Top 10 tips to improve your email marketing performance

Email marketing is an incredible tool, but ensuring emails get in front of the right people and the desired action is taken can be trickier than it seems. There are many obstacles to avoid when sending out an email campaign – from being hard to read on mobile to your email landing in the dreaded spam folder.

Luckily our experts have compiled a list of our best email marketing tips to help you get the most out of your campaigns. Read on to take your marketing emails to the next level today!

1. Keep emails clear and concise

Keeping emails clear and concise will not only improve your click-through rates but is also one of the simplest ways to improve your marketing emails. Keeping emails short, direct and easy to read will keep your recipients reading through to the end. 

Try to keep emails focused on one particular thing and make it clear to your audience what you want them to do. With this in mind, keep CTAs (calls to action) to a minimum. You can always create multiple emails and spread them across a few days.

Equally, making simple design choices – such as using a basic, complementary colour scheme and leaving plenty of space around text and images can make reading your emails easier. Chaotic emails with too many colours, moving parts and contrast can be too intense for us and make it harder to understand your email.

2. Use dynamic and visual content

Having said that, there’s certainly still a place in emails for photos, graphics, gifs, videos, polls, and more – just try not to overload your email! Dynamic and visual content will make your emails much more engaging and give your reader’s eyes a break from the text. Keep an eye on your file sizes though, as emails containing large files will take much longer to load. The last thing you want is for your viewer to lose patience while waiting for an image or gif to load and closing your email.

3. Grab their attention with a compelling subject line

No matter how captivating your email is, your recipient won’t be able to see it unless they open it, so you need to give them a reason to click. Since readers will only see about 60 characters of the subject line in their inbox, be sure to grab their attention with something short and punchy. Try calling attention to the discount or an exciting benefit you are offering.

Emojis can also be a great way to catch attention in the sea of text in an inbox, but be careful not to overdo it. To keep your subject line coherent, limit yourself to one emoji and use it to compliment your title rather than replace a word. If emojis don’t feel like the right tone for your business, it’s best to avoid them.

4. Personalise your email with merge tags

Merge tags are another great way to improve your subject line and make your emails more personal. For example, you can use a merge tag to insert the recipient's name into the subject line and grab their attention.

You can also use merge tags in the main body of your emails to make your email better suit them. For instance, if you have a variety of branch locations, you could use a merge tag to include their location and talk about their local branch.

5. Optimise your email for mobile

One of the biggest problems someone can make when designing a marketing email is forgetting to optimise their emails for mobile users. According to research by HubSpot Blog, more email views come from mobile devices (41%) than desktops (39%). By designing emails in a way that is inaccessible to mobile users, you risk losing out on potential clicks! Even if you’re a B2B business, optimising marketing emails for mobile users is still vital as more and more people work on the move and as we use more mobile apps for work.

To optimise your emails for mobile users, be sure to take a look at the mobile preview to check that your design makes sense and doesn’t get jumbled when viewed in this setting. Even better, send a test email to yourself and view it on your phone.

6. Cleanse your data

Cleansing email data sounds intense, but it just means modifying and removing inaccurate or duplicated contacts. It would be a shame for your company to miss out on a potential customer because their name has been misspelt, causing their emails to bounce.

It can be a relatively big job depending on the size of your contact list and how your company collects data, but it’s well worth going through your list and correcting mistakes/incomplete entries in your database, and removing those that are bouncing. Don’t be afraid to give inactive contacts a nudge to check that they’re still interested – having uninterested recipients on your contact list can have a huge effect on your performance. Consider deleting these contacts to save on costs, or if you really want to keep them, you could send them targeted info by segmenting them.

7. Segment your contacts

Segmenting your contacts really can make a difference to your email marketing performance. According to Mailchimp, segmented campaigns perform much better, with a 14.3% higher open rate on average than non-segmented campaigns.

Initially, it might seem like the obvious thing to do is to create lots of different audiences on one account, but as well as costing more money, you’ll find that you add more complication to managing your contacts. Segmenting offers a lot more opportunity to personalise emails based on any number of categories – from location to age to past purchases and more! As discussed earlier, you can also segment your audience based on their engagement – why not create a segment for those who haven’t engaged in a while to see if they’re still interested and try and tempt them back with an exclusive discount?

8. Timing is everything

The time an email is sent will greatly affect whether someone will open it. However, it isn’t always as straightforward as you think – you might think the best time to email a customer would be during their workday, but depending on the timing, the person, and whether you're B2B or B2C they might be swamped with work and not have time to look at a marketing email. It varies from audience to audience.

The best thing to do is to utilise the tools available to you. Many email marketing platforms offer suggested times to send your emails based on your industry or how your emails have performed previously. If in doubt, it’s usually best to send it in the morning (unless it’s a Monday!).

Timing isn’t just key in terms of the times and days sent. It’s also important to be responsive to your audience’s actions. Be sure to email new contacts within 24 hours of their signing up to stay in their mind. They’re much more likely to take further actions with you at this time than if you wait longer.

9. Don’t be afraid to experiment

Truly one of the best ways to improve your email marketing performance is to try things out and respond to the data. You are the expert in your audience because you’re tracking the analytics. If your contacts respond well to something, it’ll show up in your data, and you can take that information into account and repeat. You can even use A/B testing to get really specific – for example, you could use A/B testing to send your email out to half your audience in the morning and a half in the evening to see which time gets the most opens. Or why not experiment with different ways of phrasing your call to action to see which gets more clicks?

10. Work with an expert

Email marketing can be a time-consuming job to get right, and with regular updates and changes to technology, it can be hard to stay on top of your company’s marketing emails and get the most out of them.

Email marketing experts will come armed with the most up-to-date skills and knowledge to help you get your emails seen by the right people and give your business a platform to shine for them.

Want one of our experts to take your marketing emails to the next level? Drop us a line at hello@theunderdogagency.co.uk - we'd love to have a chat!