If you do any form of email marketing, chances are you’ve been disappointed in the responses to your mailings. Why did nobody reply to my survey asking for feedback? You may have wondered. Or maybe: Why did none of my existing customers take advantage of our latest promotion? How about: Ouch, that’s a lot of bounces, why is that happening? It can definitely feel disheartening. I know, I’ve been there myself.
You’d be surprised at how many things can impact the key conversion points of your emails: deliverability (the chance of an email arriving in its intended inboxes), the open-rate (the % of your subscribers that open your email), and the click-through rate (the % of your subscribers that click a link in your email) of your email campaigns.
Some of these factors are:
- The reputation of your domain and IP address. If it’s a new mail server and you try to send a huge volume of emails right away, this can scare email providers. You need to slowly and consistently build up a solid reputation. If you’re using an email marketing service like MailChimp or iContact, you shouldn’t need to worry about this as that’s what you’re paying them for ;)
- Email validation systems (or lack thereof). Things like Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) are like “signatures” that tell email providers and ISPs that you are legit, and they can greatly increase your email deliverability rates.
- Subject lines. There’s a ton of case studies out there about the ideal subject line, but of course it really depends on your industry and who your subscribers are. What works for certain people might not work for others. But in general, shorter is better, don’t use spammy words, and try to make it personal.
- Image to text ratio. If you don’t have a lot of words in the body of your email, it’s recommended to add an image.
- And there’s a lot more…
We spent a lot of time analyzing the different factors that impact email open and click-through rates and using all this data, have developed a tool called Email Booster. Its purpose is to help marketers easily identify and fix problems that impact their email conversions.
Email Booster analyzes your email subject and tells you how to improve it, including a cross check against a massive database of words that can either help or hurt your conversions. It will look at your email body and check for bad code, spam triggers, valid hyperlinks, image optimization and more.
Here’s how it works:
-
Either paste the content of your email into a form, or hookup your MailChimp or Campaign Monitor (we’ll be adding more email providers in the future).
-
Email Booster goes to work analyzing the email.
-
You’ll get a report that tells you what can be improved, along with a score for each section and an overall score.
Here’s some of the results we’ve seen:
Before
After
(the 2nd campaign went to a subset of our list, like a split-test)
If numbers aren’t your thing, what we saw here was a whopping 340% open-rate increase and a 586% click-through rate increase.
While this tool is still new, and we have a ton of improvements planned for it, we’re very pleased with the initial results, and hope people will find it to be both easy to use and effective. We're also offering a special free trial of the tool for readers of the #EmailCRO campaign.
What are some methods you use to improve your email conversions?
