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The 5 T's of Email Marketing
Whether it’s a single email or an entire campaign, building an email that your audience will convert with, let alone open can be a daunting task. There is a huge variety of factors that go into making a successful marketing email, but thankfully many of them can be boiled down into 5 critical steps.
1. Targeting
Building any email starts with knowing who you’re building it for, so it’s important to set yourself up for success right from this first step. You likely already have an idea of who your audience is in a broad sense (and if you don’t this is a great time to find that out!), but for truly compelling messaging it’s often best to dig a little deeper.
Try taking a moment to determine who exactly within your audience is the best fit for the message or offering each email is trying to convey. Segmenting your customer base using important attributes like demographics or company roles can help inform the rest of the process and increase open rates, click rates, and ROI.
2. Timing
An email someone will actually open and engage with is one that’s relevant to them exactly when they see it, so timing it to your audience is crucial. Consider the current challenges the audience segments you’ve previously outlined may be facing, and align them with the content of the email to craft messaging that’s in tune with what they’re looking for.
To maximize open rates, you can get even more specific. Try to determine when your audience is most likely to be checking their emails and schedule accordingly. Developing an email timeline around your customers can help keep your campaigns from getting buried in.
3. Tailoring
Personalized touches make it easier to connect with your audience and lead to much more effective campaigns. These personalizations can be as simple as including elements and imagery you know your target segment responds well to, or as specific as utilizing info from email lists to include reader-specific touches, such as beginning an email with their name.
And these design elements shouldn’t be limited to just extra flourishes, the entire foundation of the email should be created with user specifics such as device type and customer behavior in mind. Emails should look visually pleasing on mobile devices, use images that impress, and maintain a clean design. Other design considerations include thoughtful design and integration with social media.
4. Testing
With so many options for customization, it can be hard to narrow down which approach will actually give you the most bang for your buck. When that happens, our advice is simple: Try them both! A/B testing, or sending multiple versions of an email to similar audience targets, is an incredibly strong tool for gauging the effectiveness of a new email strategy or refining an existing one.
This is another area where the tailoring and targeting we discussed earlier come into play. While sending a more general email to the majority of your audience, you can develop a more targeted email to one or more subsets to gauge what level of personalization will make a real difference in your overall strategy.
5. Tracking
Ultimately, the best way to find out what works and what doesn’t in any email strategy is by staying on top of each email’s performance, and there are several ways you can do that. Most common email platforms will include in-depth statistics for key metrics such as open rates, conversions, and even what parts of the email users interact with the most.
Conveniently, one of the best ways to track how well your emails are performing goes hand in hand with boosting performance. Emails should include compelling calls to action that are clear and bold. A call to action that users follow through on gives you direct insight into how compelling your messaging is as a whole, making it just as important for tracking as it is for conversions.
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