25 email marketing tips to drive engagement rates and conversions
Want to create emails that convert? Read on.
It’s estimated that 4.03 billion people use email globally – over half the world’s population.
“There are three times more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter accounts combined,” explains Leah Miranda, senior email marketing manager at email marketing platform Campaign Monitor. “It’s easy to get caught up thinking about other, newer mediums for marketing, but email is regularly producing return on investment (ROI) as high as XX making it one of the most effective to put your marketing spend.”
While email marketing remains one of the most direct and cost-effective ways to talk to your audience, the way success is measured is in for a shake-up.
In the past, open rates have typically been the key indicator of success, with the average open rate for all industries sitting at 18 percent, according to Campaign Monitor’s 2021 benchmark report. Click-through rates are another often-quoted measurement (and are 2.6 percent across all industries on average).
A new way to measure email campaign success
However, a raft of privacy-focused changes, such as Apple’s recent Mail Privacy Protection Update (MPP), will soon make it harder for companies to view users’ IP addresses and track when emails are being opened.
So, what does that mean for retailers, brands and small businesses? Miranda says that while it might “sound scary – don’t worry, email’s not dead. Apple’s MPP update is just another opportunity to help us reframe how we think about email marketing.”
From now on, businesses need to start focusing on engagement – such as clicks to specific pages as well as conversions – rather than open rates.
Here are some email marketing tips on how to drive engagement – and conversions – direct from the experts:
Focus on your audience
“Ensure the content is customer-centric. This email is for them, not you, so deliver the content your customers want. In fact, I challenge you to surprise and delight your customers,” urges Miranda, who has learnt some useful email marketing tips during her time as Campaign Monitor.
This is true for Shenae Boorman, email coordinator at online cosmetics retailer Adore Beauty, who uses the email platform Emarsys. “Our customer is always front of mind when creating our email campaigns. We A/B test [see below] almost every single eDM (Electronic Direct Mail) campaign to ensure we are always learning and creating a meaningful, engaging customer experience.”
Ellie McDonald, head of social and email marketing at Are Media – Australia’s biggest magazine publishing business – agrees: “It’s critical to balance your intent and objectives with the user experience (UX) of the campaign itself.” She believes that “providing your subscriber with a bespoke content experience, personalized just for them, guarantees higher click-through rates.”
A/B test
“From my experience, you should never make assumptions about your audience and always A/B test before making an informed decision,” recommends Boorman.
A/B testing (once referred to as “split testing”) is when two – or sometimes more – variations of an email are shown to users at random to test which performs best. It’s one of the top ways to discover what works for your audience – and what doesn’t.
McDonald also regularly A/B tests, particularly subject lines, noting that “learning from the performance of myriad subject lines will set you up for success for campaigns to come.”
Write effective subject lines
“Fact: A subject line can make or break your campaign,” says McDonald, who names this among her chief email marketing tips. “Keep things short and simple yet descriptive – you can say a lot in just a few words! Take the time to finesse your subject line so it’s as informative as it is eye-catching. You need to motivate your subscriber to open your campaign above the rest of the emails they receive on a daily basis.”
Gregory Zakowicz, email marketing expert at online marketing platform Omnisend, agrees: “Surveys have shown that 47 percent of people open an email based on subject lines. This goes for your superfans, too. The average consumer receives around 115 emails per day, so you need to pique their interest.”
As part of her email marketing tips, Boorman recommends, Boorman recommends “utilizing pre-header space to include supporting messaging or create a sense of urgency. It’s also important to A/B test things like casing, emojis and personalization, and to make sure subject line length is checked across multiple devices.”
Do:
- Keep it short – between 6-10 words, or 28-50 characters
- Create a sense of urgency
- Use relevant keywords
Don’t:
- Use buzzwords
- Look spammy
- Be aggressive
- Mislead your reader
Send from a known sender
Given the Apple privacy changes, it’s even more crucial for email recipients to know who you are.
“Be a known sender through a ‘from’ name your subscribers will recognize” advises Miranda. Pro tip: “Take it a step further and implement Google’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) to help your subscribers see your logo in Gmail.”
To be a known sender, you need to authenticate your domain. If you use an email service provider, they’ll likely provide an authentication process for you – as Campaign Monitor does. If not, you may need some technical help to authenticate your email using either Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), or all three. Google Workspace Admin Help provides detailed setup steps; however, this can be a tricky process.
Don’t use ‘noreply’ email addresses
This is a straight forward email marketing tip, but one that cannot be underestimated. How would you feel if you were a valued customer receiving an email from “noreply”? Avoid “noreply” emails at all costs.
Optimize for mobile
“Make the email responsive,” instructs Zakowicz. “Ensure your email translates well, no matter what device is being used to view it.”
Miranda advises that the best way is to “create a mobile-first design to ensure your email looks great regardless of screen size. Balance your live text and images — aiming for a 60/40 split between your images and text. And don’t forget to add alt-text to your images to create a better experience if someone has their images turned off or they are using a screen-reader.”
Clear and clickable CTA
Zakowicz has a number of email marketing tips but stresses the need for a “clear call to action (CTA). Including too many CTAs is confusing. So is including nothing at all. [You need to] clearly direct subscribers where you want them to go with an easy-to-find CTA.”
“Optimize your emails to motivate your audience to click on [them],” advises Miranda. “Test button colors, placement and the number of clickable elements.”
Pro tip: keep your CTA between two to five words, using active language and strong verbs – “Learn more” or “Read now.”
Use buttons
Buttons are a top click-through driver, with Campaign Monitor reporting they can raise click-through rates by more than 25 percent.
At Are Media, buttons are a tactic McDonald employs. “[Let’s] say you want to drive subscribers to redeem an offer on your website. I would create a clear, purposefully positioned CTA button instructing the subscriber to click the button to redeem said offer,” she explains. “There’s no need for ‘fluff’ when it comes to building eDM campaigns.”
Set clear goals
“Businesses often ignore the strategy behind email and start sending out impersonal, unsegmented emails hoping it will work. So how do you build an effective strategy to grow your business or impress your boss?” asks Miranda.
“First and foremost, define the goals for your email marketing efforts. Are you looking to increase sales or brand awareness? Acquire new customers or build stronger relationships with existing customers?” queries Miranda. “You need to make sure your email marketing objectives are clear and actionable.”
From there, every email should have a clear goal. “At Adore,” explains Boorman, “it’s important for us to have a clear goal for each email campaign – whether that’s driving conversion for a specific category, creating awareness for newly onboarded brands or increasing traffic to our on-site content – as it’s essential in deciding which metrics to focus on and what type of content to include.”
McDonald emphasizes, “It’s important to be clear about what you’re trying to get across and why you’re creating an email campaign in the first place. Setting your intention and objective for an email campaign from the get-go will help you hone in. A short, to-the-point and objective-driven eDM will maximize your open, click and conversion rates. Because, if you think about it, if the intent of your email isn’t clear to you, it’s not going to be clear to your subscriber, either.”
Set a content hierarchy
“Create a visual hierarchy and sort your content,” instructs Miranda. “You can do this through colors, typographic hierarchy and white space, with dividing lines and colored backgrounds. Put your content in an inverted pyramid format, starting with the most important information. If you try to emphasize everything, you’ll end up emphasizing nothing.”
Be unique
“I always tell my teams that the combination of data and creative intuition drives successful marketing strategies,” explains McDonald, who provides her team with a booklet of email marketing tips when they start. While I lean heavily (and quickly!) on past performance data – focusing on patterns across open rates, click-rates, opt-outs, sign-ups and bounce rates – I believe unique, bespoke content experiences really elevate a campaign above the rest of the emails flooding a person’s inbox.”
Ensure your emails are branded
“Consistency is key. Hold fast to your brand guidelines. Your emails should be easily recognizable from your logo, fonts and colors,” advises Miranda.
Less is more – and length matters
People only skim emails – they aren’t there to read a novel. Make it sharp, engaging and straight to the point.
“Unless you’re running a long-form newsletter, your copy should be between 50 to 125 words. If you’re thinking that’s not enough, consider how long you spend reading a typical email, then apply that to your copy,” advises Miranda.
Segment your audience
Campaign Monitor reports that “marketers have noted a 760 percent increase in revenue from segmented campaigns.”
“Adopting segmentation is integral to producing a higher return on investment (ROI),” advises Zakowicz. “The options to segment are vast, from creating groups based on the subscriber’s geographic location or interests to their purchase behavior or engagement with your brand. Once segments are created and subscribers are assigned, your ability to send pertinent messages skyrockets.”
Segmentation is key for Adore Beauty, as Boorman explains. “As a pure-play retailer with a number of brands, categories and price points, segmentation is critical to us. We want to make sure we’re delivering relevant content to our customers’ inboxes to drive engagement and retention. By using customer data to drive our segmentation strategy, we’ve seen significant uplifts across open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.”
Segmentation examples:
- Email engagement – open or click-through rates
- Using past purchase history
- Content interests or brand preferences
- Stage of the sales funnel
- Weather or location – e.g., promote jackets an unusually cold day; summer sales earlier in warmer climates t ; spring outfits when the sun comes out
- Demographic information – e.g., age, gender, family status, occupation
McDonald advises, “Utilize subscriber segments strategically. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to speak to every single subscriber on your database. Depending on your sign-up data capture, you can tailor content based on a subscriber’s age, location, engagement rate and more. Creating a bespoke, tailored email experience for each subscriber will boost click rates.”
Personalize
Zakowicz stresses the importance of personalization. “There are times when the promotional email is suitable for everyone. But more often than not, emails tailored to a particular audience – such as a particular demographic or a group of customers with typically high average order values (AOVs) who haven’t purchased in a while – are more likely to engage. Research shows that 91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers.”
In fact, “63 percent of consumers expect personalization. Personalization can manifest through targeted promotional campaigns, such as an early autumn coat sale for subscribers living in colder areas , or a special gift for your most loyal customers,” he explains.
At Are Media, McDonald explains, “Personalizing content for each individual subscriber optimizes click rates exponentially. Make your subscriber feel like you’re speaking directly to them, through tactics such as using their first name in your subject line. Adding a personalization tag in the subject line boosts engagement, too.”
Using an email service provider (ESP), like Omnisend or Campaign Monitor, makes it easy to personalize emails.
Send a welcome email
Miranda explains that one of the common mistakes businesses make is “not sending welcome emails to new subscribers.”
“Your brand recognition will never be higher than at this exact moment, which is why welcome emails boast an impressive five times more clicks than regular email campaigns,” she explains. “Make the most of your welcome emails by creating specialized offers or setting expectations of what a subscriber can expect from your newsletter.”
Set up automated trigger emails
Your welcome email or “welcome series” should be set up as an automated “trigger” email.
“Marketers should prioritize automated messages (those immediately triggered by a user’s behavior, such as subscribing to the brand’s communications or abandoning a shopping cart),” explains Zakowicz.
“Automated emails show an even higher rate of return, with less work required than manually scheduled promotional campaigns. [Our] customers sent more than 10 billion emails during the first half of 2021, and conversion rates for promotional campaigns were 6.82 percent, while automated messages converted at 33.19 percent.”
Meaning “automations made up just 2.4 percent of sends but netted 32 percent of all email marketing orders,” emphasizes Zakowicz. “We can’t stress enough the immense power of workflows in addressing the customer at their point in the journey and thus driving sales.”
Effective automated trigger emails:
- Welcome series
- Abandoning cart series
- Reactivating inactive subscribers series
- Product refills series
At vintage clothing retailer Restated Vintage, customers are sent an automated “thank you” email featuring a photo of the team after every order. “Things like that make the brand very personable to people,” says founder Ben Randall.
Include value-adds
“To help separate yourself from the pack, highlight the additional value your company brings. Include features like free shipping, customer support details and extended return policies,” recommends Zakowicz when sharing ehr email marketing tips.
Manage your list
He also advises keeping “a clean list.” Remove hard bounces (email addresses that no longer exist) and unsubscribers (if it doesn’t occur automatically). Removing unsubscribers from your list ensures your metrics are more accurate, and not removing them to keep email list numbers up is pointless.
Zakowicz explains, “A high-quality subscriber list is important for keeping yourself off an email blacklist that blocks your messages. Since we can’t rid lists of non-openers anymore [due to privacy changes impacting the ability to see open rates], list-cleaning strategies should be formulated by analyzing other metrics that remain available, like click rates or purchase history.”
As Miranda reinforces when divulging her top email marketing tips, “While list size and growth are important, it’s best to focus on engagement. I’d rather have 500 engaged subscribers than 500,000 disengaged people on a list.”
Filter out inactive subscribers by sending re-engagement emails with a special offer to pique their interest. If that fails, consider simply asking whether they still want to hear from you.
Don’t buy lists
“There is not enough space for me to list why this is such a bad idea,” says Miranda. “Grow your lists organically or through paid ads, because at the end of the day, you want people in your database that actually want to hear from you.”
Invest in an email service tool
“Using an ESP , like Campaign Monitor, is the best way to get the most out of email marketing” advises Miranda. “From beautiful email templates to easy-but-powerful email automation journeys and advanced campaign reporting, Campaign Monitor gives marketers everything they need to start sending engaging, personalized emails that get results.”
Utilize analytics
She also advises using “tools like Google Analytics to track how many people are going to your site from your campaigns.”
Google Analytics is free and an easy way to expertly track your click-throughs and the website traffic generated from your email campaigns.
Implement a double opt-in and preferences center
Having a double opt-in will keep your data cleaner and improve delivery rates as you avoid adding inactive or incorrect email addresses to your list.
Pairing it with a preference center at the start of the funnel will enable you to segment more effectively immediately. Alternatively, you can offer preferences as an alternative option to unsubscribing.
Build an informed contact strategy
“Create a comprehensive contact plan to help you determine the who, what, where and when of your email strategy,” recommends Miranda. “Map out the full subscriber journey, beginning with the top of your funnel, keeping in mind you’ll probably have several different funnels for different types of customers or subscribers.”
The right email frequency is an important part of increasing and maintaining engagement, too, as is choosing the right day and time.
“It’s important to take into consideration the long-term impacts of a high-frequency email calendar,” recommends Boorman. “At Adore, we’ve found it invaluable to utilize segmentation, audience testing and refining our contact strategy to find the sweet spot for our customer database.”
However, Zakowicz reminds us that “since email is opt-in, you know you’re reaching someone who wants to hear from you, and quite regularly. More than three-quarters of subscribers want to hear from a brand at least once a week, while 51.9 percent prefer greater email frequency.”
Test your emails
It may sound like a basic email marketing tip, but nothing deters readers more than a broken link when they want to click. Similarly, typos and mistakes distract readers. Proofread and test each email to ensure it’s responsive, that your subject line fits, that spelling and grammar are correct and that all links are working.
You can also send a test email to free platforms, like mail-tester.com, which offer feedback on factors such as readability, image-to-text ratios and the likelihood that an email will get caught in spam filters.
As McDonald says, “creating a successful email campaign truly is an art.” But if you can get it right, the benefits are endless – after all, there are over 4 billion people waiting to subscribe!
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