Why Improve Email Marketing? To Boost Engagement and Drive Conversions

Email marketing is a powerful and cost-effective strategy that allows businesses to effectively connect with and engage their customers. By implementing a well-crafted email campaign, businesses can effectively promote their products and services, provide valuable information to their customers, and foster customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to recognize the immense benefits that email marketing can provide.

Common Email Marketing Challenges

If you're looking for ways to improve your email marketing efforts, chances are that what you're doing isn't working. So, before we jump into our best tips and tricks, let's review some of the most common email marketing challenges:

1. Low open and click-through rates

This is one of the most common challenges faced in email marketing and is often due to something as simple as weak subject lines, irrelevant content, or a lack of personalization.

2. High unsubscribe rates

A high unsubscribe rate may indicate that recipients aren't interested in the content of your emails or that they're receiving too many. 

3. Difficulty in measuring ROI

Email marketing can be challenging to measure and track your return on investment–without the right tools. As such, it can be challenging to justify the cost or effort of your email marketing campaign. 

4. Email deliverability

This is the ability of an email to reach the recipient's inbox. Often, emails are marked as spam or rejected by an email provider, making it difficult for businesses to reach their target audience. 

5. Email fatigue

If you're overwhelming your recipients with too many emails, they may start to delete or ignore them, decreasing open and click-through rates. 

Once you understand these challenges, it's time to take your email marketing campaign to the next level. Here's how:

Tips and Tricks to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaign

1. Segment and Personalize Emails

Segmenting email lists allows businesses to target specific groups of customers with relevant and personalized content. By segmenting email lists, companies can increase open and click-through rates, ultimately driving more conversions. This is because the more personalized content, such as an email, is to users, the more likely it will interest and resonate with them, making them more inclined to engage. 

Some beneficial ways of segmenting your audience include:

• Demographics: Segment email lists based on age, gender, location, or income

• Behaviors: Segment email lists based on purchase history, website behavior, or engagement with previous emails

• Preferences: Segment email lists based on product interests, content preferences, or frequency of email communications

Some simple ways to personalize your emails include:

• Dynamic Content: Personalize emails with relevant images, product recommendations, and special offers

• Subject Lines: Personalize subject lines with the recipient's name or other relevant information

• Calls to Action: Personalize CTAs with relevant offers and incentives

2. Create Engaging Email Content

Often, the success of an email campaign depends on the ability to communicate a clear and compelling message to recipients. A well-written and engaging email can increase the chance of your recipient taking the desired action–whether opening the email, clicking a link, or making a purchase. 

To write engaging email copy, it's best to:

• Keep your subject line short and simple

• Use a clear and compelling headline

• Use a conversational tone and avoid industry jargon

• Make the email easy to scan by using headings, bullet points, and images

• Include a clear CTA

• Make the content relevant and personalize your content to resonate with your target recipient/buyer persona.

In addition to copy, design is a critical component of an effective email:

• Use consistent design and branding

• Use images and graphics to break up text

• Use clear and easy-to-read fonts and colors

• Make the email (and your website) mobile-friendly

• Use a consistent CTA throughout the email

3. Automate and Test Emails

Automation and testing are crucial to simplifying the email campaign processes and ensuring your efforts are working. To automate your email campaign, it's beneficial to use tools such as HubSpot or Mailchimp. These can help you quickly develop email workflows to segmented lists with little effort from your internal team. This will help trigger personalized emails based on recipient actions. 

Testing various aspects of your emails is also helpful in determining which methods, styles, and formats your recipients favor. A/B Testing enables businesses to send different versions of an email to a sample of their list to determine which performs best. 

Testing tips and tricks:

• Test different subject lines, email designs, and CTAs;

• Test different send times and days;

• Test various personalization elements like the recipient's name in the subject line versus the email body;

• Use tools such as HubSpot Reports or Google Analytics to track the performance of your email campaigns; and

• Use heatmap and scroll map tools to determine how recipients interact with your emails.

Is your email health on track?

4. Measure and Improve Email Performance

As you begin to send and test your emails, measuring email performance is vital to improving it continuously. After all, that's how you discover which methods are working and which need adjusting. But, before measuring email performance, you need to determine what to measure. 

Here are some best-practice metrics to keep an eye on:

• Open rate: The percentage of recipients who opened the email
• Poor: <20%
• Good: >30%
• Excellent: >40%
  
  
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked a link in the email
• Poor: <2%
• Good: >5%
• Excellent: >8%
  
  
• Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that were undeliverable and returned to sender
• Poor: >2%
• Good: <2%
• Excellent: <1%
  
  
• Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who completed a desired action
• Poor: <2%
• Good: >2%
• Excellent: >5%
  
  

Tips for analyzing data:

• Use a dashboard or reporting tool such as HubSpot to view your metrics in a centralized location
• Use segmentation to analyze the performance of different segments of your list
• Compare your metrics to industry averages
• Use data visualization tools to understand your data and identify patterns

Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level

Email marketing is an excellent way to connect with your target audience and invite them to take action–but it can be a fickle process. For your email marketing campaign to be effective, your emails must engage users correctly. By following these tips and tricks, you can improve your email marketing efforts in small ways–with a significant impact. 

Our most recommended best practices include personalizing your email list, creating engaging content, automating and testing emails, and measuring their performance. By implementing these simple changes, you can significantly increase the results of your emails and supercharge your email marketing efforts.