Email Optimization—5 Ways to Give Your Email Campaigns a Big Boost

Looking for some easy and effective ways to give a big boost to your email-marketing campaign performance? Then check out these five strategies that are sure to improve your open and click rates and help keep your subscribers engaged.

1. Add video to your email messages. In a previous NewsLever article, we demonstrated how using video in email can result in a significant lift in campaign performance metrics, such as open and click-through rates. But to be sure all subscribers can access the video content in their emails, marketers must provide videos upon click-through, rather than embedding video in the email.

   Thanks to the launch of iOS 10 and its support for HTML5 video, however, 2017 may be the year that video in email really takes off. What does this HTML5 video support mean for marketers? Likely a significant portion of your users will now be able to view videos without having to click away from your emails. But be sure to provide a fallback for your subscribers who use email clients that don’t support HTML5 video (e.g., a link to a site such as YouTube to view the video).

2. Animate your email content by using graphic interchange format (GIF). GIFs are the easiest and most reliable way to add animation to emails, because most desktops, mobile devices, and email clients support them (with the exception of some older versions of Outlook).  In addition, GIFs are a visually fun, creative, and highly effective way of increasing engagement with your email subscribers. For example, in a Dell case study presented by MarketingSherpa, adding a GIF to the email message increased click rate by 42%, conversion rate by 103%, and revenue by 109% compared to quarterly campaign benchmarks. Yet 70% of marketers never or rarely use GIFs, according to the Litmus 2016 State of Email Design.

   Click here for information about how to proficiently use animated GIFs in your email marketing.

3. Serve up some style in your alternative (ALT) text. Because many email clients block images by default, using ALT text to label images in emails is considered a best practice. Otherwise, many of your recipients will see a preview pane with only empty boxes. And any copy that is part of the images, including calls to action, will also be blocked. Yet, in a 2016 Litmus survey, only 51.5% of marketers said that they always use ALT text.

   In addition to crafting copy for your ALT text that is clear and descriptive, consider adding some style by changing the font, color, size, and weights of the ALT text with inline CSS. This is another great way to help grab your subscribers’ attention and entice them to download the images.

4. Optimize your preheaders. Along with subject lines, preheader text—that snippet of text that appears right next to or below the subject line in most email clients—can have a big impact on driving opens and clicks. But if you’re like most marketers, you don’t optimize your preheader copy. In fact, a recent Litmus study showed that only 17.3% of marketers test their preheaders.

   For tips about what to include in your preheaders to help maximize your campaign performance, be sure to check out this FulcrumTech article: “Email Preheader Best Practices.”

5. Use responsive design. As we described in a previous NewsLever article, responsive design involves using design techniques to provide an optimum email-loading and viewing experience across various platforms and screens. Considering that most emails are now opened on mobile devices, responsive design is becoming an essential in email marketing today.

   A recent study showed that brands using responsive design in all of their emails achieved a 55% higher click-to-open rate for mobile devices and a 23% higher click-to-open rate on desktops compared to brands not using responsive design in any of their email campaigns. Plus, 45% of consumers reported that they unsubscribed from a company’s promotional emails because its emails or website didn’t display or work well on their smartphones. Yet a 2016 study showed that 50% of brands still don’t use responsive email design.

Want to take your email campaign performance up a notch? FulcrumTech can help you stay on the cutting edge of email marketing, including implementing the latest and greatest best practices that will drive opens, clicks, and conversions. Contact us and get started today!

Other Articles You Might Like

• Video in Email—How to Get a Lift in Your Email Campaign Results
• How to Proficiently Use Animated GIFs in Your Email Marketing
• Email-Marketing Optimization—7 Tips for Targeting Millennials
• Email-Marketing Optimization—How to Retain More Customers and Radically Grow Sales