Every year, millions of people fall victim to a serious and unforgivable crime… Let’s say it together… Email marketing overload!

Okay, maybe it’s not a serious crime, but it can definitely be annoying. If you’ve ever signed up for a promotional email to receive a discount or an update on a brand you enjoy, you’ve probably had at least one company that went a little overboard showing your inbox some love.

What started as a potentially helpful message can easily turn into endless email marketing messages that no longer cater to audiences in the right way. And when over 333 billion emails are being sent daily across the globe, how can you ensure that the emails you send are successful and positively contribute to your business?

Let’s look at why effective email marketing matters, some email marketing tips to help you execute your campaign strategy and yield results, and the key metrics you should be looking at to measure your success.

 

Why is Email Marketing So Important

A well-intentioned and properly cadenced email campaign can be a potent tool for your digital marketing efforts. Email marketing helps keep your current customers engaged and updated regarding what’s happening at your company and any new products, services, or events they could benefit from.

Emails are the perfect venue to show off an array of creative content demonstrating your brand’s unique position in your industry. They can be as informative or creative as you want and can open the doors to increased sales and improved profitability. One study suggests that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return on investment (ROI) of $36.

Email Marketing Tips for Success

When it comes to content creation, email marketing is one of the best (and easiest) ways to engage your existing audience and reach out to potential leads. Because emails are such a crucial part of your internet marketing strategy, it’s important to know how to craft the right messages at the right times. Here are a few tips digital marketing agencies try to follow when building email campaigns for our clients.

• Strategize Your Content

A thoughtful digital marketing strategy is always key. It’s important to ensure that your emails align with what you’re doing on social, on your website, and in any other digital marketing space your brand occupies. Providing a consistent, omnichannel brand experience showcasing your brand’s purpose will help your customers more easily recognize your brand and make them more likely to trust and believe in your content.

• Personalization

Whenever possible, try to personalize your emails by merging in each customer’s name. It might seem easy to overlook this feature, but research suggests that by personalizing promotional emails, consumers feel more engaged and, thus, more likely to develop loyalty to your brand. In fact, one study suggests that emails with personalized subject lines had a 50% higher open rate than non-personalized emails.

• Be Fun and Creative!

Remember those 333 billion emails we mentioned? Consumers have dozens of options and ways they enjoy interacting, all of which compete for your audience’s attention. That’s why it’s so important to have fun with your content. Leaning on catchy wordplay, viral trends, clever emojis, gifs, and other interactive techniques can help you pique your audience’s curiosity and allow your brand to stand out for all the right reasons!

• Audit Your Email List

When was the last time you took a deep dive into your email database? Depending on how long you’ve been maintaining the list, you could have many contacts that no longer engage with your brand. Having these contacts on your list can negatively impact your metrics. Consider scheduling time every quarter to review your email list and purge any contacts that have unsubscribed, bounced back, or seem to be inactive.

• Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Market Testing

Have great ideas but need a little help executing them? Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a great tool to help transform your email marketing. From writing assistants that can help develop your copy to automated systems that can optimize your email delivery, technology can profoundly impact your overall email presence. Also, it’s important to see what your competitors are creating for their emails so you get a better idea of how to stand out from the crowd. Consider subscribing to their email lists to see how your content compares.

Key Email Metrics to Gauge your Content Success

After you’ve crafted your email content and strategized a content calendar, it’s important to follow up by analyzing your emails’ metrics. This will allow you to understand better how your emails performed and can influence how you may want to adjust in the future.

Here are just a few of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider when gauging the success of your content.

• Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) Commonly referred to as the delivery rate, the IPR measures how many emails you sent successfully made it to a user’s inbox.

• Open Rate Open Rate measures the percentage of those successful emails the user opened.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) CTR measures the percentage of users clicking on a link within your email. Over time, this will tell you which links are most popular and where to consider placing the focus in your email content.

• Click-to-Open Rate (CTO) CTO compares the number of opened emails to the number of click-throughs. This gives you a better idea of the number of people who used your email once it was opened.

• Unsubscribe Rate This metric is important because it lets you see trends in your content saturation. If you see a high spike in unsubscribes, it may be an indicator to rethink your content or schedules.

• Bounce Rate This metric considers the number of emails that couldn’t be delivered successfully. There are two kinds of email bounces: hard and soft. A hard bounce occurs when an email address no longer exists or is incorrectly spelled, while a soft bounce indicates a temporary issue blocking the email from being received on the user’s end.

• Social Shares This metric allows you to see how often your customers share your content on social. Because you spend thoughtful time and resources creating your content, it’s important to ensure it’s easily shareable from an email to any social platform.
• Conversion Rate Depending on the goal of your email campaign, a conversion could mean a sale, downloading a whitepaper, RSVPing to an event, or any specific goal. Your conversion rate will allow you to know how successful your email was in getting your audience to take action.

Bringing it All Together

At Fishbat, we’re a digital marketing strategy agency that believes in a holistic, omnichannel approach to digital marketing. From email marketing tips to paid social advertising and everything in between, the strategy behind your campaigns should be just as thoughtful as the content you create to execute it.

If you want to see how strategically infused, full-service digital marketing can impact your email content, feel free to reach out! You can also explore all of our content creation offerings on Our Digital Marketing Agency Services page!