With 2015 just around the corner, it’s time to evaluate how your email marketing strategy worked in 2014 and what needs to change for the New Year. For most marketers, figuring out what to change is the biggest hurdle. From technology to trends, marketing your business is an ever changing model, while constantly tweaking your effort to drive the best results and largest ROI.
I looked into my crystal ball this morning and below are the most important items I saw for 2015.
- Mobile: Make sure all of your email creatives are responsive. What is responsive email design you ask? In a nutshell, a responsive design is an email creative that adapts to the viewer, whether desktop, tablet or mobile. Have you ever received an email on your smartphone and have had to scroll left and right to simply see the entire email? If you have, it wasn’t responsive. Over the past year, I have seen thousands of email creatives, some awful or really bad to others that were truly awesome. Ensuring your email designs and creatives will display correctly for the email client or viewer a recipient is using is the most important starting point for the New Year, if you’re not doing it now.
- Image vs. Text: Believe it or not, most consumers, 65% prefer email creatives that are primarily image based versus text. Considering that people are more visual in nature, when it comes to grabbing their attention, a good main image will grab their attention, while a short text headline or paragraph should briefly explain what you’re trying to sell or promote. A well balanced, attractively designed email should be both text and images. Remember, don’t try and sell or close in your email creative. All you are trying to do is to get the person to click the link and end up on your website, which should do the selling for you.
- Timing – When to Send: Just because you send an email doesn’t necessarily mean the recipient will read it at that moment. Obviously, if they are sitting in front of their computer when you send your email campaign, it will have a better chance of being read at that time or soon thereafter. Sending your email during normal business hours, considering most people work, is your best option. We have found, from our internal statistical data that Thursday and Friday, between 11:00am-3:00pm, seems to be the best time. It appears to generate the largest open rates and best conversion rates for B2B campaigns. Consumer or B2C campaigns seem to generate the most attention when sent on Saturday. Why this is, I’m not sure, but the numbers seem to speak for themselves.
- Testing: This is probably the second most important factor. Without testing your email creative to ensure it is displaying correctly in all email clients, including Outlook and mobile devices, you’ll have no way to be sure your creative won’t explode, because of some small coding issue or be shown garbled – formatted improperly. To get a better understanding of how this can impact your campaign, you should read; “How Many Employees at LinkedIn Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?”
- Email List Quality: Hands down, sending to valid and deliverable email addresses is the number one, most important aspect of your email campaign. You can have the greatest offer, an unbelievably awesome email creative and even if you’re giving away free Gold Krugerrand’s, if no one knows about it, because the emails in your list are dead or undeliverable, you’ll have no takers. Email list cleaning and validation should be on the top of your list for 2015. Ensuring that your email lists are cleaned and validated at least twice per year is essential to delivering your email marketing campaigns and improving your marketing ROI.
Conclusion: When considering any changes to your email marketing strategy for 2015, it’s vitally important to take all factors into consideration when making any changes or implementing any new ideas. Make sure to completely vet your ideas and test them to ensure your changes will be effective and worthwhile. One size does not fit all when it comes to email marketing, frequency, types of offers or figuring out when to send to get the biggest bang for your buck.