Every business needs to take another look at its marketing strategy from time to time. That includes specific tactics within the overall strategy. In this case today, I’d like to discuss why might consider re-envisioning your e-mail marketing plan.
There are a number of reasons why might consider revising your e-mail marketing strategy. Today, I’m going to talk about three:
- Your list is outdated
- You’re not engaging your audience well enough
- Your click-through rate (CTR) is too low
Maybe It’s Time to Update Your E-mail List
When is the last time you took a look–a really hard look–at your e-mail marketing list? I recommend scrubbing it once a year. Lose your dead weight. Go through and find all the e-mail addresses that have not opened a single e-mail in the last year and just delete them. If someone hasn’t read your e-mail newsletter in a year, chances are, they’re not going to start now. An alternative is to set an upward limit on that. For instance, you might unsubscribe anyone who hasn’t opened up an e-mail more than five times or less than 5% of the time and not once in the past quarter.
Set your own criteria, but scrub your list and unsubscribe any outdated e-mail addresses. Once you’ve done that, look through your e-mails and determine which ones have elicited the best responses. Produce more of those types of e-mails.
What to Do if You Aren’t Engaging Your Audience
If you find that your e-mails aren’t leading to more conversions, it’s because your audience is not being engaged with your content. It’s time to re-think your e-mail content strategy. Consider conducting a poll to ask your audience what type of content they expect from you, but be prepared to deliver that type of content once you can narrow down your audience’s interests. This is simply a matter of producing a better type of content for your audience.
How to Improve Your CTR
Your click-through rate is determined by how well you write your subject lines. If you find that your audience simply isn’t opening your e-mails, then you should take some time to learn how to write better subject lines.
CTR is important for knowing how well you’re appealing to your audience before they read your content. Writing engaging and enticing subject lines for your e-mail marketing campaigns is one of the most important things you can do for your business. I recommend writing several subject lines for your e-mail campaigns for a while and A/B testing them. Once you figure out the formula for writing subject lines that attract attention, stick to the formula.
