Editor’s Note: The following article is a guest post submitted by Rohan Ayyar of E2M and Moveo Apps.
Good email marketing is like a true friend – it meets you often, listens to what you have to say, keeps channels of communication open, offers strong support, and loves you enough to keep in touch with you no matter what you think. Sometimes, it stays on with you even if you don’t want it (with emotional bye-bye messages that make you feel guilty about unsubscribing).
No other digital marketing channel can do for marketers what email does.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has an ROI of about 4200%. And that’s not the only thing it offers: It’s a direct line to customers (who, after all these years, are still open to receiving your messages), it’s based on permission marketing (customers opt-in only when they like your brand), and it’s the surest way to nurture your leads effectively, non-intrusively, and for as long as you can.
Effective email marketing depends on painstakingly-built subscriber lists. Trust, authority, and branding go a long way to make that list grow with time. Organizations that depend on email marketing swear by the results of their efforts.
Effective as it is, email promotion requires continual testing of new design and copy approaches. Here are a few companies that made small tweaks to their email marketing efforts and reaped exponential benefits.
Mailchimp: Leading By Example
Mailchimp, an email service provider, recently launched its “Automation” feature. In an attempt to perfect their automation recipe, they tweaked various aspects of their campaigns including segmentation, timing, and content.
Here are the results:
The average open rate for the Technology niche hoversaround 20%. For automated emails, you can expect that to be lower. But MailChimp doubled those rates.
Campaign Monitor: Positive Copy Boosts CTR
Campaign Monitor, another email service provider, experimented with an A/B test on their campaigns with an aim to improve click-through rates.
In one of the versions, they experimented with positive language, using words and phrases like “intelligent people,” “learn a whole set of new tools,” ”exciting” and “new.” The version B, meanwhile, had negative words within the email.
This simple tweak of changing the copy to highlight the positive did the trick, boosting CTR by 22%.
Who knew, right?
Betabrand: Doing Excess Right
Is too much of anything is bad? Can you overdo everything you knew about email marketing and still get it right? Betabrand seems to have done just that.
Crazy emails, long-winded stories, specials, gifts, big sales, and happy announcements – they are all a part of Betabrand’s insane email campaigns.
According to MailChimp, this idiosyncratic email technique is working wonders for the company. They send out spam-loads of emails, they push their subscribers to “opt-out” when the time is right, and despite that, they have all this powerful data coming in strong.
Betabrand is a company that seems to have backed their decision making on data. No matter how crazy it might seem. The team looks at open rates, conversion rates, clicks through rates, and determines the quantity, content, and best times to send emails.
Boloco: Making Food Worth It, Across Devices
Boloco, an East Coast burrito chain, makes sure its emails look good on all types of screens. That’s vital nowadays when more than 43 percent of all emails are read on smartphones and tablets.
To do that, Boloco keeps it simple. They use a single column design, a singular call-to-action, and present information according to pre-decided priorities. And they keep doing that. Over and over again.
Litmus: Show Before You Ask
Litmus specializes in testing emails across browsers and mobile devices. It’s critical for marketers to know how their emails look on all those different inboxes, browsers, monitors, and mobile devices.
How Litmus captures email addresses isn’t very well known.
Instead of just asking for an email address, they showcase their previous email campaigns. Based on how these emails were designed and the content within, new subscribers choose to opt-in.
Small tweak, sustainable results.
Amazon: The Undisputed King of Personalization
Everyone wants to send emails the way Amazon does. The ecommerce behemoth works hard and smart to make sure its email marketing delivers superb results. Amazon’s emails are powered by automation, careful personalization, and effective delivery of content and offers eerily relevant products to customers.
But even Amazon gets it wrong once in a while. According to Kevan Lee of Buffer, Amazon didn’t bother to check if Kevan’s name was capitalized correctly in this email he received. Personalization can be effective – but only if you don’t screw up.
With more than a billion emails doing the rounds and customers constantly fighting email fatigue, attention to detail goes a long way towards making the right impression, standing up for the brand, and generating results.
Tools for Effective Email Marketing
Email marketing is a proven effective marketing method to nurture, stay in touch, keep your content relevant, and make users come back to buy when they’re ready.
Some very simple but effective tools are available to help you get the best out of email:
- Ambassador helps in brand advocacy and enables referral tracking with automated email campaigns. You can customize newsletters, set up auto-responders and triggered emails, and schedule these to be sent using your favorite email service.
- With Gmail now sporting a visual “Grid View,” images just became the future mainstay of email content. Help yourself to free photo resources such as IM Free, Picjumbo and Pixabay and online graphic design programs like Canva to spice up your email design and UX.
- Email is not just for your customers. We’re all heavily dependent on email for in-house communication. Grexit is a refreshingly simple add-on for Google Apps that allows you to collaborate on email (Gmail and Outlook), manage tasks with shared labels, and build a company knowledge repository.
How are you working on your email strategy? Let us know by commenting below.
Rohan Ayyar is a project manager at E2M solutions, a digital marketing firm.
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