According to Avinash Kaushik, email marketing, if done right, "can be one of the rock solid workhorse of any company's marketing strategy." While there are hundreds of various email marketing providers out there (some of the biggest ones are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Amazon, etc.) that can do the job for you, it is fundamental to understand the basics of an email marketing campaign and the strategies to make it successful.
Mailjet, a real-time Cloud Emailing platform that provides full scalability and better email deliverability (whether it's marketing, notification or transactional), gives the following recommendations:
1. Acknowledge the deliverability facts
20% of legitimate emails do not make it to the inbox! That's a huge percentage! Lazy marketers tend to think that because emailing is not expensive, it is still worth doing it without improving the deliverability. However, let's do the math: a 200K contact list with a 20% of lost emails will have 40K people who do not get the message. Even with a conversion rate of as low as 2%, we end up losing 800 transactions. It is not a question of greed: there is no reason to accept such a waste of time and money!
2. Make sure you understand different email types
Emails can be divided into marketing, notification and transactional, and each of these groups has a separate optimization strategy:
3. Do not act blindly: always set objectives prior to your campaign
You should not only have access to the email analytics, but you should also have a tracking strategy and understanding of the essential tracking tools. You may know about open rates, clickthrough rates, bounce rates, spam, etc.; however, you must know exactly how they are calculated given your specific scenario?
4. Optimize deliverability
Small steps can lead to outstanding improvements. Here are a few simple and efficient optimization tactics: a) use double opt-in lists; b) identify and take out the "dead" segments; c) make sure you're using SPF & DKIM authentications; d) watch your image/text ratio; e) optimize the wording and subject lines (no spammy words such as Viagra, cash, etc.). In addition, you should monitor your IP's reputation which partially depends on the factors listed above.
5. Leverage analytics & optimize now: it is never too early nor too late!
Do not be afraid of starting your email campaign optimization. You don't need to be a marketing genius and there are very simple steps that may drastically increase your revenue! A/B testing is an example of what you can do: send 3 different campaigns to 3 similar groups and then compare the results. You can also develop email notification functionality on your website to track specific user behavior (abandoned carts, incomplete goals, etc.).
Email marketing optimization possibilities are endless and to read more about them, you can download the Email Marketing for Online Retailers paper.
