The complexity of email marketing doesn’t stop people sending over two billion emails sent out daily. This volume can be bad news for both the recipient and the email marketer – the recipient is tries to eliminate SPAM, by sending unwanted messages to their JUNK or SPAM folder, while the marketer’s email may end up in one of those folders or if not, go unseen.
Unfortunately, valid email messages are sent to the SPAM or JUNK folders. Even email that is personalized, relevant, and expected.
So, what’s an email marketer to do?
Send deliberate, planned, and tactical email messages.
- Deliberate in what you want to say
- Planned on when you want to say it
- Tactical to arrive at the inbox at the right time.
And you need to be organized enough to create and send the right email for the situation: which translates into a well-crafted timely personalized relevant email message, sent in a responsive template with the right fonts, colors, and images that can easily be changed at a moment’s notice. This only adds to the complexity of email, or does it?
It doesn’t when you test your emails before you send for:
- Appearance
- Broken links
- Image download speed
- Content Rendering
- Delivery to the inbox or junk folder.
Testing is controlled by the marketer, the way you test, how many variables you can use at once, and how often, is up to the Email Service Provider (ESP) you use.
Did you know most ESPs have testing limits, like MailChimp, therefore the complexity of email marketing may increase if the marketer has set testing limitations.
The marketer should test for the most opens with changes in:
- Design
- Content
- Timing
Testing with a wizard *is easy, however, to do it correctly test one variable per test, over a large sample of addresses. Try to do this at the same time of day, and the day of week, to keep the variable to a minimum.
When the variable is a template, that may take a bit more work. Ideally, the template should be flexible enough to add extra images, and change the font, style, and length of the message. In other words, it should be scalable, not complex.
Complexity used to be a word not associated with email marketing. Email campaigns, normally created for the reader with a call-to-actions that the marketer includes to produce a reaction, are now based on what the subscriber does or doesn’t do. However, there is a lot a marketer can do to ensure the success of a campaign without complexity added to the mix.
With the right processes, marketing team, and service, you can turn complex into easy.
*Dundee’s email https://mailinglistservices.com/ has a wizard to test emails. Split-testing gives you the ability to send different versions of a message to random subsets of your mailing list, then compare the results to see which version is most effective. This type of testing eliminates any demographic or action-based bias that could alter your results
