You’ve done all the hard work that goes into strategizing and planning, now it’s time to get the word out about your business and hit send on that email. But before you do, you’ll want to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to make your email campaigns a success. That means setting up tools to help you get ahead of the game and get straight to optimising.
Write amazing subject lines and preview text
The first thing you can do to optimise your email content is to focus on your subject lines and preview text, as this will be the most crucial part of your email campaign.
It’s all the space you’ll have to convince your audience to open your emails. The more effective your subject line and preview text, the better the chances of getting your emails opened!
For starters, keep them short and to the point. No more than 9 words or 60 characters. Personalization can work wonders too! Specifically when including your subscriber’s first name and surname. Doing this typically leads to double the open rate when compared to only using their first name!
The timing of your emails matters
When your subscribers receive your emails is just as important as the subject line and preview text. Why? Because the last thing you want is for your email to end up buried under a heap of other emails and get lost in all the shuffle. So choosing when the best time to send your mailers is crucial, and it’s different for every timezone.
To help you get this right, you can rely on Google Analytics to see when your site gets the most traffic. You can also use social media analytics to see when most people engage with your brand. Use these indications as a basis and then test and tweak further until you achieve optimal results.
Optimise your email content
So you got your subject line, preview text and timing just right and as a result, your subscriber opened your email! Congratulations! Now comes the more nuanced part, optimising your email content. You can do this by asking yourself the following:
- Is my email content skimmable? In other words, is the message clear and concise or is it hard to read and difficult to decipher what is going on? You always want to make sure that you’re conveying the key points to your readers in an easy to digest way.
- Is my email content visually appealing? Have you made your mailer interesting by adding an “on brand” image or two to attract your reader’s attention?
- Is my text all in one font? This is important, as sticking with consistent fonts and headlines will guide the reader’s eye through your content.
- Does my content accomplish my goals? This could involve many email objectives, such as creating brand awareness, encouraging a sale or simply adding value. Whatever your goal, your email content should always include a CTA (call to action) button that drives the subscriber to take the desired action.
- Lastly, try A/B testing your emails. You can do this by making slight changes to each email with the goal of improving performance over time.
