This guide explains a few simple things you can do to improve your email marketing results. To make this easier, we’ve divided it into four main categories.
Make sure you have a look at our webinars which cover lots of different topics relating to improving your results. Pure360 also offer a wide range of services that can help you improve your email marketing results- see how we can help in our services guide.
Data management
The first thing to look at if you’re looking to improve your results – is who you are sending to. Keeping your list updated and healthy can help you get the best results possible.
Sending to disengaged data
If you have a lot of people in your list who have never opened one of your emails – you might want to consider segmenting those people out and not including them in all your campaigns.
You can do this by setting up a filter containing only people who have opened one of your campaigns before and start sending to that filter only. You can do this based on different timeframes, for example 6 months, 1 year, 2 years etc. We’d recommend going at least a year back.
* One thing to note is that new subscribers, which have never opened one of your emails can fall into this filter if you don’t set a rule to exclude them from it. Make sure you add a filter rule for the date of sign up as well. For example, you can set the filter to only show people whos’ date of sign up is greater than for example 6 months, 1 year, 2 years etc.
You can also make a filter containing anyone who has never opened one of your emails and only send to that filter every 3 months to check if you can get any engagement.
If after a while there are still people who haven’t engaged, you might want to consider a re-engagement campaign and just removing non-engaged data from your list entirely.
Sending to new data
We offer list health checks, which can flag up addresses that can potentially harm your deliverability. If you have a list you’ve never sent to before – it’s a good idea to get it checked. The same goes if you have a list that isn’t engaging very well.
If you have a list that you’d like us to run a healthcheck on, please contact our Support team.
Another service we can offer is email verification. This can remove invalid addresses from your list, making sure you’re sending to the cleanest data possible.
Segmentation
Are you sending the same message out to all of your email contacts or have you tried segmenting your list? If you’ve been collecting lots of data about your recipients then this will be easy enough to do.
You can view our webinar on segmentation and how it can help you improve your results here.
Personalisation
Making messages feel more personal and more targeted can increase engagement dramatically. If you’re new to personalisation, consider starting simple by just adding your recipient’s first name into your campaigns. A small touch like this can make a message feel much more targeted. If you’re interested in finding out more about different strategies, Pure360 ran a recent webinar on personalisation.
Content
Design
If your engagement levels are low consider reviewing the design of your emails. Having an attractive looking email, which follows email best practice can go a long way.
A few things to watch out for:
Do you have clear visible call to actions?
Is your image to text ratio good (Best practice is 60:40)?
Strong consistent branding across the message?
Good size, quality and positioning of images?
Is there a good contrast between text and background colour?
We have a Drag & Drop editor, which you can use to create fully responsive emails. We also have a team of email design experts who can design and build an email template for you. To see some examples of the kind of thing we can help with, have a look at our services guide.
Ensure recipients receive emails from the brand they signed up with
If they added their email address to abc.com and they start receiving emails from xyz.com, then they’re more likely to mark the email as spam and your sender reputation will suffer.
If you are sending on behalf of someone else, make sure it’s very clear on the signup form that this is what’s going to happen (setting expectations of contact), and on the email make sure you tell people “you signed up on abc.com but we said we’d send you a few related offers that we’ve carefully chosen. Please unsubscribe if you’ve changed your mind”.
Subject lines
Your subject line and pre-header text are your first chance to grab a subscriber’s attention. Your subject lines should be attractive enough to make the person open your message.
Try personalising your subject lines. Personalisation in subject lines works the same as it does in the body of the email.
Consider doing some subject line testing with Pure360’s built in testing feature. This can help you identify what kind of subject lines are attractive to your subscribers.
Sending
Are you sending at the optimum times?
There is a lot of information out there on when the best time to send a campaign is. This varies across industry and the best way to find out is to look at your own engagement levels at different times and find the best time for your own recipients.
Pure360’s Expert Package has a feature called Intelligent Time sending. This will send your campaign out over a 24h period, finding the optimum time to send to each recipient based on their previous behaviour. Consider using this for your campaigns so you can make sure your message hits the inbox at the optimum time.
Are you sending a resend to non-opens?
Doing a resend of your email can be a second chance for your email to get opened. Setting up a resend with our built in feature couldn’t be easier. We’d recommend to send exactly the same message, just with a different subject line. You can adjust the subject line slightly or change it completely – it’s entirely up to you.
Pre-send checklist
Make sure to use our pre-send checklist for your campaigns.