7 High-Impact Hacks to Get More from Your Email Campaign

This article was last updated on September 1, 2020

Part of creating the perfect creative content marketing plan involves analyzing trends and embarking on an email campaign that guarantees your brand will be on the forefront of your audience’s mind. When snail mail was the norm, receiving a single email used to send a surge of adrenaline through our bodies. Nowadays, the opposite holds true; we get so many emails that we’ve become desensitized to them and have come to dread the ping! That announces a new one. This is why you need to stand out from the rest by following these 7 high-impact hacks to get the most from your email campaign.

1. Make Your Subject and Opening Line Count

Your subject line is your email’s headline and your opening line is the attention-grabber. More often than not, browsers display both the subject and opening line at the same time, and combined will determine whether your email will be opened or completely ignored, destined to join the pile of unopened emails that eventually get deleted in one fell swoop when the clutter becomes too much.

It’s also important to address common issues your audience may be encountering and to use power words that will grab and retain attention. As Neil Patel says, if your subject line is uninteresting, uninspiring, or mediocre, your email is likely to get passed over. Also, if it gives off a spammy—used car salesman—kind of vibe, it’s probably going in the trash.

One final note, A/B testing is vital to crafting the perfect subject and opening line, just make sure to leave the body as-is — the focus here is on what your audience will see first — and track metrics like open and click-through rates to see what works best with different groups (this will be useful with segmentation).

2. Segment Your Audience

On the topic of segmentation, always segment your audience to ensure greater success. This can be by industry, business size, location, interests — anything. Segmentation works because it makes your emails much more targeted, improving open and click-through rates, and, as MailChimp found, segmented campaigns led to 14.31% higher opens, 100.95% higher clicks, 4.65% lower bounces, and 9.37% lower unsubscribes than non-segmented campaigns.

It all comes down to the fact that your buyers aren’t all the same; they have alternating problems and needs, and while a cookie cutter approach may work for some, it definitely won’t work for all. Learn more about how to segment your email list.

3. Personalize Your Message

Just as segmentation improves your email marketing campaigns metrics, personalizing your message does the same. In fact, personalized emails deliver 6X higher transaction rates than their non-personalized counterparts.

Not to be confused with personal emails, personalization entails personalizing emails with customer data such as browsing and purchasing history. For example, instead of using Dear valued customer, use Dear Matthew; instead of suggesting the same product/service to everyone, suggest something similar to what they’ve previously bought or searched for. In other words, why suggest X when your audience has previously searched for Y?

4. Optimize for All Devices

We live in a mobile-first world and just like pairing your website with a responsive design, your emails should be catered for all users. People are always on their phones, and chances are good they’ll use them to check their emails. What do you usually do when you wake up? If you’re like most, you probably reach over, grab your phone, and catch up on anything you missed while you slept. As it happens to be, one of these things is email, and you definitely want to be on your audience’s mind from the beginning of their day.

Specific to email, use a responsive email design that ensures high user experience across all devices, and don’t forget to keep subject lines on the shorter end so that they can be viewed on smaller screens. You want your content to be digestible on every device, especially mobile. Remember, if your audience can’t open your emails, or if they can but can’t see them properly because they’re meant for desktops, they’ll either completely ignore it or be frustrated and click out.

5. Utilize Rich Text

Utilize rich text in your emails if you want to highlight something, add emphasis to something else, and so on. The truth is that plain text is boring and your point may be lost in a sea of monotony. By including bold, italics, underlining, different sized fonts and different colors, you can rest assured knowing your main points will take the lead and rise above the rest of the text.

6. Test Everything

When it comes to creating a creative content marketing plan, email marketing included, you always have to test everything. Like we talked about earlier on the subject of A/B testing your subject and opening line, testing everything else will improve your overall email marketing efforts. The goal is to create an email that comes with high open rates, high click-throughs, and high conversions, and the only way to do this is to test varying formats and options to see what works and what doesn’t.

7. Put Yourself in Your Recipient’s Shoes

Finally and before you click send, put yourself in your recipient’s shoes and look at your email from their perspective. For example, make sure that:

• All links are clickable and are working properly;
• All landing pages are setup and working properly;
• All photos are rendering properly;
• All videos can be played;
• There are no spelling and grammar mistakes.

And as we covered earlier, make doubly sure that mobile users have the same experience as desktop users.

Let’s Take a Second Look at What We Covered Today

There are specifics to creating a content marketing plan specific to email. What works for social media may not work for email, and vice versa, so you always have to craft your email campaigns carefully. Here’s what we covered today, AKA 7 hacks to get the most out of your email campaigns:

1. Make Your Subject and Opening Line Count
2. Segment Your Audience
3. Personalize Your Message
4. Optimize for All Devices
5. Utilize Rich Text
6. Test Everything
7. Put Yourself in Your Recipient’s Shoes

Best of luck!

About the author:

Matthew is a content writer for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency based in New York City that specializes in content marketing. While writing on a variety of topics that range from mobile SEO to web development, Matthew’s niche is in creating the perfect content marketing plan.