What Makes Your Email Marketing Campaigns Perform Better? 7-Factors

Did you know that email marketing has an average Return of Investment (ROI) of 4400%?

That’s pretty impressive if we must say so ourselves.

But just sending emails won’t guarantee you more conversions or high ROI. If it did, every brand that sent emails would be a roaring success. But, in reality, emails get sent in spam, your followers unsubscribe, and email campaigns do not affect sales.

If you find yourself questioning the success of your emails, then fret not, as we uncover the factors that make your email campaigns perform better.

How To Measure Email Marketing Performance?

Before discussing the golden elements that result in high-yielding campaigns, it is imperative to know how you quantify performance.

How performance is monitored ultimately depends upon a company’s management. However, if you’re clueless, the following metrics are good starting points.

• Deliverability Rate

The rate at which emails get sent to your audience’s inbox relative to the total emails sent.

• Open Rate

The rate of emails that get opened by your audience as compared to the total delivered emails.

• Click-through Rate

This metric represents how many readers clicked on a provided Call To Action (CTA) button in relation to the total delivered emails.

• Conversion Rate

The percentage of readers who performed a specific goal action, like registered to an event or made a purchase,  relative to the total delivered emails.

• Return on Investment (ROI)

The percentage of profit realized of a campaign as compared to its cost.

7 Factors That Improve The Performance of Email Marketing Campaigns

So what makes your email campaigns perform matter? We have compiled a comprehensive list after analyzing multiple email campaigns of different nature.

For your ease, each section contains actionable information that you can adopt to improve performance instantly.

1. Clean Email List

The saying, ‘The more, the merrier,’ doesn’t apply to email lists.

A clean list ensures your emails get sent to a) valid email addresses and b) to people who are actively interested in hearing from you. Regularly auditing your email list will ensure that your deliverability rates are high and unsubscribe rates are low.

Actionable Information:

‘How do I maintain a clean email list?’. Easy; just follow the below methods:

• Use double opt-in forms to ensure people (not robots) want to stay updated with company news. We know that such forms can be annoying, but hey, they’ll give you the most accurate data.
• Benefit from an online email verification tool. The latter will quickly differentiate legitimate email addresses from fake ones.
• Provide an unsubscribe link in all emails you send. Don’t worry about the subscribers you lose – they wouldn’t have purchased from you in the first place.

2. Responsive Format

This point might seem obvious, but so many people get it wrong. If you want to improve the performance of your email marketing campaigns, the design needs to be responsive.

According to Yesmail, emails with a responsive format generate 55% higher Click-to-Open rate than their counterparts. The majority of your audience views your emails over their mobile devices. If the email looks distorted on a smaller screen, you might just kiss your conversion goals goodbye.

Actionable Information:

• Designing responsive emails is no rocket science. We suggest using mobile-responsive HTML email templates, like Unlayer’s email marketing templates.
• Create emails with a single-column layout. The latter will help in vertical scrolling on mobile screens and won’t look cluttered.
• Keep your email copy less than 200 words and use a maximum of 4 pictures. This will ensure your email isn’t long enough for your audience to get bored.

3. Segmented Audience

Let us pop the bubble; if you’re sending the same email to your complete audience, you’re doing it wrong. Would you like to receive an email for a new makeup launch when you’re a guy with no interest in it?

Segmentation is a vital step for creating personalized experiences (more of this in the next section). According to Campaign Monitor, marketers who execute segmented email campaigns witness an increase in revenue by up to 760%.

Actionable Information:

• Less is More

There’s a misconception that you have to create multiple groups of people with similar characteristics when segmenting emails. Such a strategy will not yield the results that you’re aiming for.

It is suggested to make fewer segments that have a sizeable audience each. The latter ensures you reach a reasonable number of customers without spending too much time designing and implementing email campaigns.

• Break the Norms

Many email marketers think when segmenting an audience, they just need to look at the basics, like gender, age, and social class. However, there is much more to segmentation than such criteria.

Ideally, you should be dividing your audience based upon their interaction with your marketing campaigns, purchase behavior, and position in the sales funnel.

4. Personalized Experience

Remember the last time you purchased something from a generic email? As per a study by Janrain, 74% of people are frustrated with messages that have nothing to do with them.

The truth is that people like being acknowledged. When they are addressed in emails and campaigns revolves around their interests, their willingness to purchase increases.

Personalized messages are great for igniting an impulsive purchase. When somebody says your name in mid-conversation, you suddenly become more attentive. The same logic applies when sending promotional emails.

Actionable Information:

• Personalizing subject lines is the easiest thing you can do right now. People decide which emails to read, ignore, and delete through the subject line. When their name is added to the subject line, they become more compelled to open and read it.
• Use dynamic content templates to customize emails without spending too much of your time and money. These templates show different email content to different audience members based on the criteria you define. For instance, females are shown the women category in a clothing line, and males are shown the men one.

5. Well-designed Emails

If your emails aren’t well-designed, be ready to witness low conversion rates.

With inboxes cluttered, emails need to be impeccably designed so that they instantly grab your audience’s attention. Don’t take us wrong – emails need to look good, yes, but everything you add needs to have a strategic purpose behind it.

Actionable Information:

• Use a variety of visual content. In addition to images, make use of GIFs, videos, and gamification elements.
• The content should be precise and persuasive. The font style should be legible and should reinforce the message being communicated.
• Emojis in subject lines are a proven way of getting higher opens. Just make sure not to overdo them and use relevant emojis.
• Apply the 60/40 rule when designing emails. Feature 60% textual content and 40% visual content.

6. One Main CTA

How do you expect to increase click-through and conversion rates when there’s no call to action?

There are two CTA sins in the email marketing world; 1) not including any and 2) adding only one. There should be one main CTA, but it needs to be followed by secondary ones.

People are busy; they don’t have time to read long email newsletters. Your strategy should be to convert them at each stage. Feature the main CTA on the top or bottom of the email and add the secondary ones throughout the email body. However, don’t include more than 4 CTA buttons in an email.

The following is an example of how CTAs can be stacked within an email:

Actionable Information:

• Use CTA buttons instead of embedded links. Not only do these links appear shady, but they get lost within an email’s content. The CTA should easily stand out without your customers having to look for it.
• The CTA copy should be short and convincing. The focus should be on the value being offered to customers.
• Use high-energy colors, like red, for the CTA buttons. These colors get the reader excited and willing to click on it.

7. Value Sharing

It’s 2024; people don’t like being sold to. They reward those brands with their time and money that provide value over forcing a sale.

‘But how do I promote a sale?’ You can be promotional and valuable at the same time. The focus needs to be on what you can do for your customers, not the other way around.

Actionable Information:

• In addition to sending promotional emails, share newsletters that feature product tutorials and tips from industry experts.
• Get in touch with customers to know what they consider as valuable. Send survey emails or have one-on-one discussions; your goal should be to know exactly what your customers want.
• Focus on building strong relationships with your audience. This will boost opens since your audience will be more compelled to read when they have a connection with your brand.
• Add a CTA (or more) even in the value-centric emails you design. Your customers may want value, but you want sales.

In a Nutshell

Email marketing is a fool-proof way of getting more conversions and revenue. But, only if you know the art of designing high-performing emails. Follow the above-discussed factors to yield a greater return on your email marketing campaigns.