The science of writing an email that converts is nothing more than writing an email that gets opened. If your email doesn’t get opened it never has a chance of converting.
Email marketing is quite powerful. Obama’s digital election campaign raised $690m in donations from email marketing campaigns alone.
Of all the forms of contacting someone email is the most personal. Research by ExactTarget suggests that 91% of consumers check their email daily and 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email.
Also, 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message.
Let’s see how we can write emails to achieve maximum conversions.
1. Your Subject Lines Should Not be an Afterthought
For most marketers subject lines are an after-thought. For the successful marketers subject lines or headlines come first.
Joseph M. Juran stated the Pareto’s principle which says that 80% of your results come from 20% work. Out of every 100 people who read your email subject line only 20 will open to read the copy.
If your headlines suck you’ve already lost 80% of the war.
According to Oli Gardner (Unbounce) the average person gets about 100 mails a day.
Another interesting stat is that 64% of people open an email because of the subject line.
The subject line is not only about the subject but also about the description and about who sent the mail.
The chances of your email being opened when you have a dull subject line are close to zero.
Adam Rifkin’s analysis of social media posts reveal that headlines with action words or verbs get more clicks.
See how precious space is wasted conveying vague, generic information.
This is one key mistake which even big brands aren’t exempt from.
Here’s how to make the maximum out of that space.
It’s very simple to make this change.
The first sentence of the mail you send makes up for the description of the mail.
To make the subject more interesting change the first line and remove generic information.
Humor works. How would you react if you got an email with the subject line-“Shall I pick you up at 7?”
You’d probably assume that it’s from a friend or family or if you never made any plans for the evening you may think that it was sent by mistake.
It was from Influitive an Advocate Marketing firm and here’s a deep analysis of why such mails work.
2. Subject Line Length and Words Used
“Over six billion of the emails we studied showed little or no correlation between performance and subject length. Mailchimp”
As subject line gets longer, nothing happens to the open rate.
What About the Words Used?
Mailchimp studied the subject lines of approximately 24 billion delivered emails.
Words that implied urgency had higher open rates. Words like “urgent” and “important” really got the attention of the reader.
Of all the words that conveyed a sense of Urgency, the word “urgent” showed the highest open rate.
People act when there is a sense of urgency. Subject lines spelling the end of an offer tend to work very well.
While saying that something is a limited time offer creates a sense of urgency and your subscribers take action.
In a test which pitted creative headlines against clear headlines these were some of the email subject lines.
“Subject lines written creatively included:
Aweber’s Awesome Anthony A.
Getting Earth-Friendly Beyond Email
Threadless’ Frequency Alert: Hot or Not?
Subject lines written with clarity included:
Grow Your Email List 99% Faster: How One Site Did It
43 Free Animated GIFs For Your Email Campaign
Email Timing: A Look At 6 Marketers”
Source: MarketingSherpa
The mails were sent to more than 45,000 subscribers and the subject lines written with clarity generated far more response, open rates and shares.
Clarity works but that doesn’t mean that the headline itself should give everything away.
The headline should give away enough information to pique curiosity but not quench it.
It should entice the reader to click to find more.
Personalization Works
Mailchimp found that even though the use of first name and last name is not common, it had the largest positive impact on open rates.
I had signed for a back link monitoring service sometime ago and had almost forgotten about it. But then this email came. It was from the CEO of the company and it looked very personal.
An email from the CEO a little while after signing up really generates a warm feeling.
When sending company emails adding the name of one of the team members can boost open rates. I have seen a service called PeoplePerHour change the names of people who send mails on a weekly basis.
Isoconer an eCommerce site that sold boots and umbrellas used an email marketing system to send personalized emails to its customers based on their behavior on site.
The result was 7000% increase in email driven revenue.
3. How Does Timing Affect Email Conversions?
Mailchimp sends over 300 million mails every day. According to their data more email opens occur on Wednesday and Thursday. More people open emails at night and the best sending hours are 2 pm to 5 pm.
They also suggest placing a particular link in the mail multiple times to increase the number of clicks for that link.
However, it can vary from industry to industry and shouldn’t be taken as a set guideline for sending emails.
Instead, you can do A/B split tests and find what works best for you.
4. How Segmentation Improves Email Conversions?
Segmented campaigns produced better email newsletter performance. The open rates were higher, the click through rates were up and bounces lower.
One such example where a company had success with segmentation was Artbeads. The Marketing team from Artbeads wanted to test sending targeted emails.
For their test they had many ideas.
They could either target a segment based on the recency of purchase, the frequency of purchase or by how much the customer had spent.
They finally ditched the first two ideas and went with the monetary factor and decided to send emails to subscribers who had done one big purchase in the past.
The number of subscribers in that category was only 10% of the whole lot.
The results were astonishing.
- Open rate: 20.25%
- CTR: 4.36%
- Conversion rate: 0.71% (conversion defined as “purchase”)
Overall, segmentation delivered a 208% higher conversion rate.
The truth is even if they hadn’t segmented they would have got almost the same results, since the same email are going to everyone including the 10% of big buyers.
But sending irrelevant emails to a large group may cause people to unsubscribe and mark the emails as spam. Even worse, they can stop paying attention to the mails.
Segmentation, on the other hand is a remedy to these problems.
How to Segment Properly?
There are quite a few challenges to segmenting your list properly.
“If someone is not segmenting, then they are leaving money on the ground. There is gold in segmentation; diamonds.” , says Wendy White, Senior Marketing Strategist, Global Media Division.
You need to start collecting data on your subscribers in order to help yourself and you may start with these places:
1. Subscriber preferences center.
2. Your Email Service Provider’s tracking data
From the ESP tracking data you can find information such as the purchase activity of the subscriber, email preferences like html/text, preferred topics, email opens etc.
Once, you have segmented the list, start sending test messages to these small segments.
Based on the response you get, form newer segments and send more targeted emails.
5. Why Should You Have a Single CTA?
Marketers like John Chow often repeat the CTA one or two times throughout the email to drive attention towards it. Moreover, they don’t ask readers to do a lot of things in one email. The CTA is singular and unique.
Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School says that when too many choices are given it rarely makes more people choose things.
Having tested her theory in an Upscale luxury store she found that when 24 varieties of Jams were placed on the aisle only 3% of the people bought one (even though it attracted a larger crowd).
Comparatively, placing just 6 varieties of Jams caused 30% of the people to buy the Jam.
More links doesn’t necessarily imply more clicks or conversions.
The fewer the links, the better it is.
6. Short Copy Versus Long Copy
Daniel Burstein set up a split test for the emails announcing the call for entries for MarketingSherpa’s 7th Annual Email Marketing Awards.
One was a very long copy and included every minute detail like the exact number of detail of prizes and why there was no entry free etc.
The second mail was shorter, just had the necessary details with a quick link to the CTA.
When the results of the test came it was seen that the email with the shorter copy received 100% more clicks to the main and secondary CTAs.
7. Why mobile email optimization is important?
Litmus states that over 48% of mails are opened on a mobile device and 75% of consumers are highly likely to delete emails they can’t read on smartphones.
Should I say anything more?
Realizing that up to 65% of their customers open their mails on a mobile device was eye-opening for Deckers, a footwear manufacturer.
In 2012, the created a desktop version and a mobile version of their mail. Having segmented the subscriber list based on past opening habits and devices, they finally sent the mails.
They did a good response for that.
Seeing the success, they decided to make responsive emails and sent those to subscribers of one of their footwear brands called Tsubo.
From the A/B test they found a 10% increase in click through rates and 9% increase in mobile email opens.
Concluding thoughts
Marketers are using more email today than they were three years ago. But email marketing may not yield results, or yield less than stellar results if a few things are not taken care of.
Knowing what makes a reader open a mail, what kind of words excite an action, the timing of the mail that pushes open rates through the sky was not possible before.
But with advanced metrics we do now.
Making use of this data to send better emails and targeted emails will give a great ROI. Good luck.
