OTB’s top three tips for boosting your email marketing strategy

How good is your email marketing strategy? Email is proclaimed outdated and irrelevant time and again by industry commentators. Yet despite speculation, statistics show email is not only still relevant, but consistently delivers meaningful results;

1) CIO recently claimed that ’27 percent marketers [are] reporting excellent ROI and 46 percent  [are] reporting good ROI from their email marketing campaigns.’

2) Marketing Dive recently questioned conventional wisdom that young people are no longer interested in email.

3) Econsultancy’s annual Email Marketing Industry Census has found that, when it comes to ROI, email was deemed more successful than SEO by a huge 9%.

With this in mind, any good marketer should be investing time, effort and money into their email marketing strategy. Emails must be attention grabbing, targeted and message driven. Not sure how to boost your email marketing strategy? Think OTB has three top tips you can implement today.

1. Get personal

We’re sure you’ve heard marketers discussing the need for personalisation in all marketing offerings. But, when it comes to email, how well do you really know your recipient?

A recently released whitepaper by Salesforce Marketing Cloud has crafted ‘5 blueprints for building smarter emails’. According to the paper, understanding your recipient should be the core driver of your campaign. Knowing your reader is vital to campaign success.

Through a series of tick box questions, the whitepaper asks marketers how well they understand their audience. Questions such as;

• Do you know how they opted in to subscribe to you?
• Where is it that they click in your emails?
• Have they engaged with you on social media?

These are all simple questions any organisation can ask of its email audience. Did you answer no to any of them? Then there’s no better time to find out! Use those insights to streamline and better inform your email marketing strategy.

2. Mobile first

We need to impress upon marketers the need to optimise their content for mobile. Many people still presume that desktop driven content leads the way. It’s just not true!

Figures show this could be a major mistake for brands looking to engage through email. According to an article by CIO, ‘research […] shows that 71 percent of people will delete an email immediately if it doesn’t display correctly [on their mobile device].’ With such an overwhelming majority of people inclined to this behaviour, mobile optimisation is a must to ensure all the hard work that has gone into crafting your email campaign doesn’t go to waste.

However, an interesting article by business2community.com has argued that although most marketers believe they can succeed at mobile email marketing simply by using responsive design, this doesn’t necessarily lead to high click through rates.

business2community suggests a number of practical measures to engage mobile users with the emails they receive. Among these tips are;

• offering shorter registration forms for mobile users
• allowing users to sign in using social media platforms
• offering e-book style content as opposed to white papers
• using larger call to action buttons

3. Consider the time

While it may be assumed that the best time to send an email campaign is within office hours, this is not necessarily the best way to reach your target audience.

Considering your own habits can be a quick way to gain insight into how your users might be engaging with email. Do you log into your email on the commute to work? How much time do you actually devote to email once your daily schedule kicks in? business2community recently reported that that ‘almost 50% of people who own smartphones check their emails as soon as they wake up.’

With this in mind, a simple way to make your email campaigns more effective is to monitor what time of day, and what day of the week, produces the best level of opens and engagement with your content. With automation now prolific, there really is little reason that email should be restricted to office hours. This is even more important if your business operates across multiple time zones.

Need more help boosting your email marketing strategy? Get in touch with our experts.