6 Tips to Better Your Email Marketing Performance

Email marketing is a great way to get your company’s message in front of a larger audience and produce conversions. Whether it’s a new product for sale, a new service you feature, or just informing them about an incredible deal or discount, there’s no better way to spread the news. There are more than 3.9 billion email users worldwide, making email marketing the ideal marketing channel for businesses to connect with customers and other companies alike.

Marketing experts say that email marketing offers a 44 percent ROI, meaning that you can see up to a $44 return on your investment for every dollar you spend on it. Although reaching that ROI is obtainable, the big question is, how do you get there? How do you better your email marketing performance and bring incredible results?

Worry not; that’s what MailBakery is here for. Not only as a team of passionate designers and developers who aim to create and code beautiful HTML emails, but also as a resource for your email marketing questions and industry insights. Below, we share a few tips to better your email marketing performance.

1. Tell Readers What to Do Next

Think of your calls to action as the headliner of your event. Everything within your email leads to the call to action at the end of your email, from the catchy subject line to the engaging images, to the short but informative body. A call to action tells subscribers what to do next and encourages activities that often drive conversions to your site or social media page.

Every marketing email has a purpose, like informing, educating, or entertaining, and your CTA should reflect that and be clearly defined. It works best if you always assume that your readers don’t know what to do next after reading your email and that your CTA will lead the way. There are a few ways to better your email marketing performance, including placing your CTA near the text that talks about the sale or products you’re offering. Other examples include:

• Inverted pyramid method: Directs your reader’s attention to what you want them to do (i.e., follow you on social media or purchase a product or service.
• Color theory: The colors you choose can help or harm your clickthrough and conversion rates, so choose wisely. Your CTA should have a stark contrast to its background, making it stand out and be easier to locate. As a rule of thumb, stick to brand colors if you’re unsure which colors to use.
• Keep it above the fold: Most readers don’t read past the fold line on a newspaper, and it’s the same with emails. To increase your clickthrough rates, place your CTA before they would need to scroll to see it.
• Optimize for mobile: Because you don’t have as much real estate on mobile, opt for having your CTA front and center so that your readers won’t miss it as they scroll.

Related: Clever ways to use a CTA in your email marketing campaign that will drive clicks

2. Don’t Go Overboard with Images and Videos

Another tip to better your email marketing performance is to take it easy with the images, videos, and GIFs you use in your emails. Sure, the average reader is a visual learner, and audio-visual avenues are much more convenient and accessible than text emails, but they don’t guarantee conversions.

The reason is that not every email provider displays images. In fact, 60 percent of email providers blog images by default. So, that means you’re unconsciously alienating a percentage of your readership by going overboard with images and videos. To combat this and boost your email marketing performance, use images and videos sparingly in your emails, limit your image-embedded CTAs, and don’t assume that image-heavy designs will best express a message.

3. Add Social Share Buttons to Your Emails

If you don’t know that email marketing and social media make a powerful marketing duo, you’re missing out on a proven way to grow your business. You can start simply by including links to your social media accounts in the signature to your email or adding social sharing links to the content featured in your emails. Be sure to include them in every email you send out!

This is an excellent tactic for producing a better email marketing performance because it enables you to further promote your emails while encouraging your readers to share your content on their respective pages. People love sharing the cool things they find with family and friends, and incorporating social sharing links can help generate new leads and expand your reach to a previously untapped audience.

Related: How to Use Email Marketing to Boost Your Social Media

4. Track Your Emails to Improve Performance

Your email marketing campaigns can teach you a lot about the do’s and don’ts of marketing, and that is why it’s important to track them. They can easily show you how to better your email marketing performance and what resonates most with your target audience. The metrics from each campaign can determine why your emails were successful at their goal or why they failed. And applying the insight you gain boasts incredible results like growing your email list, generating more sales, decreasing unsubscriber rates, and boosting open, click-through, and conversion rates.

In addition to tracking analytics, you can also use A/B testing to gain insight into which designs, copy, and images are preferred by your targeted audience. Like tracking analytics, this method also informs you of the do’s and don’ts of an email marketing campaign, but it also allows you to pinpoint what performs best.

5. Check Your Email List

Companies love to boast about their extensive email lists, but we have some bad news for them: having a long email list means nothing if the majority of your subscribers are inactive. To better your email marketing performance, you need to ensure that your email list is packed with engaged readers. That means regularly scrubbing your email list and updating it so that your collection of contacts are fresh and always relevant.

Keeping inactive users on your list can negatively affect your emails’ deliverability and take much-deserved focus away from your subscribers who are active and ready to be nurtured. Or worse, they can land you on a spam list. When combing through your list, keep an eye out for the following:

• Emails that have bounced at least three times.
• Old email addresses or ones with a defunct domain like Aol.com or Hotmail.com.
• Typos such as .con or addresses that are missing a letter.
• Addresses that haven’t opened an email in three months or more.

6. Offer Something Extra

There is nothing better than being rewarded for a favor. After all, everyone loves incentives. Another way to better your email marketing performance is by offering your subscribers a little something extra. It doesn’t have to be limited to discounts or limited time offers. Sometimes, that something extra can be to enhance a customer or subscriber’s experience. For example, Squarespace occasionally extends the trial offers of its potential customers.

The company understands that people are busy and sometimes don’t have the time to explore the product the way they would like, thus creating a positive experience for the customer. You can also do things like giving users more product for the same cost, give them first dibs on beta testing your new feature, and so much more. The sky is the limit, and better yet, offering something extra goes a long way to foster trust and a relationship between customer and company.

MailBakery

Email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most impactful marketing channel strategies in the industry. There are many ways to reach new customers while still appealing to your existing ones. If you already have email marketing campaigns in place, the best strategy is to use our tips to better your email marketing performance.

Our team at Mailbakery can assist by creating stunning, brand-specific email templates that captivate the customer and make you stand out. Got a vision you want us to bring to life? We’re happy to do it. If not, let’s brainstorm together.

Are you interested in learning more? Contact our team today, and let’s get cooking in the kitchen!