4 rules to follow for successful email campaigns

Kristina: How can a strong email data strategy help brands better profile customers and behaviors?

Aaron Beach, Data Scientist, SendGrid: Current email providers like Yahoo and Google are using algorithms to track email engagement and determine if your email marketing campaign will be delivered to the inbox or the spam folder. Instead of fixing the problem by using data to enhance and add value to their email marketing campaigns, many marketers are trying to find loop holes in the algorithms which allow them to fake a good email so it gets delivered. However, just because an email was delivered doesn’t mean that it was opened or clicked on.

Kristina: Is the worth of email list members skewed?

Aaron: As shared in the [Winterberry Group] report, more than $9 billion of the $11.5 billion will go into perfecting mailing lists because marketers realize the importance of good email sending. There has been an incorrect assumption for some time now that the most engaged recipients are just 2 to 3 times more engaged than less engaged recipients. This assumption directly leads to bad sending strategies. The truth is, the top 10 percent of engaged recipients are 100 times more likely to engage in your email marketing campaign. By recognizing this, marketers will see that sending strategies can’t be one-size-fits-all. For example, if you’re a daily deal sender and a specific customer on your email recipient list doesn’t engage with your email within 60 days, then we recommend you remove them from your email lists to prevent being marked as spam. To do this automatically, you need to build a model to determine engagement frequency, which, is one way to bake a data-driven culture into a marketing organization.

Kristina: What are the four rules marketers need to abide by in email?

Aaron: Maximize the subject line: Subject lines of six to 10 words are most effective, yielding open rates of 21 percent, while subject lines of 11 to 15 words secured only 14 percent open rates.
Don’t overuse images: If an image is used in an email marketing campaign, make sure it’s sensibly balanced with at least two lines of text per picture, to reduce the risk of emails being classified as spam.
Focus on formatting: Today’s email recipients access their accounts via a range of devices, so it’s vital to cater to smartphones, tablets and desktops to avoid being directed to spam. Include a plain text version in HTML email and make use of responsive design templates.
Get personal: Personalizing messages can see an uplift of 20 percent to email open rates. Why go through the hard work of asking for a first and last name during the sign-up process if you don’t use them?