Email is still one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your audience — and sometimes it’s even preferred — but when as marketers when we get down in the trenches of executing a powerful, record-busting show, the nitty gritty of an email campaign may, hmm, not be high up on that list.
Heidi recently attended ASAE’s Membership, Marketing & Communications Conference. Here are 11 email hacks she shared with the CSG team that’ll help you prioritize where it counts and send your emails in confidence:
1. Are you hyperlinking your logo and all primary links to your offer landing page?
If you’re hyperlinking to your homepage instead, you’re missing out on the chance to increase overall conversion rate by 55%.
2. If your email doesn’t have an offer, include at least 3 destination links.
These destination links get 52% of clicks.
3. Add a “list” email to your campaign.
List focused emails (ex. “10 Reasons to Attend XYZ Show”) have a 37% higher average open rate.
4. Are you personalizing with your contact’s proper name?
Garner up to a 19% increase in open rate by personalizing emails to your contacts by using first name only, with a capital letter. Make sure the name merges successfully though — unless you really do want to message %%NAME%% or ##first_name##!
5. Add “trigger” emails to your campaign.
Think about an email for cart abandonment, an upcoming birthday, signup, thanks for purchasing, or a follow up “win back” email after inactivity. Trigger emails enjoy an average open rate of 58% when sent no more than 3 hours after the goal action has happened.
6. No matter your business size, email campaigns with multiple touches perform better than a single send.
Small businesses (1–50 employees) should aim for 2 touches, which increases response rate over a single send by 44%. A 3-touch email campaign gives medium-sized companies (51–500 employees) a 59% increase in response rate, and finally, enterprise companies (501+ employees) can increase response rate by 73% with a 4-email campaign over a single email. We feel that these multi-offer emails would best be served for webinars or other products rather than events, but make sure to use the same offer throughout multi-touch email campaigns.
7. Including [brackets] or (parentheses) in the subject line boosts email opens by 19%.
8. When A/B testing, test with just 10% of your contacts, then roll out the winning offer to the rest.
If you split your list 50/50 with 50% receiving version A and the other 50% receiving version B, that means 50% will get the worse offer. Instead, send version A to just 5% of your list and send version B to another 5% of your list. With your your winning offer in hand, send that version to the remaining 90% of your list. Now 95% of your list enjoys the best offer. Most email systems should have systems in place to do this for you so it’s not a manual effort!
9. Don’t forget to A/B test your automated and transactional emails, too!
10. Are you using the same primary image on your landing page as in the originating email?
Good if you are — you might see up to a 27% increase in overall conversion.
11. Chunk your text!
Using over 75 words in a single paragraph to prospects drops overall click-through rate by 34%. Customers are more gracious — using over 100 words in a paragraph lowers click-through rate by 23%.
Need to go back to email basics? Read up here.
(Thanks to the “2 guys” for these great reminders and tips: Craig Wood, The Collaboratory and Jay Schwedelson, Worldata.)