Why isn’t my Email Marketing Working?
5 Tips that will improve your email marketing campaigns
Was it Actually so Bad?
First up, congratulations for selecting the most cost effective digital marketing strategy there is — email marketing.
Since you’re reading this, it appears you have been disappointed with the results you have achieved. Let’s first quickly sanity check if your results are actually that bad.
For email campaigns that are targeting new leads, i.e. people who have likely never received an email from you before, here are some averages, taken from a case study you can find here:
- Bounces and Unsubscribes: 5% to 10%
- Open rate: 10% to 15%
- Click rate: 15% to 30%
- Call To Action clicks: 80% of all clicks
- Complete the action: 50%
This translates 1,000 total emails to:
• 90 to 142 Opened
• 13 to 42 Click on any link
• 10 to 33 Click on your main CTA
• 5 to 17 Make it all the way through and complete your registration or sign up process.
If you were at the low end of these averages, or did significantly worse than this, then read on.
Improving Email Marketing Campaign Performance
The five metrics listed above are the key to improving your email marketing campaign that is not currently working. Let’s take each in turn.
1. Bounces, Spam and Unsubscribes
Email bounces are inevitable, people get fired, move job, retire and so on — these are “hard bounces”. Good list hygiene means regularly cleaning your list to delete bounces. Many email providers will allow a few so called “soft bounces”, these are deemed not terminal, but in my experience they almost always are and so the safest way is to remove all bounces, hard and soft. Yes your audience is going down, but these emails were low quality anyway.
Included in this section is the dreaded “S” word — Spam. Spam filtering can be very aggressive and sometimes, it is just not possible to send emails to certain domains / companies during an email campaign. Check your message against lists of known spam trigger words, such as this one from snov.io. Removing these will help deliverability.
Next are unsubscribes. These simply need actioning. In many cases you are under a legal duty to remove unsubscribe requests within a reasonable time. Again, there is no point delaying, remove them immediately.
TIP: If you are buying email list data, ask about the level of bounces to expect and what compensation is available.
2. Improving Email Open Rates
Once your email is sent to a good email address, the next step is to get them to open it. There are three points to consider here, in order of importance:
1. The Subject line
2. The From email address
3. Email preview text
The Subject line
Keep it short and to the point! As you can see above, some of the Subject lines are truncated and this is especially true on mobile devices. Research shows that the first three words are usually read, so make sure your critical keywords are at the start and try and limit to about 40 total characters.
There are some proven types of Subject Lines that work it’s a great idea to experiment with them using “A/B Testing”.
Curiosity: “Revealed, 5 tips to improve your email marketing”
Question: “Know the biggest email mistake?
How to: “How to run your best email campaign“
Surprise: “Email campaigns — less gets you more”
Numbers: “5 Tips to improve email campaigns”
A/B Testing is used to test two variations of a message. We always recommend you do this, often it is free. In the examples above, you could test the ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Question’ subject lines types for example, or even two different questions.
TIP: A/B test for every mailing of sufficient size (over 1000 emails).
The From Address
Next in the list to improve open rates is the From address. Usually it is best to reference your company, but testing has shown that a person’s name is also good to boost open rates.
• Jenny McCloud — ok only if the recipient knows Jenny
• Jenny from Red Squirrel
• Red Squirrel Inc. — ok, but less personal
Think about the from label, it can be anything, so make it count. They could well be the first words your audience reads.
The Preview Text
This should be regarded as an extension of the subject line and flow on from that. It is the least important of the three, but mistakes here can look silly. Consider:
Jenny from Red Squirrel
Know the Biggest email mistake?
Click here to open in a browser
Or
Jenny from Red Squirrel
Know the Biggest email mistake?
Hi Sarah, See our 5 tips to improve your email…
TIP: Test, Test, Test! Both to yourself in multiple inboxes and then A/B test to your audience.
3. Improving Email Click Through Rates
By this stage, we have lost perhaps 85% of an audience, so getting what is left to click is super important. Contacts who open the email are clearly somewhat interested to learn more, which is a great start.
Attention grabbing start
Research has shown that your audience will read for between 5 to 10 seconds, typically skipping over large blocks of text and picking out on keywords of interest. What does this mean?
• Start strong, nailing the core purpose of the message and the reason to continue reading.
• No large multi-sentence paragraphs
• Bullet point lists containing important keywords
• Talk about the benefits they will see
• Avoid talking about your own company, history and background. These can likely be found on your website for those interested enough.
Keywords are the critical point in the message. You should know your audience and their hot buttons, so talk to them.
People respond best to emotional messages rather than bland corporate statements, so elicit excitement, intrigue, curiosity or even fear (of missing out). More generic keywords that work are
• Special offers
• Trials
• Discounts
• Time limited offers
However — as mentioned above, check your text against spam words.
To end the email, sign off as you would a personal email. If the email can be from an actual person, great, if not, then a team or function can work well.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards
Jenny McCloud
Jenny@redsquirrel_Inc.net
Or
We welcome your comments and feedback
The Marketing Team
Marketing@redsquirrel_Inc.net
TIP: If possible, personalize — Hi Faye…
4. Improving Call to Action Rates
A clear Call to Action (CTA) is critical. Do not be tempted to pack in lots of other related links, upselling other things can wait for later. Your message should be about one thing and have one, clear CTA button that is very obvious.
Too much choice can be paralyzing, so if you have multiple items to sell in a single message, just make sure the main CTA is much clearer and obvious than other links.
The CTA label is very important. Just “Click here” is lazy and converts poorly. “Request your trial here”, “Download the presentation”, are better as they tell the reader what to expect.
Keep the text short, ideally 3 or 4 words.
Positioning of the CTA is also important. It should be visible “above the fold”, i.e. without the need to scroll the email. For longer emails, repeating the same CTA lower down makes sense, to make it easier to click.
Testing CTA button styles is something high performing email marketing teams do. Different colors, shapes and text styles can all be A/B tested and can make a difference.
TIP: Make sure your CTA is totally obvious when the email is first opened
5. Completing the Call to Action
Given that to get this far, you may have already lost up to 99% or your audience, making it easy to complete the call to action is a no-brainer! Too often I see landing pages that are overly complex. Keeping it as simple as possible is the guiding principle. No one likes having to fill in a large form, just to get to a download or other freebie.
Hiding main menus can help people stay focused on the page. Once the CTA is complete, the user can be taken to the website proper. Here are some interesting examples:
Bills.com collect a single piece of information that is critical to them, before taking the user to the next step. Each step collects more information and gives back benefit clues to the user.
This works well because it is so simple.
Zillow.com present an attractive page, again asking for one piece of information to start the onboarding process.
Everyone wants to know what their home is worth! Great simple interface converts well.
The Impact page requires five fields to be filled out immediately. The page is quite text heavy too, however it depends how people arrive here.
If it is via an email campaign, they will likely already have read some text and this could be annoying.
If the landing page was arrived at directly from a google search, then the text is needed.
Either way, the page is clean and well presented, another good example.
TIP: Collect the minimum information you need on a clean single landing page.
5 Tips that will improve your email campaigns
1. Email Data: Always use high quality, cleaned email lists, your own or from specialist third party with bounce guarantees
2. Open Rates: Test Subject lines every time and keep them short
3. Click Rates: Engage your reader emotionally from the first sentence.
4. Call to action clicks: Keep the CTA clear, with a clean design and obvious what the action is.
5. Converting the CTA: Simple landing pages that ask for minimal information perform best.
Good luck with your next email campaigns and keep testing!
PS, Please check out my KISS medium post, that will give you some more great tips to improve your email marketing performance.
