If you’re looking for easy ways to improve your existing email strategy, you may be wondering:
- What should you be analyzing and why
- What small changes you can make right now
- How to create a strategy to continue upgrading your emails
A short audit of what you’re currently doing can reveal easy to find opportunities you may have missed.
Many companies overlook these email optimization strategies because they aren’t aware of them OR they just don’t have the time to implement them.
Here are some easy to implement email optimizing strategies you can use RIGHT NOW to start improving your email sales results.
Remember: Not everything works with every email list. Testing, adjusting, and analyzing will help you hone in on what your subscribers respond to.
If you like this post, you may also like:
- 37 Easy Email Marketing Strategies You Can Use Today
- 9 Common Email Marketing Mistakes – Which Are You Making?
1. Analyzing Open Rates
Finding what works and what doesn’t means paying attention to subtle differences and being really intentional with your email marketing strategy.
The biggest factors affecting your email open rates will be:
- What they’ve seen prior to this moment
- Are they segmented
- Subject lines
- From lines
- Preview text
What Have They Seen Already?
What your subscriber has seen up until this point has a huge impact on the open rates.
Here are a few examples of what I mean:
- An open rate for an opt-in delivery email is going to be much higher than an open rate for a regular newsletter
- If you’ve been sending sales emails every day, your open rates will likely go down over the course of your promotion
- Sending an email to a highly targeted segment of your list will result in much higher open rates
Consider what they’ve seen before they’ve opened this email.
For instance, if they haven’t received an email in a while, you can expect low open rates and high unsubscribes.
If you have a freebie delivery email, then they jump right into the newsletter sequence, this may be confusing for them.
You’ll always want to consider the client/customer experience with every email, every sequence, and opt-in form.
Your welcome sequence sets the stage for a good client (or potential client) experience up front.
2. Analyzing Click Rates
Click rates can give you detailed insight into what your subscriber truly wants.
Analyzing click rates can tell you if your calls to action are working or not and what kind of content your subscriber wants more of.
The general rule is to give each email ONE job and ONE call to action.
Pay attention to the topics they are clicking on most.
If you’ve given them too many links to click on, you’ll likely see a drop off as they go down the email.
Test out using passive links (adding links passively in the top part of your email and throughout the body), then analyze your results to see how your subscribers responded.
Although these are all best practices, it’s always best to test things with your audience. I’ve seen big bloggers have lots of success with sectioning off their emails and adding all kinds of different links to paid products.
I believe that if they had the rule of ONE job in place, they would have more success, but I can’t know for sure. They may have tested out all sorts of strategies on their audience.
How you can improve your business with this strategy:
It may seem tedious to analyze your results, but consider how it helped one of my clients add a new stream of income to her business.
After reviewing click rates for a few months, we identified the top 3 topics readers couldn’t get enough of.
My client then developed low ticket digital products to sell passively in her welcome sequence and added new streams of income to her business by selling them on the site, in her welcome sequence, and weaving them into her email strategy.
3. Analyzing Email Length
You can read all you want about email marketing, but the #1 MOST important strategy is testing what works for your audience.
Test if your audience likes long, short, or medium length emails. They might like a mix of the three, or they might prefer short, snappy emails.
Test out different formats to see what they like.
Do they like stories, do they prefer tips, do they like when you just ask them a question?
What emails are they engaging with the most (through opens, clicks, and if they reply).
4. What Types of Subject Lines Work and Why
Testing out different subject lines will help you figure out what you’re readers respond to.
Connecting the dots between who your audience is and how they engage with your emails takes a bit of time.
Start with best practices, and test from there.
How this works in practice:
I have a client who has a much older audience than we originally thought. They are 60-80+.
We discovered this by analyzing email results, writing emails that engage with the audience so they are encouraged to respond.
We tested different types of subject lines with her audience. We found that they were very confused by subject lines that are designed to invoke curiosity (a best practice taught by top email copywriters).
We had to get VERY specific or she would get all kinds of responses with confused subscribers.
We use a personal approach with her email marketing strategy, so emails look like they come from a friend. This age group truly believes that she is writing to only them in some cases. We have to keep this in mind with subject lines.
Once we figured this out, we got more specific with her subject lines, and her open rates ticked up consistently. She now gets tons of positive responses from her audience and they adore her.
This is a good example of how user experience is incredibly important.
Although she had a good open rate, her readers were confused.
Always remember that your subscriber is a person with problems that need solving. They aren’t just an email to be opened.
6. Which Opt-Ins Are Converting?
If you have several opt-in forms and only one is converting, you’ll want to analyze why.
Is it the copy?
Is it the placement?
Is it a pop-up, or exit intent pop-up?
This can help you optimize the other opt-in forms for better conversions.
Pro tip: It’s a good practice to optimize one thing at a time and keep track of what you’ve adjusted.
Optimizing your email marketing strategy doesn’t always lead to better conversions.
Sometimes you change something and despite it being a best practice, your audience doesn’t like it. You’ll want to know exactly what you changed so you can change it back or try a new strategy.
This is another great example of how testing with your email list audience is more important than any other strategy.
7. Welcome Sequence Audit
Whether you only have a welcome email or an entire welcome sequence, you’ll want to analyze the results.
Pro tip: Make a welcome sequence, not just one welcome email. Your welcome sequence sets the stage for your entire relationship, don’t let that opportunity go to waste.
It’s normal to have declining open rates as your subscribers move through your welcome sequence.
Do you see a big drop off somewhere?
This could indicate a bad subject line, or perhaps they didn’t like an email and bounced from your email list completely.
It’s possible they had a frustrating experience with your email content or the format of your emails.
Always make sure to test your own sequence as if you’re a subscriber. This can help you patch any leaks in your sales funnel strategy.
What Are You Analyzing?
Have you been analyzing your emails?
The email optimizing and analyzing strategies mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg of what I do for my clients.
If you’d like help with your emails, visit my services page to see how I can help you optimize your current email strategy.
