On Friday May 29, 2015, Clic et Site presented the 3rd edition ofEMDay, the email marketing day, in Strasbourg. On the program: workshops, conferences and round tables to debate hot topics in email marketing. But what were the key points to take away from the day?
Emailing, one of the most engaging yet little recognized levers
Acquisition emailing is omnipresent in the Internet user’s conversion tunnel, and plays a role in the purchasing process at one point or another. Whether intended to inform or to sell, emailing initiates, guides or triggers conversion. In fact, it plays a part in at least a third of all conversion paths across all channels. The 3 main levers influenced by acquisition emailing are:
1. Display
2. Retargeting
3. In-text and Native So, when you feed emailing, you feed the other levers. They’re all intertwined, so it’s a holistic approach. Emailing is the 2nd lever with the highest engagement rate, yet it receives little recognition in a last-click model. It is therefore essential not to neglect its place and influence in the buying journey, to achieve better performance.
This day has enabled us to reinforce the best emailing practices that Effinity applies to ensure the success of its customers’ campaigns. Here are the 10 key points to remember:
- Ask yourself the right questions
Think about the interest of your campaign for Internet users. How do you generate interest? What are the objectives of your campaign? - Respect legislation and use clean databases
For a lasting relationship, respect legislation, only send messages to Internet users who have given you the right to solicit them (opt-in) and adopt good emailing practices. “Consent and commitment are the pillars of your deliverability”, says Guillaume Laché of NP6 Group. - Optimize your email deliverability
According to a study by Vade Retro1, 84% of emails are graymail (i.e. low priority) and 20% of legitimate emails are spammed. That’s why it’s so important to optimize your mailings so that they reach their destination. Managing your e-reputation, personalizing your mailings, segmenting your data or optimizing your HTML code are all actions you can take to improve your deliverability. - Target
Use predictive big data and machine learning to generate effective, targeted, high-performance campaigns! - Personalize your email with dynamic content
Personalizing your email helps to improve user engagement by systematically offering them the most relevant content, in real time. It’s all about making the content more appealing to the user, and adapting it to their immediate needs. Optimize your creative when the email is opened, with dynamic content that changes according to pre-established criteria (geolocation, contact, weather, times, social network news feeds, price or stock variations, etc.). - Be responsive because emailing will be displayed in 300 different ways
Today, your email will be opened on a mobile, a tablet and then a computer, and will be displayed differently whether it’s read on Outlook, Gmail or Orange… So you need to make your creative responsive so that it adapts to all these different media and situations. - Warning: some Internet users won’t see the images in your e-mail
Don’t forget that some messaging systems block images, so you need to add effective ALT tags and text to make Internet users want to view the images or find out more. - Using a good CTA (Call To Action)
“Learn more” or “I buy” will not give the same click-through rate on your creative. So it’s important to choose your Call To Action carefully and test it before sending your email to your entire base. - Test with A/B Testing: subject, creative, color, hours, CTA, everything goes
A/B Testing is one of the keys to success! Your preconceived ideas about emailing aren’t always the right ones! For example, you may perform better with a form on the left than on the right, or a subject line that’s too attractive may be out of sync with the creative and cause click-through rates to drop, etc. So take the time to test your creative. So take the time to test your creatives to optimize your response rate. Numerous tools are available to help you, but they are under-utilized due to lack of time and test & learn culture within the company. - Analyze and adapt to the market
Analyze the results of your e-mail campaigns to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and deduce a better strategy for the future. The market is constantly evolving, so keep your finger on the pulse for better transformation.
Relevance is a major factor in the success of emailing: it’s possible to halve the number of emails you send and still keep your revenues! So target, test, adapt and personalize your emailings. If you’d like to optimize your email campaigns, Effinity can help you design and produce responsive creative and A/B tests, as well as post-send analysis. So don’t hesitate to submit your projects to our dedicated team.
