Written By:
Peter Ghali, iContact Senior Manager of Product Management
Email marketing has evolved from its early days, when terms like “email blast” or “spray and pray” were commonly used to describe email marketing. Back then, it was all about sending the most emails, regardless of how engaged your audience was with your email. Nowadays, email marketers have gotten much better at assessing how engaging their emails are in order to drive great results.
Tip #1: Experiment with your content
Think about your personal email. It is typically sent to a single person or to a small audience that knows you. As a result, it is more likely to be opened and acted upon by everyone you sent it to. Recipients identify the email by the From name and email address. With email inboxes getting cluttered with so many emails, the only way to get read is to have a From name, From email address, or email subject line that gets noticed.
Once you’ve settled on the right From name and email address, you should start testing to determine what works best for your audience. There is no such thing as the perfect time or perfect layout, so testing what content resonates with your audience is important. There are several content items you can test, including:
- Subject
- Date/time of your email
- Different email layouts, design, copy
Use email analytics to understand what resonates best with your subscribers, and use that information to adjust your content strategy.
Tip #2: Personalization and Segmentation
Personalization used to be very challenging, but with iContact, it’s easy to make that email personalized for the recipient. For example, you can start your email with a simple personal salutation. “Dear Mike” (vs. “Dear Reader”) can go a long way to encourage engagement with your email.
Not every email you send will appeal to everyone on your list. Segmenting your list can help you send your email to those people who are more likely to open it and engage. For example, if you are selling shoes, you may want to segment your list by gender to create emails that contain information about the appropriate shoes.
Increasing engagement is not only about the right content; it’s also about the right audience. Encourage your subscribers to share as much information with you about themselves so that you can leverage segmentation and personalization to deliver a better email experience.
Tip #3: Share your email content
Many times we send an email, and it’s only a couple of days before the opens and clicks stop, and your email is lost in your subscriber’s crowded inbox. However, your email took time to create, design, lay out, etc., and that content has a lot of value. Re-using and repurposing some of the relevant content you have created can help you leverage that investment in new ways. For example, you can encourage your subscribers, fans, and followers to share your email to reach a new audience, or you can share your email on your own social networks.
Leveraging the investment you’ve made in email marketing across multiple marketing channels can help you reach a new audience and create new, engaging experiences.
Related links:
Seven Tips on Integrating Email and Social Media
Email, Not Junk Mail: The Importance of Content in Email Marketing
Get Some Smokin’ Hot Results with Social Media and E-mail Marketing