Four ways to improve your email marketing

Email marketing has remained our industry’s trojan horse. Once again, the humble email continues to be a tried and tested strategy for brand engagement and conversion.

In fact, in Shopify’s recent Cyber Weekend study, email conversion rate outperformed all other marketing channels. Understanding and utilising the power of email marketing could be your key to success in this final quarter of the financial year.

Here are our top four tips to enhance your email marketing strategy heading into Q4 of 2022.

How to level up your email marketing

1. Understanding the impacts of software updates

   The most recent iOS15 privacy features on AppleMail have altered the metric available to track and report the performance of email assets. In updating the features available for Apple users, they have impacted marketers ability to track email open rates and gain accurate metrics as to how an asset performed.

   As of 2021, iOS held a 55.86% share of the mobile operating system market in Australia and 22% worldwide.

   Through Apple’s masking of IP addresses and blocking third party open tracking, open rates are no longer the convenient snapshot of EDM performance. Mail protection privacy settings in use now serve to register any email received as ‘open’, inaccurately inflating open rates.  In navigating these changes, other metrics need to be leveraged to determine performance and engagement.

   This marks an opportunity for marketers to evolve their content for a landscape where privacy is priority, understanding engagement and performance through other means. Open rates once reflected the success of the email’s subject line and preview text. Now, pivoting to focus tracking on click rates can serve to reflect asset engagement. Clicks and click-through provide better insights on how many or how often email readers are engaged with, and have clicked on your content.

   Beyond the reporting stage, Apple’s updates force us to reconsider the customer experience, and expand how marketers can build trusted relationships with their audiences to create engaging assets.

2. Ensure you have an easy and attractive way for people to sign up to your newsletter

   List growth is more important than ever to ensure you’re not fatiguing your audience. It’s an opportunity to diversify your audience and enrich brand awareness and nurture.

   List building requires you to attract more subscribers to your emails. By having multiple touchpoints throughout the customer experience prompting email sign up, marketers can successfully leveredge a diverse email marketing list. Understanding how your brand is experienced across channels can help you determine where to place sign up points and attract subscribers.

   We recommend implementing call to action buttons on every landing page of your website, thereby making subscribing convenient and efficient. Moreover, employing pop-ups on your website prompting sign up is also really effective.

   Ultimately, to attract more audience members to join your list, it’s vital to have an understanding of why someone should subscribe. This can range from exclusive discounts or access to educational newsletters. Your social media can be an effective way to attract new list members, and highlight what your email assets offer.

   As we already know, our world is becoming increasingly concerned with privacy. You can assume the audience you’re trying to reach has experienced their fair share of spam emails, and inbox overload. Positioning your email assets as relevant, beneficial and considered can help build trust and connection between your brand and your audience.

3. Realise the importance of segments and leverage your customer data

   Managing and utilising your email list through effectual segmentation can serve to boost your email performance and create a more personalised customer experience. Email marketing softwares provides you with a gold mine of customer data, waiting to be leveraged to streamline your marketing assets.

   It comes down to the classic difference between quality over quantity.

   A ‘batch blast’, to send generic assets out to the largest subscriber list, can often seem like the most sure path to success. In doing so, marketers are denying the opportunity to have meaningful and relevant conversations with customers at individual points of the customer journey. Email marketing success stems from showing the customer the content they want to see based on their behaviour. Emails sent to the wrong customers, at the wrong time, can lead to high unsubscribe rates, low engagement and a loss in revenue.

   Personalising and segmenting your subscriber base with customised criterias, lets you deliver more relevant emails to subscribers. These customised criterias can employ and intersect factors from the customer’s geographical location and interests to purchase history and much more. 70% of email marketing ROI comes from effective segmented campaigns and flows, rather than Batch Blast sends. It is the experience audiences have adapted to expect from their email subscriptions, with 80% of subscribers preferring a personalised email experience.

   Using audience segmentation to implement targeted email marketing is a sure fire way to personalise your customer experience, increase engagement and ultimately, make more revenue.

4. Clean your lists! It’s more important than ever to make sure you are keeping an engaged and healthy list

   Maintaining and managing your lists can serve to enhance all of the above tips. List cleaning ensures the health of your engagement rates, and ensures your email assets are being sent to customers engaged and interested in your brand.

   Based on most industry benchmarks, the average email open rate is only 20%, with four out of every five emails not being opened. Whilst reviewing your content itself can often be intuitive, it’s important to put yourself in your subscriber’s shoes.

   A simple way to keep an engaged list is to create a ‘list cleaning’ dynamic segment. This means audience members unengaged with your brand or dormant accounts are not disrupting your engagement rates and undermining your deliverability. Low rates of engagement can impact the deliverability of your email assets and overall health of your account.

   By cleaning your list and being selective about an email’s audience, you’ll not only stop harassing the never-openers, you’ll support loyal readers by keeping your emails out of spam folders. In the long run, this can reduce software subscription costs which are most often determined by audience size and improve your email marketing’s long term health and success. By breaking your customers into personalised segments and actually automating the process, your lists will always stay clean.

An evolving beast

To harness the true power of email marketing, personalised and considered tactics are required to evolve and adapt to the constantly changing consumer market. These four tips are a good start, but continual learning and experimentation is needed when it comes to understanding how email marketing can be your secret weapon to nurturing your audience, and further, generating more revenue.

Lifecycle marketing really is for life not just for seasonal projects.