Email retargeting connects rich customer data to email addresses allowing you to attract customers back to your website. For that reason, collecting email addresses on your website helps expand the reach of an email retargeting campaign and improve your existing email marketing strategy.
Consider these facts: On both desktop and mobile devices, working adults report spending over six hours a day checking email. There are three times as many email addresses as there are social media accounts. Email users bring 17% more value per conversion. Over the past 10 years, email has produced higher returns on investment than all other marketing channels—with an average ROI of 38:1.
Email marketing drives higher returns than other marketing channels. It’s also 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Yet, while it continues to lead among other marketing channels, it also misused by a lot of marketers.
Email requires thoughtful attention to detail in order to drive sales. With email marketing making a comeback, it’s especially important that marketers take advantage now and optimize the best they can as more and more companies continue the march towards automation.
Six Steps to Improve Your Email Retargeting
- Make Sure Your Emails Come from a Person and Not from a Company
The identity of the sender is among the first things your customers see when an email hits their inbox. We are 15–35% more likely to read emails from a person than a company.
Set your next email up for success by changing your sender details to follow this format: [First Name] [Last Name], [Company].
According to AdRoll, the gender of the sender also influences the open rate. Their tests show that female names have higher open rates than male names, and names with two syllables perform better than names with one. It is easy to try sending the same email or similar campaigns from different male and female employees from your marketing team and see which one generates a higher open rate
- Create Impacting Subject Lines
With 35% of email recipients opening email based solely on the subject line, it’s an important asset in the email marketing process. The average American adult receives 90 business emails each day, so it’s easy to miss a message—especially if the subject line is on the boring or formal side. Subject lines should grab your recipients’ attention and give them a preview of what to expect.
In general, subject lines should be short (i.e., no longer than six to 10 words), action oriented, and urgent. Studies show that subject lines posed as questions perform better than those that are not.
- Use Concise Copy for Your Offer or Promotion
Email copy should be concise. Think of what you’re trying to say in as few words as possible. In other words, email marketing is not the type of medium for you to be vague and wordy.
In our experience, we’ve noticed that a short and catchy headline, followed by 3-4 bullets describing the benefits of the offer, followed by an enticing call-to-action always generate more clicks.
Some marketers like to use the Hemingway App to have the text editor highlight sentences that are too long or confusing.
- Use a Compelling CTA
There’s nothing more inefficient than receiving an email with a lot of information, offers, event promotions, etc. yet there’s no CTA to follow through or find out more.
The CTA is the reason you’re sending your email. It should tell your reader explicitly which step to take next and give them a heads-up as to where they’ll be directed.
Overall, we prefer a CTA that follows these principles:
- Concise and Enticing (e.g., “Save My Spot” instead of “Select Available Dates”)
- Including confusing or misleading CTAs (e.g., “You can book now here, or start a free trial for your membership”)
In the above case, if you’re targeting members and non-members, it is best to create to separate CTAs, one for existing members and one for non-members.
- An Image is Worth a Thousand Words
Yes, it is a old cliché but there’s a reason why it is a cliché: it works! Adding attractive images to support your offer will dramatically improve your click rates. However, it is important that the same images also appear on the landing page after the viewer clicks on your offer. Using different images for the ‘before & after’ will create confusion and decrease your conversion rate.
When using images to support your email design, keep in mind these basic rules:
- Keep image files small, compressed, and optimized to ensure that your email can load quickly.
- Be sure that images do not make up more than 30% of an email—otherwise, your message may land in the spam folder.
- Share important messages and CTAs in text as well as images. You’d hate for your customers to miss out on what you’re sharing if the images don’t load.
- Always Create a Landing Page for Each Email Campaign
Finally, one of the points that most experts do agree on is the fact that the home page of your website is very rarely the best landing page to send your campaign visitors. In fact, it is rarely that any of your website’s existing pages would be the right choice. Typically, any website page is built for the casual visitor, for visitors that are browsing around trying to learn more about your business, your location, your offers, etc. That doesn’t mean that any of those web pages answers any particular question or includes what the web searcher is looking for after they click on your ad.
Landing page optimization is solely intended to improve conversion rates. However, make sure that you have the correct understanding of its value so it doesn’t outbalance and reduce the results of your email marketing campaign. As the name implies, the “landing” page is the final destination for your campaign and your only chance for a great first impression.
If you need assistance reviewing or implementing your Email Marketing campaigns, be sure to contact our MGR Team for a free initial consultation.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR).
Sources: AdRoll, Acxiom
