamlining the different processes involved in the planning, execution, and assessment of running email marketing campaigns.
Why is it important to optimize email marketing?
Optimizing email marketing should be a priority goal for any business using this channel. Effective optimization means achieving better results with minimal effort by following pre-defined rules, processes, and templates.
Here are a few other reasons why optimizing email marketing is important for your business.
Increases engagement: Personalizing emails and segmenting your audience ensures that the right messages reach the right people at the right time. Engaging content, relevant offers, and compelling calls-to-action keep subscribers interested and more likely to interact with your emails, leading to increased open and click-through rates.
Boosts conversion rates and revenue: By tailoring your emails to the specific needs and behaviors of your audience, you can drive more recipients to take desired actions, such as making a purchase or signing up for a webinar. This targeted approach not only increases sales but also maximizes the return on investment (ROI) for your email marketing efforts.
Improves efficiency: It allows your team to focus on strategizing and other creative tasks by setting up automation to handle mechanical and repetitive tasks. This ensures that you save time by getting work done faster as well as reduce resource consumption.
Enhances deliverability: When you send relevant content to the right people, it improves your domain, sender, and IP reputation. This helps you avoid spam filters and ensure that your emails reach your subscribers' inboxes. High deliverability rates are essential for maintaining the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Strengthens brand loyalty: Consistent and well-crafted email communications help build and maintain strong relationships with your audience. By providing value through your emails, you can foster a sense of loyalty among your subscribers. Loyal customers are also more likely to advocate for your brand, thereby improving your brand image.
14 best practices for email marketing optimization
Here are some of the best practices you must follow for optimizing your email marketing:
1. Define your goals and target audience
What is the purpose of your email marketing campaign? Do you want to build a brand, partner with someone, or achieve revenue goals? The best approach is to use the SMART framework to set your goals.
While figuring out your goals, it's equally important to determine who you want to reach out and talk to. What are their interests? What types of products do they buy? Creating an effective email campaign begins with establishing goals and aligning them with what your target audience wants to hear.
2. Build an email list
An email list contains the addresses to which you want to send your emails. These should ideally be people who have opted in to receive your emails.
You can set up signup forms, landing pages, lead magnets and pop-ups on your website to streamline the email address collection or list-building process. Place these forms strategically on your website so that they are easily accessible to visitors.
Another good way to build your email list is to offer resources such as free ebooks, whitepapers, or templates that are relevant to your audience. You can also provide discounts or special promotions to encourage people to sign up.
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3. Use email templates
Email templates are predesigned emails that you can edit to use for your email campaigns. They are also visually more appealing, and customizing them allows you to make them look like they were custom-made by your brand with a lot less effort and time.
Many websites and ESPs offer free and paid email templates. You can also check out Mailmodo’s template library, which has 450+ templates to choose from. When you’re choosing a template, ensure that the final design aligns with your branding and complements the purpose of the email.
4. Create better emails
Create interactive emails that enable readers to engage with the contents of the email by clicking, touching, or swiping. You can include interactive elements such as image carousels and widgets that make the emails visually appealing too. A good example of an interactive email by Mailmodo looks like this.
Creating interactive emails generally requires you to write lines and lines of code. However, you can use drag-and-drop no-code email builders offered by ESPs such as Mailmodo to create interactive emails without coding. Additionally, you can create and send AMP emails that render and display dynamic elements such as calendars, shopping carts, forms, carousels, and accordions within the email itself.
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5. Segment and personalize your emails
Sending the same email to everyone in your target audience isn't the best approach. Instead, you should tailor your emails to specific segments. This could involve excluding some people or sending different versions of the same campaign depending on the demographics and behavioral preferences of your recipients.
For example, sending annual 4th of July sales emails to your international subscribers who don't celebrate this holiday is irrelevant. They may ignore your email, mark it as spam, or unsubscribe from your email list.
6. Schedule your email campaigns
It is important to plan when you want to send your email campaign carefully. For instance, for a New Year campaign, you would want to send your campaign in the last week of December to maximize engagement and sales during the seasonal momentum. You also don’t want to create your emails on the same day you want to send them. You must leave some scope for fixing any unforeseen errors. It’s ideal to create your emails beforehand and schedule them to be sent on a specific date and time.
You can also use send time optimization to send emails to your readers at the optimal time when they are most likely to engage based on previous data. This increases the probability of emails being opened and clicked, leading to a higher engagement rate.
7. Perform A/B tests
Conduct A/B testing for different elements of your emails like email subject lines, email copies, CTA copies and placement, and even layout. This will give you an insight into what resonates best with your recipients and you can optimize your email campaigns accordingly. It will also help you design your future campaigns better.
8. Use email marketing tools
Email marketing tools offer a host of features that you will need to run your email marketing campaigns smoothly. For instance, Mailmodo is an ESP that allows you to create and send interactive emails, set up automation, create customer journeys, trigger campaigns, and manage email lists. It also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that helps you create your customer journeys and interactive emails.
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9. Set up automation
Email automation refers to using email marketing software to send personalized emails to a target audience based on predefined triggers or schedules. You can set up automation to engage and nurture prospects and free up your time by eliminating the need to send emails manually.
For example, you can automatically send a welcome email series when a user signs up for a free trial or a thank you email after someone buys a product from your website.
Monitor email performance
Sending the email isn’t the end. You need to track the performance of your email campaigns. Monitor metrics such as open rate, bounce rate, deliverability rate, CTR, etc. to understand if the emails you’re sending resonate well with your recipients.
It’ll also help you identify areas of improvement and boost engagement.
11. Get feedback from customers
Gather feedback from your email subscribers to understand their preferences and improve your email marketing strategy. Create a feedback survey with questions such as what type of content they like most, how likely they are to recommend your emails to a friend, and so on. To get better survey responses, offer your subscribers discount codes or special coupons. Review the responses to identify the pain points and areas for improvement.
Here’s an example of a feedback email:
12. Improve email deliverability
Email deliverability refers to the number of emails that can reach the recipient’s inbox rather than the spam folder. Achieving high deliverability is important for any email campaign as it defines the success of your email campaigns. Your recipients cannot engage with your emails if they don’t get them. Some of the best practices that you can follow to improve email deliverability include:
Set up email authentication such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
Warm up your IP address
Maintain a consistent sending frequency and schedule
Send relevant content
Avoid spam triggers
13. Clean your email lists
Email list hygiene is very important. It affects your email deliverability and the performance of your email campaigns. Pay attention to inactive subscribers and remove them from your email lists. You can also clean your email list by setting up a sunset policy. You must also make sure to acknowledge unsubscribe requests fast so your recipients don’t start marking you as spam.
14. Comply with email regulations
Complying with email laws and regulations protects consumer privacy and ensures the safe use of customer data. You must be aware of the laws and regulations in your operating location and the regions where your recipients reside. Some important regulatory frameworks include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the CAN-SPAM Act, and CASL. Following these laws will help you stay safe, keep your subscribers safe and avoid penalties and fines.
Conclusion
Now that you’re familiar with the best practices for optimizing email marketing, you can begin implementing them to enhance your email campaigns. Applying these strategies will improve engagement, increase conversion, and help you achieve the desired results with your email marketing campaigns. It’ll also streamline the entire process for you so you can achieve those results with much less investment of time and resources.
