Email Marketing Campaign Strategy: 8 Smart Tactics for High ROI

This article was last updated on September 1, 2020

Is your email marketing campaign strategy not delivering the desired results?
Today we’ll share with you 8 valuable tactics and plenty of tips that will help you shape your own email marketing campaign strategy with a high ROI.

All of these tactics are based on real-life cases and they are proven to deliver results. Time is money, so let’s not waste a minute more. Here we go!

1. Don’t skip the Welcome!

Тhe first thing you should do when you have a new subscriber on the list is send them a greeting message for joining you aboard. According to MarketingLand, this practice puts the foundation of a strong, warm and lasting customer-brand relationship. (Source)

2. Special offer right after sign up

Don’t delay sending an offer to your new subscribers! Adestra revealed that a coupon offer combined with the Welcome greeting generated 48% CTO rate and 25% higher opens than regular emails. These numbers were generated by a SpinLife campaign. The success of this tactic is due to the still fresh customer experience with the brand. (Source)

3. Personalization of a whole new level

People can smell a generic email from miles… and they don’t like it very much. Even throwing in their name is not merely enough to count for the personalization people expect. Set a goal to monitor the specific user experience with your website or service, as well as:

• who they are,
• where they are located,
• what their favorite products are, etc.

A case study by Adestra proved that high personalization can boost your campaign success like crazy. With whole 9 points of personalization, an innovative email template by Meteor generated 117% higher open rates than company’s regular newsletters. Impressive? We thought so, too. (Source)

4. Subject line length

Turns out, different subject line lengths lead to different effects. Buffer blog published an interesting revelation, claiming that you should craft your subject line depending on your campaign objective.

• Short

Write a short subject line (less than 60 characters) if your goal is your message to be read. Short subject lines, even one-word headlines such as “Hey!”, generated higher open rates.
The reason: It is easily digestible and/or it makes people curious of what the message is about.

• Long

On the other hand, subject lines longer than 70 characters perform better regarding click-through rates.
The reason: Longer subject lines are usually more descriptive, therefore people open them if they have interest in the particular subject. This is why such headlines lead to more conversions. (Source)

5. Subject line copy

A research shows that subject lines containing no offers generated higher open rates but lower conversions. However, these emails need to be relevant to the target audience and should prompt a broader range of actions.

On the other hand, offer-based subject lines such as discounts (% OFF) and free shipping report lower open rates but higher conversion rates. The reason behind it? Users who click on such headlines are already interested in purchasing. (Source)

6. Use segmentation

Segmentation can significantly boost your open and click-through rates, and it will also improve your sender reputation.

A case study by Adestra shows that an early bird offer for an event (a discount for early purchase), sent to a segmented group of recipients who expressed previous interest in this particular event and measured by related link clicks from previous campaigns, generated the impressive 74% opens and 86% clicks. These numbers were almost 5 times higher compared to a similar campaign conducted the previous year. (Source)

Learn more about Email list segmentation: Best practices for high open rate.

7. Nail the perfect timing

It’s not only about who you send your campaign to but also strategically send it at a time recipients are more likely to convert.

Adestra tells how The Daffodil Hotel & Spa nailed the perfect time to send their offer for luxury travel and booking – right after Christmas vacation. At this time of the year people look for something pleasurable to beat the post-holiday blues and this offer turned out to be a perfect solution. The campaign reported the impressive 2500% ROI. (Source)

What else matters is, in which day of the week and at what time of the day you send your email campaign. According to several researches, the best day of the week to send your email marketing campaign is Tuesday, and the best time of the day is around 3 P.M. (Source)

8. Say Yes to Animation

Using GIFs instead of a static template increases the click-through rate and the conversions.

This was the revelation made by Whittard and Adestra in a campaign for launching a new product. The A/B testing revealed that the animated version generated 28% more clicks which led to 20% more conversions. (Source)

Conclusion

The key to a successful email marketing campaign strategy is relevance. It all starts with getting to know your audience and offer them relevant content. This process is certainly time consuming, and yes, we already said that time is money. But we can all agree that great results require investment.

We would love to hear about your own experience. Wanna to also check out How to build successful email marketing in 10 steps?