Right now there’s an interesting trend developing in the world of email marketing. Email open rates have increased substantially. According to Epsilon, they’ve gone from 22.4 percent in 2010 to over 30.8 percent today. That’s great news for companies that depend on email marketing to sell their brand. Unfortunately, however, click through rates have declined. They started at 6 percent back in 2010. But they’ve steadily declined to 4 percent today. Many commentators blame this trend on the fact that mobile platforms. Consumers now prefer to use mobile for shopping and responding to emails. But content has not yet been fully optimised for mobile. And this is harming click through rates.
If you don’t want to be a part of this trend, here’s what to do according to the data.
Targeted Deals
Targeting your customers based on the products that they actually want to consume boost click through rates. You can take your click-through rate from an industry average of 4 percent to a stunning 7 percent using this method.
However, to do this, you’ve got to be a little clever. For instance, you’ve got to be able to record each user’s clicks and purchases. And then you have to set up a system where they only receive email marketing that’s relevant to their recent purchases. A good online marketing agency should be able to advise you on how to do this. It’s not simple. But some standard personalisation tools can help.
Using Customer Name
It might now sound like much of a game-changer, but using the client’s name in the email title is important. MarketingSherpa recently conducted some research on the matter. It showed that including the customer name boosts click-through by a whopping 17 percent.
What’s amazing about it, is that it’s such a simple change. Instead of writing “new iPads on sale now,” online stores instead wrote, “[customer name], new iPads on sale now”.
Personalisation increased open rates too, but only by about a third as much as it improved click through rates. Thus, using a person’s name seems to have a significant impact on customer engagement.
Include Video
Wistia decided that their content was a little dull and needed sprucing up a bit. So they decided to trial the use of video in their marketing. They began by seeing what would happen if they embedded video in their newsletter. Incredibly, newsletter videos increased clickthrough rates by over 300 percent. Emails with videos also dramatically increased the amount of sharing of their content on social media.
Getting in front of the camera, therefore seemed to matter enormously. Wistia recommends that businesses include a call to action in the corner of their videos. Grabbing customers while they’re interested is an important strategy.
Images
Many experts advise against using images in email marketing. The reason? They can slow load times and put customers off. But a case study on car deal finder, UnHaggle, suggests that images might be important after all. UnHaggle started using images in emails and saw click-through rates soar by over 378 percent. Now that’s pretty good.