Is your target audience opening your emails? If not, what is preventing your email open rate from reaching its full potential?
While it’s important to look at many different KPI’s when determining the overall effectiveness of an email campaign, open rates rank pretty high on the priority list. To improve open rates, marketers need data. Luckily, there are software programs that can help determine the root cause of campaign successes or failures. These programs gather crucial data and offer up easy-to-interpret results that aid in improving open and click rates.
Here are three of the best strategies that can help you get better email open rates and determine what that means for your company’s bottom line.
Utilizing Data to Personalize and Analyze Your Email Marketing Strategy
In a world of ever-evolving customer interactions and marketing strategies, it’s important to gather as much data as possible. Coming in many forms, from geographical to demographical, data allows for more individualized targeting of an intended audience. With the assistance of email marketing software, businesses are able to easily determine how subscribers interact with content and promotions.
Using subscriber data to personalize subject lines increases open rates by 26%, according to Experian. Many of the top email marketing platforms allow businesses to integrate with other business tools, such as Salesforce, to utilize existing customer data to personalize subject line with data point like name, company, geo-location and purchase history to significantly increase open and engagement rates. To drill down further, marketers can use email marketing platforms’ analytics to determine subject lines that aren’t performing and create AB tests to optimize for better open rates.
Planning the Timing of Your Emails
You’ve heard the saying used before: timing is everything. While it applies to many different aspects of life, it can apply to email marketing campaigns as well. Determining the most beneficial time to send promotional email content is an incredibly crucial factor in the success or failure of any proposed email marketing campaign.
How do you determine the perfect time to send an email? As stated above, with the help of properly interpreted reports, the answer lies in collected consumer data. Recent studies have shown that 23 percent of all email-opens occur within the first hour of delivery; within the second hour, opens drop by nearly half. Companies like Campaign Monitor offer an automation service called time-zone sending that delivers emails according to a subscriber’s time zone, maximizing the amount of customer engagement and click-through rates. In addition, Campaign Monitor has launched Send Time Optimization that analyzes how each customer has interacted with emails historically to dynamically deliver emails at the time that each recipient is most likely to engage.
Certain content has better engagement in the early hours of the day, while other material has more success in the late evening. When a company specifies an email content strategy, let’s say for a promotion to be sent out at 8 a.m. local time, time-zone sending automatically creates send-off times for campaigns to every time zone. This ensures maximum consumer engagement across the board – making the benefits virtually endless. The analytics from time-zone sending also help marketers adjust future timing for maximum engagement.
Creating a List Segmentation Strategy
One of the most common misconceptions in the world of email marketing is the idea that the more subscribers gained, the better the chances of success. This simply isn’t the case. Just because an account has thousands of subscribers does not guarantee that each one of those subscribers translates into revenue – that’s where list segmentation comes into play.
List segmentation allows email marketers to tailor content based on any number of factors, like demographics or location, to ensure the recipients of the next campaign will find value in the content. A current promotion, for example, detailing a sale on men’s sporting apparel will have less likelihood of attracting interest from female recipients as opposed to the success it would garner when geared toward male recipients. List segmentation allows marketers to target, in this example, only male subscribers. To break this down even further, if the men’s sporting apparel product in question leans heavily towards college basketball team apparel, campaign marketers can tighten the target audience again by focusing on young college-aged men under the age of thirty who are more likely to purchase such a product.
Now that you have a few strategies for improving your email open rates, you can navigate your way to higher engagement and consumer interaction with your campaigns. How will you start improving your email open rates?
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