What makes an email marketing campaign suitable? How do you determine that a marketing campaign is capable of bringing in leads and turning your brand around? While we can talk all day about creating a marketing strategy, we barely explore how to measure its effectiveness. What are you doing right or wrong? What could you be doing better?

Principles of High Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing can benefit your business in more ways than you can imagine. However, the strategy differentiates your brand from others and helps you stand out. This article will explore some of the top principles of a high-performing email marketing campaign. 

Design

The importance of email marketing design can not be overemphasized, as it benefits your marketing campaign in numerous ways. You could have the best content with a top lead magnet but getting the design all wrong could ruin the entire thing. Your design is one way to eliminate clutter and communicate clearly to your readers. Over 70% of companies use email marketing to communicate with their audience today. This means your readers might be getting a lot of emails, and design is one way to stand out from the crowd. 

Portray your brand’s personality through your unique design and ensure it is responsive and optimized for mobile. Your subscribers are more likely to respond to you when you get it right with your design. This will not only increase your open and click-through rate but will also improve your lead conversions over time. 

Relevance

Let the entirety of your email campaign be about the value the recipient would get from it. Everything you do in the email must scream relevance, so you have to be deliberate about your content. The average person receives over 100 emails per day and subscribing to your email list could only mean one thing — they expect something of value in return. Bear this in mind while you build your email marketing strategy and campaigns and carefully ingrain relevant content into each email. 

To ensure that your email is relevant to your recipients, you can take further steps to apply email segmentation. With this, you can divide your mailing list into different segments based on common characteristics such as geographical location, gender, age group, and purchasing history. This helps with email personalization and ensures you’re catering to the needs of each subscriber and not just sending a blanket email.

Personalization

Emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line have been found to have a higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t. You can also generate up to a 760% increase in revenue with a segmented and personalized email, as they have a 26% higher chance of being opened. 

There are many ways to go about email personalization but that would depend on your brand and preference. The commonest one is to use the first name of the recipient, so the email is addressed directly to them. They would get something like “Hello {FirstName}” rather than a random “Hello there”. If you have other information about your client, you can also use that to your advantage and make the emails feel personal and not random. 

Easy Communication

One common mistake a lot of email marketers make is that they try to communicate with their audience using email lingo. While it’s understandable that you are sending an email and would want to sound as formal as possible, you can also switch things up. Emails shouldn’t always be like advertisements and announcements. Try to communicate as you would on social media. Many times, we get creative with our posts on social media and make them as enticing as possible. You could do the same for your emails, rather than the usual long and boring content. 

Use Killer Visuals

The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and taking advantage of this in an email marketing campaign can change the game. You can use quality images, videos, infographics, animations, and GIFs. However, use the 60:40 rule for text-to-image ratio; this means making your text at least 60% of your email and your visuals 40%. Creating this balance helps improve the readability of your content. 

Beyond including visuals in your emails, you also want to carefully choose what visual you use. It’s always best to include an image that perfectly depicts or aligns with what the email is about. This will help the reader connect the information in both the text and visuals, which can further inform whatever decision they make at the end of your email.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is not often explored in email marketing but it could go a long way in helping you determine what’s working and what’s not. This can be tricky, considering that there are a lot of elements to consider such as the click-through rate vs. click-to-open rate, split testing, design copy, and subject line among others. However, if you have a large database, you should constantly test your emails to recognize patterns and improve performance. 

A/B test helps you compare two or more versions of your email. Pick one aspect at a time and focus on small differences. You need to set a clear goal before starting any test; know why you’re doing it and what you intend to get from it. You can use this calculator to check how statistically significant your A/B test is. 

Bottom Line

Building high-performing email marketing campaigns is not a walk in the park, so you need to be intentional about it. The principles highlighted here have been proven and tested across many brands and if your campaign hasn’t been effective, you are probably not doing it right. The first step to creating something superb is by setting your goals and also having a concrete email marketing strategy to work with. 

At MailDrip, we have a goal to ensure that every brand gets the most from its email marketing campaigns. As a result, we have created a free template to help with the email marketing strategy for your brand. To get a copy, all you have to do is fill out the form below.