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Have you been spending hours strategizing, planning, crafting, and sending emails, only to come up short? It can be incredibly frustrating, not to mention time-consuming.  

But, email marketing is both an art and a science. It must be visually appealing, engaging, crafted with high-converting copy, personalized, and much more. Sounds like a lot, right?

Don't worry, as we've created an ultimate guide that'll help you boost your existing email marketing efforts and skyrocket conversions.

Table of contents: 

1. Know Your Audience
2. Write a Killer Subject Line
3. Get Personal
4. Keep it Short and Relevant
5. Create a “Swipe Folder”
6. Include Irresistible CTAs
7. Send Out Follow-Ups
8. A/B Test Your Emails
9. Optimize for Mobile
10. Measure Your Efforts

Know Your Audience

Knowing who you’re writing to is extremely important if you want your campaigns to be successful. After all, how can you sell your brand and services if you don’t even know who your audience is or what their pain points are? 

So, get to know your audience. Build buyer personas through interactions with customers, web and social analytics, and current customers, and learn what drives your customers to seek your services. Only then will you be able to write a compelling copy that makes them want to click and convert. 

But, before you start building personas, be sure you’re complying with GDPR. You must make sure that you gain your audiences’ consent to process their data and that they accept to receive your emails. You can include acceptance buttons on your website, in the first email you send, on landing pages, or any other place you feel would be relevant. 

With that in mind, you must also include an “opt-out” or “unsubscribe” option in your emails. All this is to avoid your emails from being marked as spam, having your account blacklisted, or even becoming exposed to legal lawsuits.  

Write a Killer Subject Line

Having a powerful subject line is the first step to ensuring your email gets opened - and therefore, it’s crucial you nail it. The subject line is the first thing the recipient sees, and if it isn’t relevant or interesting, it won’t get opened. 

So, some best practices to keep in mind when creating subject lines are: 

• Avoid clickbait: as it will result in your emails being marked as spam.
• A/B test different subject lines: this practice can help you discover which subject lines drive results and lead to more conversions.
• Use power words: use at least one in your headline. These are words that command attention and incite action. Words such as “best,” “increase,” “now,” are some great examples. 
• Be mindful of length: try to keep it on the shorter side, around eight words. 
• Include incentives or discounts in the subject line to encourage the recipient to open it.

If you need a little help crafting something catchy, tools like SumoMe’s Headline Generator and CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer can help you write killer subject lines that’ll guarantee a click.

Get Personal

Much is said about the value of personalized content in marketing, and it’s done so for a reason. Personalized content can help you stand out in the recipients’ inbox, make your email more likely to be clicked, build trust, strengthen customer experience, and more. 

In fact, studies show that click-through rates are 14% higher, and conversion rates are 10% higher when emails are personalized. So, why skip out on the chance of gaining these impressive numbers? 

And, personalization goes beyond the copy. Another way you can personalize your email is by segmenting your audience. Think about it, your audience landed in your mailing list, most likely, from different sources and for varying reasons. So, it wouldn’t make sense to send the same email to all these people. 

Make your email relevant to the audience by segmenting them into different groups; based on their interests, pain points, needs, resources, or anything else. Only then, you’ll be able to craft highly-relevant, personalized copy that will resonate with their pain-points and needs. 

Keep it Short and Relevant

Before you start writing your email, take the time to define its purpose. Doing so will allow you to understand the goal that you are trying to accomplish with your email marketing campaign, create an email that aligns with it, and ensure your email doesn’t become too long and irrelevant. 

With your goal in hand, introduce yourself to your audience, and get to the point. You only have a few moments to convert your readers into leads, so don’t waste it beating around the bush. Instead, use actionable language, such as “download” or “buy,” avoid industry jargon, and focus on the benefits of your features, as well as the problem your email can solve. 

"Content builds relationships. Relationships build on trust. Trust drives revenue." 

- Andrew Davis

Make every word count, and most importantly, proofread your work before you hit send.

Create a “Swipe Folder” 

A swipe folder is a collection of tested and proven ads, emails, and graphics that you can get inspiration from, use as a reference for great ideas, and rework for your brand. 

There are plenty of sites online that you can use to collect ideas. Check out websites like Quora, Reddit, and Buzzsumo, to discover the topics piquing people’s interests, as well as great examples. 

You can even take it that one step further by checking out the competition. Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters to see what they are doing to get attention. If it works, adapt it to suit your campaign goals and audience needs. 

Include Irresistible CTAs

Call-to-actions are one of the most important components in email marketing campaigns. They play such a vital role in your emails, as they work by grabbing your audience’s attention and encouraging them to take action and begin the conversion process. 

These simple yet effective buttons help brands keep the conversation going with customers and help you understand performance metrics. Even more, they direct audiences to your home page, product page, content resources, or any other page that provides audiences with another opportunity to learn more about your brand and convert. 

So, when it comes to implementing your CTAs, experiment! Make sure the CTA you have chosen is making the right impression and delivering results.

Send Out Follow-Ups

Did you know that you have a 21% chance of getting a response to your second email if you didn’t get a reply to your first? 

These days, sending one email doesn’t cut it anymore, so be sure to add following up to your campaign strategy. There is no clear rule of thumb when it comes to how much you should follow up. However, it’ll depend on two things: 

1. The purpose of the email,
2. If the recipient is a warm or cold lead.

Generally speaking, if you are sending out a cold email, that is, to someone you have never had any contact with, then we recommend you follow up no more than six times.

However, if you're reaching out to someone that you have interacted with in the past and never received a definite "no," then follow up until you get an answer. 

But, be sure to space out your emails so that you don’t become mistaken as a spammer. 

On another note, by following up with your subscribers, you’ll be able to showcase your care about user experience when it comes to your brand and services, as well as establish a relationship with your audience. Win-win.

A/B Test Your Emails

Your goal is to ensure the recipient of your email will open it, right? Then that means testing, testing, testing - and to do this you're going to need data. 

Collect and analyze data to do with your email marketing campaign performance to determine what is working and what needs to be improved. This data could be to do with anything from headlines to sending times to copy, CTAs, and more! 

Tip: we recommended testing one thing at a time. Whether that’s a color, CTA placement, a header, or anything else, as this provides you with the opportunity to discover if the change made a difference and which option performed better. Once you’ve determined which element worked best, move onto the next part of the campaign that you would like to test. In short, focus on testing one thing at a time until you come up with the best performing-email that drives clicks and conversions. 

Optimize for Mobile

The explosion of mobile has changed the marketing game, so much so that most people actually check their emails on mobile - 1.7 billion users, or 60%, to be precise. Thereby royally outnumbering those that open their emails on desktop. 

Therefore, to best support your email marketing efforts, you must ensure that you optimize your emails for mobile. And, you can do this by:

• Pay attention to your pre-header text. This text is the first line of your email that is visible, as a preview, in the inbox. It acts as another opportunity for you to incentivize your recipients to click.
• Bring CTAs as far up your copy as possible. 
• Keep emails between 600 and 800 pixels in width and stick to single-column layouts (if your email is more text-heavy), so the reader can better focus on what you have to share. 

Remember, it’s not enough to implement these changes. Always test across multiple devices to ensure your changes work. 

Measure Your Efforts 

Beyond A/B testing, how do you know if your campaigns are driving the results you seek? Want a hint?  It begins with Google Analytics. 

Google Analytics, Hubspot Marketing for businesses and other internal analytics tools can provide you with deeper insights into your campaigns. You can discover anything from opens and clicks on emails, to which visitors landed on your website from your emails, to isolating visitors to learn their behaviors, to understanding which campaigns led to a higher rate of conversions - the possibilities are endless!

Sounds great, right? And it's simple to set up. All you need are UTM parameters. 

Include UTM links in your email campaigns to differentiate between different emails, clicks, components, and more.  

Simply by implementing these parameters, you can learn which campaigns are performing better, as well as how to improve any future campaigns by focusing on what's working. This reliable data will make all the difference between email marketing campaigns that fail and those that exceed expectations.

Final Note

Email marketing is one of the best tactics you have up your sleeve when it comes to increasing conversions and growing your business. 

The tips laid out in this article will help you to optimize your email marketing campaigns and get the most revenue out of your marketing strategy - and we’ve just touched the surface!

Want to dive deeper into email marketing? Our experts would be happy to hop on a free consultation call to discuss all things email marketing and more. Reach out to us today to discover how we can help you skyrocket your conversions.