Email is consistently rated as the most popular and the most used application on the internet. For B2B, it is the preferred primary means of business communication. For B2C, it is the preferred channel for permission-based promotion messages.

Email maintains its top position as a channel for delivering high ROI (Return On Investment) and cost-effectiveness. Through email marketing, companies get the chance to communicate one-to-one with their customers or prospects, meaning that an effective campaign has the potential to lead to high conversion. Almost three-quarters (73%) of companies rate email marketing as 'excellent' or 'good' for ROI*.

*Source: Adestra-Email Marketing Industry Census 2016 (614 respondents)

By email marketing, businesses can not only proactively keep in contact with existing customers, but also explore potential business opportunities. The ultimate goal of email marketing is to bring more visitors to your website, and then to convert them to your loyal customers.

Optimize your email marketing campaigns

Making full advantage of the potential benefit of email marketing is essential to drive revenues and build long-lasting relationships that go beyond the sale. We have some key points for you to optimize email marketing campaigns:

1. A/B testing for opt-in subscription form

A/B testing is an essential weapon for online marketers, especially in email marketing.

Sometimes we would like to evaluate how changes on website could affect email marketing performance. For example, at which position should a subscription form be placed on the website? Which color of the "subscribe" button should be used?

Through A/B testing, we can find which changes can let visitors be more willing to subscribe, and thus bring more new subscribers.

2. A/B testing for email marketing campaign

Subject and content of an email marketing campaign are the key determining factors of open rate and click rate. For instance, we can have two versions of email subject line and email creative for a new product launch email campaign and send to two groups of subscribers. Even if the open rate and click rate slightly increases, ROI of your email marketing campaign could be greatly optimized.

3. Ask your customers

One of the great advantages of email marketing is that you can conduct market research to your target customers. Whenever you are considering to promote product A or product B, you can conduct a simple survey and ask for customer feedback by sending bulk email. The customer preference is valuable for your product development and marketing direction.

4. Help your customers solve their problems

It is short-sighted to consider email marketing only as a promotion channel.

In regular email newsletters, you can give your subscribers and customers some advice to solve their problems. It is good for building a long-term relationship. As long as they find your advice helpful, they regard you as an expert in your industry. When they need related product and service, your business will pop up in their mind. This is suitable for both B2B and B2C email marketing campaigns.

5. Segment your subscribers

Some businesses are used to send product email newsletters to subscribers with the same standard email template, while some would sort out customers' recent purchase record and recommend similar products to them. Which kind of email marketing do you think is more effective?

The more precise your email newsletter is, the more effective your marketing campaign becomes. The key is segmentation based on shared attributes of your customers and subscribers. For example, you may group those customers who spend a fixed monthly amount, or those subscribers who click every products in every email newsletter.

There may be different segmentation criteria and result in different industries and different business models. However, once you have segmented your target customers, your email marketing campaigns can be more interesting and more relevant, which can boost sales eventually.

In your contact list, those subscribers who do not open your email newsletters could occupy your valuaconsume your effort and money. Therefore, it is necessary to manage your contact lists regularly.

On Reasonable Spread, you can search and clear those subscribers who do not open your email in a specifc timeframe, say, in the last two months. Keeping your contact lists "clean" can let your email marketing campaigns be more successful.

Spread is the first cloud-based professional email marketing solution with servers and data centre in Hong Kong. For more details, please contact us.