3 Tips to improve your current email marketing program

So you have a good email list. You send out emails regularly. You look at your open rates and try to improve them.  What next? What more can you do? Here are 3 quick things you can do to improve your email marketing program….

1] Welcome Email

Readers are most engaged when they share their email with you.  Sending a welcome email helps reinforce that engagement.  Do send a welcome email as soon as possible.  It helps to thank the readers and tell them what content to expect from the newsletters.
The open rates and click rates for welcome emails are among the highest, so many ecommerce retailers include a welcome discount coupon. This gives an incentive to readers to purchase online when they are most engaged.

2] Segment your audience

Are you wondering why your open rates are falling? It probably may have to do with “list fatigue”. If you are sending the same communication to every single customer then it makes sense to start segmenting your audience.  While segmenting can get very involved here are three ways that some of our customers are segmenting data today:

• Segment data into city wise lists
• Segment data into separate lists of Gold, Silver and Platinum loyalty card holder data
• Segment lists into  investors based on the value of investments, platinum, gold and regular

We recently did an analysis for a client where they have city based segmentation. It turned out one particular city always had the most opens no matter what the content.  A lot of interesting data can be seen once you start segmenting your lists and looking at their open and click reports.
3] Track Email in Google Analytics

My last post was about how to track your email clicks in Google Analytics.  Once you start getting data you there are many more ways you can understand your reader’s behavior.

Here is a simple report (from our own website statistics) of the time spent on site by visitors who come via email vs other segments.  Email readers read more pages, spend more time and have lower bounce rate (bounce rate = visitors who look at one page and leave immediately).