Emailing is a marketing strategy that is sometimes considered ineffective by some companies. According to the ADM (2019), CHF 1.- invested in an email marketing brings back about CHF 35.- and according to Emarsys (2018) 81% of SMEs consider emailing as their first customer acquisition channel and 80% as their best retention channel. Just like social networks, the newsletter is one of the indispensable marketing tools for a large proportion of companies.
In this article, you will find a list of our tips to help you in the formation of your emailing and help you achieve your goals.
What is emailing?
Emailing consists in sending emails as part of a mass communication with a mainly commercial purpose, but not only. It is used as a direct web marketing method to send messages to a certain audience. It is therefore not about correspondence for technical aspects or in the classic framework of exchanges with a customer for your business.
The purpose of this type of communication can vary, we have identified several:
- Loyalty: to strengthen the relationship with your current customers to maintain the link and build loyalty.
- Prospecting: acquire new customers and develop your sales
- Visibility: generate traffic on your website
- Information: keep informed of your brand’s news about products or other projects (newsletter).
Our 6 tips to make a good emailing:
For an emailing campaign to be successful, you need to optimize a number of key elements that will allow you to set up an effective strategy and account for the returns in return for the time and resources deployed.
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The targeting of your emailing recipients
Not targeting the recipients of your mailings and giving priority to quantity over quality is a mistake not to be made. Indeed, the more you target the recipients of your mailings, the greater your return on investment (ROI) will be. The objective of a relevant targeting is to allow you to personalize your mail more, resulting in a higher number of clicks. For this, there is a real work to be done on your databases and on the segmentation of your prospects/customers to obtain a very qualified list.
Beyond this aspect, badly targeting your prospects could be detrimental to you because some of them could feel overwhelmed by the emails received and develop a negative emotion towards your brand.
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A striking email subject for your email
This is the first thing the recipient will read. It is therefore a step in the creation of your campaigns that must be sufficiently worked on to capture his attention in his inbox and trigger the opening of the email.
First of all you have to make sure that the length of the subject is not too long and that it can be read in full on most email messages.
On average, it is advisable to make objects of 50 characters, even if this number of characters varies depending on the messengers. You can also perform a database analysis to determine which messages are most used by your contacts and thus be able to adjust the size of your object.
It is also important to put the most important information at the beginning of the message to attract the reader’s interest. It is also important not to use certain words (Spam Words) which are often analyzed by the messengers as spam and are redirected directly into this category.
For example, here are some words/phrases that should be avoided: Special promotion / Best price / Urgent / Earn money / Sign up now / Click here / Free access…
Finally the last point is to personalize the subject of the email, to bounce on a current topic, to add emojis to make sure to bet on the emotion of the recipient and make the email more human. Indeed, according to YesLifeCycle Marketing, emails with a personalized subject line generate a 50% higher opening rate.
The insert that appears below the subject line must also be relevant enough to make the recipient want to click because it is the last thing that will be read before the potential click.
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A concise and clear content for your emailing
Just like the subject of the email, the broadcast content must be worked and optimized. There must be a personalization of the message. Once the user is on the email, one must be aware that the beginning and the end of the email will have more chances to be read. To do this, you are advised to adopt an optimistic tone and to highlight your proposal with a careful and interactive design. Namely that marketing campaigns with emails containing videos generate 300% additional commitment according to MarketAdvisor.
Your identity must be felt in the visual of the email and it must be clean and airy so as not to stun the prospect with too much information. Don’t hesitate to use bullets or to play with fonts or font types (bold, clear…). For the whole thing to be harmonious, the proportion of text and image must also be well-balanced.
Depending on the target and the objective of your emailing, you must also adapt the content and the form of your email to communicate in the most relevant way with your contacts. Sometimes images and visuals will be de rigueur, in other cases, it is better to focus on authenticity with a simple and conventional message.
It is also necessary to pay attention to the name with which you send your emails, often personalizing the name with that of a person in your team allows a greater number of openings of the email.
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Call-to-action (CTA) highlighted
This is the determining element of your email since it is thanks to call-to-action that you will be able to bring your target to your website. In concrete terms, how does a CTA work? It is a button (visual element linked to a web link) whose purpose is to make your prospect carry out an action: register for a webinar, consult a product on your site, register for a private sale…
For a CTA to be effective, it must be directly traceable in the content of your emails. The recipient should not have to search. Therefore, it makes sense to place it above the waterline (this is the line beyond which your contacts must scroll to see the rest of the email content). The color of the button should also denote in relation to the rest of the content to automatically attract attention. The color chosen must be adapted to the meaning of your message (pay attention to the meanings and perceptions of colors) and to your company.
Usually, it is also placed in the center of the page and in an area where there is not too much information for it to stand out visually. The text inside the button should also be concise and punchy. For example, it is preferable to use an action verb in the imperative or first person that accurately describes the action that is going to be performed and the benefit to the prospect. Action verbs often used are: Discover, join, start, I subscribe, I want to…
You can use several CTAs within an email, but be careful to prioritize and limit them as much as possible.
When the recipient clicks on a CTA, he or she will be taken to the landing page you have defined. You also have to be particularly rigorous in creating this page and its content to try to keep the prospect and convert him into a customer.
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Preliminary tests for your e-mailing campaign
Before launching the campaign, you must pay attention to the visual rendering of your email on the different types of media since today, most Internet users consult their emails on their smartphones or tablets. An upstream multi-media test is a necessary step to carry out for your emailing campaign.
Then, it is necessary to determine the most opportune moment (date, time…) according to your target for the sending in order to have a higher opening rate. To do this, it is necessary to know well the habits of your contacts and make changes if necessary to optimize to the maximum.
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An in-depth analysis of the KPI's of your emailing campaign
Finally, the success of your emailing campaigns will also depend on your ability to analyze your data step by step and to draw the right lessons to optimize them a little more each time. To do this, there are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to follow and analyze in particular. These tools will allow you to evaluate elements such as your derivability, the relevance of your objects and content or the efficiency of your CTAs.
- Bounce Rate = Number of undelivered mails / number of mails sent * 100
Above all it is important that the email is delivered to the right person and that you have the right email address. This is what we will determine thanks to the bounce rate. This rate allows you to sort in your database and also allows you to determine if you need to set up a more efficient way to collect email addresses: Registration taken into account thanks to a confirmation email (beware of the high level of loss with this method. According to Mailchimp 61% of people do not complete these procedures) or a double entry of the email address at the time of registration.
- The opening rate = Number of e-mail openings / number of e-mails sent * 100
This should catch your attention if your prospects only open one out of 10 emails. The goal is to have this rate as high as possible. If it isn’t, it means that you probably have to rework your objects and content, that you didn’t target them well enough or that your sending was considered as spam by the messaging service.
- Click rate = Number of clicks on a link contained in the email/number of emails sent * 100
This data is important because the success of the campaign lies mainly in the click rate since it means that your emailing has indeed provoked an action from the recipient. It is very important if you have a link in your email, otherwise the opening rate is the most followed data.
- Reactivity rate = Number of clicks on an email link/number of email openings * 100
It also analyzes the number of clicks on the link, but this time it is based on the number of openings, so it will really allow you to see if the content of the email and the CTAs are effective and manage to engage your prospect.
- Unsubscription rate = Number of unsubscriptions/number of emails sent * 100
It allows you to see how your mail is received by your target. If the rate is too high, it means that your targeting needs to be improved or that your message is not adapted. As your campaigns progress, this rate should tend to stabilize since at the beginning, it is normal to make targeting errors, but with time you should succeed in having a more qualified database. You must be attentive to variations in this rate because it can be a valuable indicator on the perception of your communication changes for example or on the frequency of your mailings.
Thus, you must be careful to perform different tests to disprove or confirm your theories and interpretations of the results.
- Conversion rate = People who performed a specific action/number of emails sent * 100
It allows to measure the concrete results concerning the specific action targeted by the company with the emailing campaign and therefore the number of people who went through the process. This action can be, for example, the number of purchases made by prospects. It is the rate that will really indicate the success of the campaign in particular and provide you with information beyond your simple emailing strategy.
For it to be as high as possible, your offer must have a real added value for the recipient because it will make him want to go /en/service/graphic-design/graphic-design-web/mailing/Â and it will benefit your image.
Why call upon the marketing agency Habefast for your emailing campaigns?
Emailing is a very interesting tool when you follow all these different steps and that it is well mastered because it allows you to have a direct communication with your prospects. With our advice, you should be able to set up an effective strategy with a logic of continuous improvement.
To set up efficient and adapted emailing campaigns, you can call upon our agency Habefast.