Building a Powerful Email Strategy: Techniques and Tactics That Get Results
Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their customers and drive sales. However, creating a successful email strategy can be challenging. In this article, we will provide you with techniques and tactics to help you build a powerful email strategy that gets results.
Table of Contents
1. List Health and List Maintenance
2. Value Proposition
3. Design Optimization
4. Personalization
5. User-Generated Content
6. Call to Actions
7. Engaging Unengaged Users
8. A/B Testing
9. Adaptive Send Feature
10. Analyzing Metrics
List Health and List Maintenance
The foundation of deliverability resides within the data. Poor data is the quickest way to tank conversion rates due to poor reputation. Reputation can take a good amount of time to rebuild, so it's always best to remove those harmful addresses beforehand. We want to make sure that your data is in tip-top shape and making sure that your data is clean is the best way to start building your powerful email strategy.
List maintenance is a key part of building a powerful email strategy. Making sure your list is as clean as possible is essential. For list maintenance, we often turn towards a few different list cleansing tools that'll scrub your list and remove any harmful addresses. There are a few different types of services out there for validation. We usually turn towards NeverBounce. This is a validation tool and it's mainly to help hard bounce issues. This type of service will catch any addresses that are invalid or just straight up not emailable. It's a good service and cost-effective, but there is a much more thorough cleaning that can be done. For cleansing services, we go to Webula. Webula is the top of the cream of the crop for cleansing services. This type of service will remove all those hard bounces but it will also do a full scrub of your list and remove any potential threats and known spam traps. This will be a much deeper cleanse and leave your list in good shape when building a powerful email strategy.
Value Proposition
An important question you can ask yourself as you think about your email strategy is, "Are you providing value?" Marketers spend too much time discussing their own team's goals. The pressure on marketing teams to send more and more email to all contacts is something we hear frequently at Acton. We really recommend that you ask yourself, "Is this an email that I would open and engage with? What value do my prospects and customers get out of this email?" If you answer yes to bullets one and three or you can't answer bullet two, then it's time to rethink your email strategy.
Design Optimization
Optimizing email design is another important tactic you can focus on to up your email game. First, build responsive emails. Your emails need to render properly on the devices your subscribers are using to access them, so make sure that you test that. Second, be above the fold. Make sure your call to action is easy to find on any device with no scrolling required. Third, design emails by segment. If you send cat food emails to dog people, no one is going to open and engage with your email. Design your emails specific to your target segments. Fourth, use great images. Use low payload attention-grabbing images that are crisp and easy to see on any device. Fifth, shorten subject lines. Keep your email subjects as short as possible, especially for mobile devices. Sixth, avoid multiple calls to action. Stick to one, maybe two calls to actions, where your subscribers will simply be overwhelmed by the amount of choices. Seventh, personalize everything. That includes subject lines. Personalize where you can to build personal connections with your subscriber base. Eighth, play with fonts. Test different fonts and ensure that your emails are legible on the devices your subscribers are accessing them from. Ninth, focus on the pre-header. The pre-header is previous content below the subject line and can help to entice opens.
Personalization
Personalization goes a long way towards building a connection with your subscriber. You can start with subject lines. You already know their first name, so use it. Personalized subject lines significantly increase open rates, and some studies have shown that they can do so by 15 to 25 percent. Also, get content creative. Demonstrate that you understand the customer's journey. Use details from the customer's timeline to create engaging content specifically for them.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is anything from callouts on review sites or social media pages. You can also ask your customer for testimonials, which is exactly what we did here. It has immense value to any marketing plan because user-generated content increases your credibility. It isn't salesy and it works to improve engagement.
Call to Actions
Optimizing CTAs is a great way to see what your audience likes and is a great way to drive engagement. A few best practices when looking to optimize CTAs for your email strategy are keeping CTA short, using buttons or images for emphasis, and having them have a sense of urgency. Link into a dedicated and specific landing page. This is especially important when trying to track those CTAs and trying to track different conversions. Lastly, optimize, test, and repeat. Trying to find what your audience is going to click on is really important, and it's always important to test a bunch of different CTAs against each other and see which one's going to work.
Engaging Unengaged Users
After we've built a beautiful email, it's time to think about who it's going to have the users in your list engage with your mail. In the past, it's always best practice to focus on those users that have engaged with your mail, are opted in, and want to receive your mail. It's also important to think about those users that are highly unengaged and start sunsetting them out. This means suppressing contacts that have been sent a number of emails but haven't opened anything in a year. These are the contacts that are directly causing you harm, and it's best to get them out of your list.
A/B Testing
A/B testing can be very powerful when trying to hone in on your audience. Test different subject lines or CTAs to see what your audience enjoys. It will give you a chance to see what performs better and really helps increase engagement and overall ROI. It'll also help reduce opt-outs, bounce rates, and overall helps improve reputation. Always remember in email marketing, everything is testable.
Adaptive Send Feature
Acton's adaptive send feature uses predictive intelligence based on your contact's history timeline. Use adaptive send to send emails to each contact at the most probable time they will open it. We recommend that you schedule adaptive send at least a day ahead to give Acton the opportunity to analyze predictive.
Analyzing Metrics
It's always important to analyze your metrics after the fact and see how your audience reacted and see how you can make adjustments. With what you see, you can further test those subject lines, those CTAs, and see what's going to work.
Highlights
- List health is extremely important.
- Optimizing CTAs and subject lines are all testable.
- Personalizing subject lines significantly increases open rates.
- User-generated content increases your credibility.
- Adaptive send feature uses predictive intelligence based on your contact's history timeline.
FAQ
Q: How many emails should a contact receive before being considered for sunsetting?
A: It depends on the use case, but we typically recommend at least five or so emails. If you send about two times per week, that four or five number could be a really good starting point.
Q: How long does it usually take to recover from bad reputation?
A: It usually takes around 30 to 60 days to see any type of improvement. However, it's important to be consistent and target those engaged users and get all those bad users out of your list.
Q: What is the best way to manage hard and soft bounces?
A: For hard bounces, list validation or list cleansing tools are the best way to manage them beforehand. For soft bounces, make sure that the soft bounce limit is set up. This is a limit within Acton within your soft bounce list, and it would be a limit to move people over to the inactive soft bounce list.
We hope that this article has provided you with valuable insights and techniques to help you build a powerful email strategy that gets results. If you have any further questions or want to speak to anybody on our team, please reach out to your account manager or your customer success manager.
