5 Ways to Optimize Your Email Campaign

These days most email marketing solutions come equipped with a campaign builder that helps you put your email message together from start to finish. This of course takes a lot of the hard work out of the equation and is particularly useful if you are new to email marketing and still learning the ins and outs. While an email marketing service can do a very good job of creating a beautiful looking campaign, what it can’t do is optimize it for you.

Optimizing your email is one of the best ways to increase conversions, traffic and interest and you should look to optimize each new campaign that you send out. Look at it as refining your campaign sending process and continuously assess and make small, yet valuable improvements that will drive even better results with each new email.

We’ve outlined 5 ways that you can optimize your email campaign to help ensure that you reach those desired results.

1. Start with your ‘subject’ and ‘from’ line

A subject line should immediately capture your reader’s attention, and your from line needs to come from an existing, valid email address that can easily be identified by the recipient. You should aim to personalise each of these lines. With the subject line, you can include the person’s name and you should specify clearly what the reader can expect when they open your email, preferably in less than 50 characters.

Creating an effective subject line is actually quite an art and there is a fine balance between choosing SPAM safe trigger words and those words causing your email to land up in the junk/spam folder. With the from line, you should include your name or the name of your company or both even. If people recognise or are familiar with who is sending the email, they are more likely to trust it and open your message.

2. Keep your copy relevant, succinct and punchy

Just because this forms the main part of your message, it’s no reason to go overboard with overly long, stuffed to the brim content. Ideally, aim to include all vital information on a single screen above the fold and keep the purpose of your email in mind. Are you offering, promoting, selling or getting people to sign up? Make sure whatever your goal is that your content reflects that.

Your copy needs to be relevant, valuable, short and succinct. You’ll also want to make sure that it’s easy to scan so use bullet points if necessary and avoid overly sophisticated language. Now is not the time to try and impress them with your lexical range. If you do have a lot of information to convey, rather create a link to your website or landing page so that your subscribers can read more about your company or offer there.

3. Make sure your landing page takes readers exactly where they need to be

If your subscribers have just clicked on a ‘sign up here’ button, then the button should link them directly to the sign-up page on your website, not just to your home page. Sending subscribers to generic pages on your website can lead them to become distracted and exit without taking the desired action you need. Studies have shown that if a headline directly reflects on the landing page, it leads to a favourable boost in conversions.

4. A strong, clear call to action

It might seem like an obvious point, but is your call to action clear, bold and easy to locate on the page? You can test different placements and have this button at the bottom, middle or top of the page and see which results in a higher CTR. Join Now, Sign Up Here, Call Us, Email Us – your call to action needs to be short, sweet, easily understood and quick to locate.

5. Graphics and images add value to an email

Now that your reader has been tempted to open your email after reading the hard to resist subject line, don’t bore them to death with overly text-heavy copy. Short paragraphs interspersed with clever, relevant images add to the value of your message and can elicit emotional and psychological responses that complement your email and keep your readers interested.

Having said that, ensure that your pictures have been compressed and resized for email and that they load fast. Also, don’t assume that everyone is on broadband and take into consideration the fact that some of your recipients might choose to open their emails on mobile devices - iPhones, Blackberry and Android to name a few. To be on the safe side, use alt text to describe an image, in case it doesn’t load. You won’t gain any friends with an email that takes 10 minutes to open correctly and there aren’t many second chances in the email marketing game.

Once you have optimised your email along the lines of the suggestions mentioned, it’s important that you start doing extensive split A/B testing, which can be conducted on every component of your email.

Testing your newsletter has many benefits and will, amongst other things;

• Determine which email version is the most user friendly and accurately meet your subscribers' needs and expectations
• Improves the overall performance of your campaign in terms of opens, clicks, conversions and sales

In conclusion, remember that optimization doesn’t finish once you have sent out your campaign. You need to constantly assess your results, see what’s working and what can be improved on. You’ll soon find that the more you polish your campaigns, the more positive results you can expect to get.