Email Marketing: Sending High-Performance Emails

There are many ways to communicate with customers nowadays, but email is not going away as an effective marketing tool. Make your email marketing stand out and play a larger part in how your business attracts and retains customers.

Sending high-performance emails is all about sending the right email to the right person at the right time. That involves including high-quality content, segmentation of your CRM, and workflows in your email marketing strategy.

High-Quality, Contextual Email Content

You know what it’s like to get emails that don’t apply to us or from brands we have no relationship with. You think, “Who are these guys?” and mark them as spam. While email can be a great way to inform and engage, poor-quality emails or ill-timed emails can be a turnoff.

Copy

In your email content, speak to a target audience and use personalization tools (not involving any private medical information, of course). It can be a simple design, and a friendly tone can make up for flashy graphics like in this example:

Each email should only have one goal and one purpose: get the reader to do __[insert call-to-action]___. If you have more than one call-to-action (CTA), your email will be less successful.

Not that you can’t include related, secondary information that your reader might need, like in the Warby Parker example below. Note that they emphasized the most important information with different sizes and colors. They include a link for optometrist services, something their customers might need to shop for glasses!

Images

When you use photos and graphics, make sure they are high-res images that load on any device or platform. Graphics and images are an important part of email design, so make sure your readers can see them!

Images are what people who open your email see first, not the copy. Whether you’re selling athletic gear or medical equipment, images get people interested enough to click.

Segmentation in Email Marketing

Segmentation will help you zero in on a particular audience and avoid generic emails that people will overlook. The more specific the characteristics of a segment the better because you can tailor emails to be exactly what the recipient needs.

In your CRM, divide your customers by persona, location in the conversion life cycle, type of clinic they work at, etc. Create emails or workflows for multiple segments to speak to those people in a unique way. They will trust that what you send them is valuable and relevant to them.

Email Marketing Automation: Workflows

Ready to make life easier for your marketing team? Email marketing automation, or workflows, are series of personalized, contextual email campaigns that are sent automatically based on actions taken or criteria met by a group of contacts. It’s a way to nurture and engage your existing contacts without having to make thousands of repetitive emails.

For example, if a visitor on your website fills out a form, they would automatically be put on a list to get an email with information about the next steps. If they follow through, they’d be placed on another workflow for new customers. If they didn’t respond to the first email, they would get another email as a reminder with the same CTA, and so on.

This may seem like a daunting task to set up at first, but workflows are effective at taking care of contacts’ needs and saves you time in the long run.

A/B Testing in Email Marketing

One last tool for sending high-performance emails is A/B testing, also called split testing. Think of this as an experiment: you have one element of your email you want to test (the variable), so you make multiple versions of the same email with the only difference being the variable element. You send each out to half of your email list and analytically compare the performances of each version.

If you want to test your call-to-action, for example, come up with two different wordings. You may want to explore how your audience reacts to a more clever, comedic tone. Look at conversion and click-through rates to determine which CTA was more effective.

Remember: everything else about the email must be identical, or your results could be skewed by factors other than the variable. Even with perfect testing, there still could be other reasons for people not converting. Make sure to look at sample sizes and other circumstances to determine the statistical significance of your findings.  

With its limitations, A/B testing can elevate content quality, improve deliverability, and lead to better relationships with your readers.

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