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Email marketing is not the future of business – it has been for decades. With the advent of the internet, email provided a new way for businesses to engage with their customers, and a revolutionary way to increase income. Today emails are a fact of life, but they remain one of the most effective ways a business can advertise themselves; and this is why.
The Importance of Email Marketing
Email marketing is a vital component of your business’ marketing campaign, for both the onboarding of new customers and the retention of existing customers. According to a survey of UK marketers, in 2020 email marketing strategies had a return-on-investment of £46 per £1 spent – In other words, an ROI of over 4000%. This makes email marketing perhaps the single most effective marketing method for businesses. It is also one of the most diverse marketing techniques, as a visual marketing medium with which you can directly introduce customers to your brand, mission, and products. It’s simply a matter of leveraging that medium in the right way to draw in customers.
Email Marketing Techniques
In order to guarantee the highest ROI possible from your email campaign, it needs to be robust, and well-tested to boot. There are various techniques you can utilise to ensure its success, both ahead of and following initial release. One such technique is A/B testing, whereby two different iterations of an email are sent out to different selections of your customers. Their metrics are measured and compared according to key performance indicators (KPIs), giving you a clear idea, of which one is the better performer and what design or content ideas you should run with in future campaigns. Rather than an occasional technique, A/B testing should be a constant process by which you fine-tune and perfect your emails for your business’ needs.
One of the more important KPIs to track in A/B testing is click-through rate, or CTR. This measures how many people “click through” from a specific part of your email – whether it is a simple hyperlink out from your content, a button, image or even a call to action. CTRs are represented as a percentage, being the percentage of times clicked through that particular link over the total number of recipients – it does not measure unique visitors, however. The average overall CTR for all businesses is 7.06%; an increase in your CTR represents above-average performance, and ultimately an increase in in custom.
Design and UI for Your Email Campaign
Of course, the KPI gains for which you seek with testing can be found in altering your email campaign’s design, and user interface. Emails can be customised in HTML, and the various platforms that allow you to create and send marketing emails are tools for drafting an email from HTML. As such, you have the capabilities of the coding language at your disposal, enabling you to craft engaging email designs. Some chief things to include in order to see progression in your KPIs are buttons – in this context, interactable objects which click through to various calls to action.
Such calls to action might be: “shop now”, to direct potential customers to a specific page in your online store after reading about a product in your email; “redeem points”, as part of an effective loyalty program which awards points for purchases or repeated purchases; and “unsubscribe” – an unusual button to include, but an important one nonetheless. Including an unsubscribe button is the law in the UK, but signposting it clearly can signal to customers that you are an honest brand, and not a spam merchant.
