Overview
Email marketing is the most reliable way to drive revenue. Discount offers, specials, coupons and educational content engage recipients and increase their interest in your brand. It is an effective way of building credibility and trust, which instills brand loyalty and encourages future purchases. Check out these 7 tips that can boost your conversion rate.
eCommerce email marketing has an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent—with numbers like that, you can’t afford not to. Here are seven strategies that you can explore to boost your conversion rates.
1. People appreciate quality content
The question you should ask before you send something out is “what will this add to a user’s day?” If the answer is nothing, then you can’t expect them to respond to it. Commerce is transactional, and you’re not going to get anything unless you give something. How to guides, insightful blog posts, exclusive offers, even a fun Instagram story—just make sure that your email gives the user something instead of just asking them to give things to you.
2. Straightforward subject lines work best
Don’t get overly poetic with it: browsers will cut off the title after a certain number of characters, and users have short attention spans. Your keywords should come early in the title, and you should aim to communicate as much as possible about the content in as few words as you can.
CodeClouds Newsletter December 2016
Happy Holidays from Andy’s Aeronautics
Claim Your Coupon From Pete’s Pizza
Our New Ten-Speed Bicycle is out today!
This is a balancing act with point #7; overuse of certain common phrases can get you relegated to the spam filter. You’re trying to be direct without being too sales-y.
3. Topical subject lines also do just fine
The use of engaging content along with a topical subject line can be very effective with email marketing. For example, right now the most-discussed issues are the US election cycle, Brexit, the Oscars, and Game of Thrones. Exploring ways to creatively relate/link topical themes with your products will keep your content diverse and interesting.
4. Personalization draws people in
Consumers lose interest in a brand within a few days; it is imperative to hold their attention and stay front-and-center in their minds. A tactic that works well is personalization – targeting emails to specific segments of your target audience. Personalized offers surprise and delight consumers, and suggest that you care about them. If your strategy is customer acquisition, you may want to refer to buyer personas based on demographics, activities, and their actions on your website or social media pages.
Software like Mailchimp will usually have functionality to allow this: you can split your users into demographic lists or apply tags to them, then only send out the right content to the right people.
Software like Mailchimp will usually have functionality to allow this: you can split your users into demographic lists or apply tags to them, then only send out the right content to the right people.
5. Use campaign tagging
If you’re using Google Analytics, tracking your email campaigns by tagging links in your email allows you to assess their individual performance, and understand which ones resonate more with recipients. Data is the new gold rush, and with good reason: the more data you collect on your users, the easier it is to understand what they want and pivot to their needs accordingly.
6. Keep emails short
Even if you’re sharing great content, but not condensing it into bite-sized bits for easy consumption, recipients may feel discouraged to go through all of it. Short paragraphs, bullet points, and brevity are essential to get your message across and encourage clicks. I’d personally recommend 500 words or less—any longer than that, and users are going to check out before they reach the CTA.
7. Understand how spam filters work
Too many exclamation points, all words in title case, and spammy phrases can easily relegate emails to the spam folder. A working knowledge of email spam filters is very useful in getting through to recipients’ inbox each time and deriving full value from your email marketing efforts.
A big note: most of these will not trigger as spam if they’re coming from a recognised address. That’s why they’re fine to use in your day-to-day or business correspondence, but aren’t reaching your users–your colleagues have got you in their contacts but relatively few of your customers do. Here are things spam filters are looking for:
- Exclamation points (the acceptable number varies, but for a lot of filters, even 1 is too many)
- Too many typefaces/colours/styles. Not only does it look ugly and drive users away, it’s a huge spam trigger—spammers will often use variant characters or different typefaces to try and trick filters and it’s become something filter designers prepare for.
A spam blog comment using a different typeface or special characters to try to dodge a spam filter
- Lots of images, relatively little text
- Attachments instead of inline images
- EXCESSIVE CAPSLOCK USE
- Too many links in the email body.
- Known spam phrases. This varies from email client to email client, but just think about what a “spammy email” looks like in your own inbox and try to avoid sounding like that; 50% off exclusive offer claim your deal now/Act now for our exclusive promotion, 100% free with a $3.99 signup fee/Exclusive free offer to deal with 75% off increased sales to help with urgent success prevention for serious cash, get started NOW etc etc.
And that’s it: the seven tips that’ll help you start building up a solid customer base. It might take a little time, but with enough hard work, persistence and refinement, you’ll be well on your way to those incredible ROIs.
If you’re looking for help building and running your online store, don’t be afraid to get in touch! We have developers on demand that have all the skills you need to take your storefront to the next level.
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