In the past month, we’ve looked at email campaigns’ trends – specifically for enewsletter – and what goes into a successful deployment. Your audience and the content is a common thread strung through all of the most successful enewsletter campaigns we analyzed. Understanding WHY your audience is active and engaged is helpful for strategy, but knowing HOW best to maximize on your audience list is what will ultimately lead to stronger performing email campaigns.
Know Your Audience and How Engaged They Are
Making sure your audience is up-to-date and engaged can be one of the most beneficial tips for audience targeting. Discussed in the previous email post, email algorithms take recipient engagement into account for whether or not the email will land in your customers’ inboxes. If your audience isn’t opening your emails, is moving them to the junk folder, or is unsubscribing from them, this can hurt your opportunity to reach audience members who may actually want to be reached. A good rule of thumb is to remove your audience members who haven’t engaged with your email promotions in the last six months. If you are hesitant to remove potential audience members, sending the unengaged audience members a targeted message to try to prompt interaction or spark interest is a tactic that can be used to try to resonate with this segment of your audience.
Another option to consider is dividing your audience into more specific demographics in order provide more tailored information to different groups of people. Maybe you want to be providing C-level customers different content than entry level or mid-management. If you’re targeting an audience for hospitality and travel, having two segments – one more focused on hospitality and one more focused on travel information may help to resonate with your recipients and help to increase interaction with your promotion efforts.
Use Previous Email Deployments for Learning Opportunities
When using an email deployment service for email promotions, there is a lot of analysis that you can do in order to gain insights on how your campaigns are performing. Analyzing helps to gauge whether or not you’re resonating with your target audience. In this email blog series, open rates have been the main point of focus. However, there is a lot more happening beyond whether or not the email is opened. What is the popular content once the email is opened? What time of day are most of your viewers opening the email at? Which aspects of the email are of interest to your audience? Where are people clicking? The reporting tools that Omeda has are able to answer all of these questions. If you’re sending out a weekly enewsletter to your customers, looking at which day of the week most people are engaging with it may help to reach your audience when they want you to reach them. Heat maps can show you the hot content that your audience likes, which can then guide which future subject matters you should be providing them. Take advantage of the analytics opportunities in order to understand your audience and most effectively engage them.While it may seem like a large time commitment upfront, it will help to save time and resources in the longrun because of more effective targeting.
Implement an A/B Testing Strategy
A/B Testing is a feature that Omeda’s Email Builder offers which allows you to test subject lines and/or email content against another. The purpose for doing so will allow you to see which returns the highest open and click-thru rates. Ultimately, it will help to achieve higher conversion while keeping leads and customers engaged with your campaigns.
Steps for a successful test are:
- Determine the number of splits or versions of your email you would like and create each of the versions.
- Identify your audience and designate the size of the test audience you would like to have.
- Define the size of the test audience and the winning metric for the campaign.
- With Omeda tools, once the winning threshold is reached, the higher performing content will be automatically sent to the rest of your mailing list.
This process will help to automate the winning content that is better resonating with your audience, allowing you to invest less time into targeting and identifying strong content.
Omeda has a variety of email automation services that are beyond simple deployment offerings. If you have questions or are interested in gaining more information, reach out to emailsuccess@omeda.com.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
