How to Improve Your Email Marketing Results

Personalisation

Once segmented you need to define the message for each of your target audiences. Make it personal to each contact, address their pain points in your content and how your product/service can offer a solution. For example, finance directors will have different problems that you can solve compared to operations directors, so talk directly to them about what matters to them.

Focused

Don’t offer or discuss too many different things in each email. Focus your message on a few important things so that the core message isn’t diluted. If you have a lot of different products or promotions running it can be easy to talk about everything you can do, but you need to reign yourself in and focus on the important few. The rest can be part of another campaign another day.

Grab Attention

Take the time to come up with a strong subject line that interests the reader enough for them to want to open your email. You can mention specific pain points, solutions, pose a question, or create scarcity for example. The trick is to build curiosity, intrigue or desire from the outset that compels your contacts to find out more – to digest the email.

Your subject line is a creative space, you can use different ones for your different audience segments. You can use it to try something different. Test and review as you go and see what works.

Add Value

Yes, the purpose of your email may be to sell or to attract enquiries but that doesn’t mean your content should be excessively ‘salesy.’ You need to add value too. Show your expertise, share your knowledge, position yourself as the expert in your sector and use adding value to build trust with your audience. Then you can more effectively…

Ask for Action

Always have a clear call to action in your email to tell the reader what you want them to do next. That might not always be to buy product or call your sales team, it could be directing them to an information source, or it could simply be a pre-cursor to your next email.

Get your Timing Right

It’s important to consider the best time to send your campaign to optimise its performance. This needs to be based on what’s best for the audience not your marketing team. Any software you’re using should allow you to schedule for specific times so this is an easy thing to get right.

There’s no hard and fast rule on when the perfect time is unfortunately, as its different for different industries and target audiences. The good news is there has been a lot of studies on this subject, but that said, there is disparity between findings.

Our general consensus is that midweek, Tuesday-Thursday between 1-3pm or 9-11am, is usually best for B2B campaigns. Whereas for an industry like retail, Fridays and Saturdays should yield stronger results. Like with all things marketing, test your timing, collect evidence-backed data, and use it to make future decisions.

Test email types

Test a mixture of HTML and plain text emails to see what your target audience responds to best. This is an often-overlooked factor but it’s an important step you can take to boost your results.

Follow Up

Keep in contact with your audience on a regular basis – both your current and prospective clients.

Regular communications build trust and keep you front and centre of your customers’ minds.

Follow up all enquiries quickly and stay in contact with prospects directly throughout your sales process.

How you follow up and support your email marketing with other marketing and sales activity will fundamentally influence its success, so be sure to have a process in place that doesn’t end when you hit send.

Do you have the data you need?

It all starts with your data. The first step that kickstarts all successful email marketing campaigns is securing compliant, legal, and effective data. That’s where we come in. To ask us any questions about our data, contact our team on 01252 367400. To try us out today, sign up for a free trial now, or you can find out more about our service here.