As with any other marketing tactic, you can always optimize your email campaigns for better ROI. After all, once you know how to plan your email campaigns, create nice emails, and track your campaign’s performance, you’re through with the basics.
What you need to now do is try some of the more advanced email marketing tactics that will help improve your campaigns’ performance. So let’s see three such email marketing power moves that will help you generate more leads and sales from every email you send.
Here goes.
Start with A/B testing
As you can probably understand from the term itself, an A/B test tests two versions against each other (i.e version A vs. version B). A/B testing an email campaign can help you achieve higher open and click-through rates.
Let’s take an example to see how an email A/B test works.
Suppose you have about a thousand subscribers in your list and you want to ensure a higher open rate for your campaign.
So, in this case, you’d want to test the subject line because the subject line influences the open rate.
By setting up a simple A/B test on the subject line, you could send 30% of your subscribers version A of the subject line while another 30% would get the B version.
Once the test is over, you’d know which version won and you’d send the winning version to the remaining 40% of your subscribers. So, if the A version of the subject line gets 200 opens with the B version getting 150 opens, the remaining of your subscribers would get version A (the winning version). This way, you can ensure that a better chance at getting more email opens.
You get the idea, right?
You can A/B test everything for an email campaign — right from its subject line to its design and copy. Here’s an email A/B test example that tests two completely different versions:
Such simple A/B tests can bring big wins for your email campaigns. In the above example, version B got a 29% higher click-through rate than version A.
When Whirlpool tested the following two subject lines for their email campaign, they found that the first version won and had a significantly higher open rate
- A: Savings end soon! Save up to $400 on select Whirlpool® Ice Kitchen Collections
- B: Save up to $400 on select Whirlpool® Ice Kitchen Collections
Mainly because it created a sense of urgency among the subscribers. Running A/B tests can help you learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t. You can use your learnings to keep optimizing your future campaigns.
Here are a few email A/B testing tips to use on your email campaigns.
Create subscriber segments
Every email list has some identifiable segments.
A very simplistic example of this would be for an online store. So, for example, if you run an online store and sell clothes to both men and women, you’ve at least two segments there.
And once you identify such segments in your subscriber base, you can send them laser-targeted offers. For instance, in this case, you could send your female subscribers offers on cosmetics and to your male subscriber segment, you could send offers on grooming kits.
With such segmentation, you don’t have to send a general email that offers both cosmetics and grooming kits to your entire list! Instead, you can write better email subject lines and more targeted email copy that gets more sales.
You can slice and dice your email list in many ways to create your segments. Here are a few simple data types you could use for such segmenting:
- Demographic data including (age, gender, location, job title/ company position and more)
- Behavioral data including (open rate, click-through rate, etc)
- Interests
And you can actually collect some of this information right inside your email signup box. For example, you could add a radio button to your signup box to get the subscriber’s gender information. Or, you could let your users choose what items they’re interested in and would like to hear about (by listing out the options and adding checkboxes before them to let the users tick the ones they’d like to be updated on). And so on.
Start with email automation
With email automation, you can put your email marketing on autopilot.
Here, you basically set rules that trigger certain emails automatically.
For example, if you have data about your subscriber’s birthday or wedding anniversary, you can set a rule to send them a birthday special email offer. You could give them a coupon code or a flat discount on their next shopping through such an email.
You can also set email automation rules to target your buyers with product offers similar to the ones they’ve bought from you.
The best part is that you don’t have to do this manually for each subscriber. An email marketing solution like Juvlon that supports email automation can do this … automagically! You just need to set the rules once. Because such triggered or automated emails are hyper-personalized and targeted, they offer a very high ROI.
You can also set up behavioral automated emails based on how your users engage or “behave” with your emails. So, for example, if a subscriber opens and clicks on a particular link in your email, then based on this interaction, you can send them a more personalized follow-up email. Likewise, if a subscriber doesn’t open your email at all, then you could use the “unopen” activity to send them the same email after a few days with a different subject line.
Wrapping it up
As you can probably tell, to make the most of these advanced email marketing tactics, you need an email marketing solution that supports them. At Juvlon, we help our customers with all these and more. Sign up for a free trial account here.