Unlock the secrets behind email marketing creative improvements
The title of this blog post has probably made you wonder what on earth I’m going to preach about this time. There can’t be lots of hidden and unknown approaches to improving email performance when looking at your creative in isolation, can there?
Well, no. There aren’t actually, and I’m feeling a little bit guilty about teasing you into reading on, but although I’m not going to be revealing something all new, shiny and cutting edge, I do think that the following will help you to improve the performance of your email marketing creative.
Test
That’s it. Test. If you put the right elements of your email design to test, you can see the difference within one campaign. The challenge is in figuring out what to test, and what is likely to deliver the clearest insight and biggest improvement, quickest. I recently spoke about how to challenge your call to action buttons and text links to improve click-through rates for eCircle, and if you are generally happy with your overall design, this is a great place to start testing new ideas.
Layout is another great thing to try and a/b split test with. You don’t even have to have two completely separate layouts – just test the top two or three sections, because this is where you will generally win the most clicks and it’s this area that needs to work the hardest.
Lastly, another quick way to get your audience engaging with your emails a little bit more, is to make subtle image changes based on prospect data. For example, if you know the gender of each subscriber, you can tweak things for them accordingly so they’re likely to be more relevant for that group. So, if you’re promoting high-definition televisions as your main offer, why not have an image on the screen of something like a football match for males, and something else that’s likely to be more appealing for females. I’m not suggesting you stereotype – everyone’s different, and you’ll never capture everyone’s interest like this, but having a stab at what each prospect might be more likely to engage with is worth trying. Test it out, and let me know if you see any changes.
There you go guys, I don’t feel so bad now about the title now.
Nice, I was searching for something along the lines of this. I was wondering, do you think newsletters are still an great way of marketing online? Does anybody still use them successfully and actually get readers?
Cheers!
Sarah
[...] Storey’s blog gives some ideas about what to test , and as an email marketing creative it gives some great [...]