Email marketing is a unique combination of low cost and high returns.
If you’ve taken some interest in email marketing, it’s unlikely you’ve missed this fantastic piece of statistics: email marketing offers an ROI of 4400%.
The big question, however, is what’s your own email marketing ROI?
If you’re nowhere close to the magical figure of 4400%, congratulations, you’ve got a lot of room to improve your results.
How you can improve your email marketing performance
Instead of trying to improve your email marketing as a whole, it’s better to break it down into important components and improve each component separately.
There are two advantages to working this way:
- You pay more attention to details
- You know which change produced what results
Let’s break down email marketing into four distinct areas. Each of this area, when improved, contributes to the success of your email marketing:
- Better landing pages
- More subscribers
- Clean mailing lists
- Pre-send testing of emails
Now we’ll take up each of these four areas to discuss how you can work on them to achieve a better ROI.
1. Build better landing pages
Landing pages can be a huge topic to fit into just a handful of paragraphs. However, here’s the minimum you need to know when designing or improving your landing pages.
How well your landing pages perform will largely depend upon your answer to the following questions every visitor has:
- I’m interested in ‘X’. Does your website have ‘X’?
- Lots of sites have ‘X’. Why should I use your ‘X’?
This ‘X’ is your product offering: a course, a pair of shoes, an e-book, the trial version of a software, a pack of herbal tea, a certain piece of information… anything.
Your landing page is the visitors’ first impression and interaction with your brand, so make sure you please your visitors. Make sure they see your best side – in all likelihood you won’t get a second chance.
Landing pages can also be pop-ups you place on your website or email links. It’s important to keep your landing pages and pop-ups jargon-free, convincing and direct for your visitors.
Here’s why.
Let’s say you run an online store for kitchen appliances, one of which is a knife. You know what exactly a utility knife does. Your visitors don’t.
Don’t make it difficult for them to find the knife by asking them convoluted questions or asking them to tick off eleven uses of the knife before you can show them what they’re looking for. Make it easy for them to easily locate the product.
Next comes the question of pop-ups: how will you use them?
There are different types of pop-ups and each pop-up has its own unique strength. Understanding pop-ups in detail will tell you how to use pop-ups on your website.
Pop-ups are mostly used to build a mailing list. It’s important you give your visitors a good reason to sign up.
Example: Neil Patel
Provided you use pop-ups in a non-intrusive, helpful manner, they can bring you wonderful results. The key, as always, lies in testing what works and what doesn’t.
2. Work on getting more subscribers
To many marketers believe that the subscribers are only needed for more traffic – and hopefully more business.
That’s half the story.
You need more subscribers to a wide range of reasons. One of which is for your email success.
Growing your email listing helps to increase your chances of leads. Leads are potential customers that can become short or long term buyers of your brand. More subscribers aren’t just a number you get to brag about, it the opportunity to see potential revenue and a community of people to build brand loyalty with over time.
Here are some of the many ways you can attract more subscribers:
- Create free-plus-gated content: Create great content and keep a part of it gated. Have readers subscribe to your newsletter (or course, or whatever) in exchange of the gated content.
- Design a quiz: Invite your visitors to answer a quiz and offer to share the results and explanations to those who subscribe.
- Add a CTA to your podcasts: At the beginning and/or at the end of your podcasts, invite listeners to sign up so that they don’t miss anything you offer.
- Offer a trial period: Let visitors try your product in exchange of their email address.
- Keep your sign-up form short: You don’t need any information beyond their name and email address. Check out the below image of the signup form that QuickEmailVerification uses.
Need more help with growing your email list? Try these 25 Easy Tricks for Creating Email Lead Generation Campaigns You Need to Know.
3. Maintain clean email lists
Having a big mailing list is good, but seasoned marketers will tell you that’s not enough.
A mailing list with poor quality email addresses hurts your deliverability – many of your emails will land inside the Spam folder instead of the regular inbox. Your Sender Reputation suffers because of the email ecosystem begins suspecting you’re a spammer.
The ideal solution to this problem is to clean your mailing lists regularly. An email checking tool will remove expired, disposable or otherwise undeliverable email addresses from your mailing list. If you’re wondering why verify email addresses, remember clean list is one of your surest bets to improve deliverability.
At the end of the email verification, you get a clean list that is not only safe to send but will also give you a much better inbox placement and practically zero hard bounce.
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As mentioned earlier, many email addresses die each year when people quit jobs or move to another organization and so on. As a result, it’s a good idea to clean your list of email addresses every year.
4. Test emails before you hit Send
Even if your mailing list is as small as 100, you can’t afford to make mistakes. That’s because just one slip ends up being visible on 100 screens!
In other words, every mistake you make on the email gets multiplied by the number on your mailing list. That’s why you simply can’t afford to make mistakes in your email. This is where you want to check and double-check your emails before you hit Send.
Here are some of the important things to check before you send emails:
- Do images (if any) render properly?
- How does the email render on different email clients?
- Are all links within the email working right?
- Is the copy of the email spammy?
- Are there any issues when you view the email on hand-held devices?
- What’s your sender IP reputation?
- Do you have your SPF and DKIM records in place?
- Is the CTA button or link easy to locate?
- Does the CTA button work right?
- How good is the Subject line?
Before you hit send here are 7 Things To Test Before Sending An Email.
Try A/B Test your emails, it allows you to see what’s working and what’s not. For example, if your test results say headline option 2 is better than option 1 there’s the likelihood that your readers would prefer that option. You must use your own judgment regarding how to use the results.
Conclusion
Just like all other marketing channels, email marketing involves experimenting, measuring and improving. That’s why the details matter when you’re trying to improve your email marketing campaign performance.
Begin by focusing on building better landing pages and improving your pop-ups. Your next goal is to get more subscribers without forgetting the fact that the quality of your email list will be critical. Make sure to regularly clean your mailing lists. Finally, test your emails before you hit Send.
About the Author
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Mayank is Partnership Manager at QuickEmailVerification. In addition to the exciting world of email and email marketing, he enjoys solving math puzzles.
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