Effective email marketing is about reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. Consumers who are most likely to purchase after receiving an email campaign are ready to make their final decision within only a few clicks and a few days.
Optimally targeting your email marketing campaigns, refining your content, and using testing and reporting tools is paramount to your success. Consider the following tips to ensure your email marketing counts:
1. Smart-target your campaigns. Behavioral targeting uses consumers’ demographics, as well as their online and offline history and purchase patterns, to predict things they might be interested in—even if they don’t know it yet.
What consumers say they want or what buckets they might fit into demographically aren’t always the same as what their behavior tells us. Smart-targeted campaigns build on an initial email to touch your customers continuously with additional information that is pertinent to their behaviors and wants.
2. Refine your content. The ideal amount of articles in an email newsletter is three or four, enough to vary content without over-saturating the reader or turning them off from reading more of your campaigns.
At the conclusion of every interesting email newsletter article, and any individual campaign, be sure to have a call-to-action that is worthwhile and highly visible. For example, add a link to your website with a strong verbal tag: “Click HERE to Print Your Coupon!”
Outsell found that the largest percentage of click activity leading to purchase comes from the clicks that happen within the first 11 days after receiving an email, and with a frequency of one to five clicks.
3. Implement testing and reporting practices. For any campaign type, A/B testing—comparing a control sample to other samples—is a proven email optimization strategy that can drastically improve open rates, click rates, the user experience, and, ultimately, sales. Having actionable reporting tools that allow you to see granular click activity is just as important.
You can then more effectively retarget campaigns to people who have clicked.
