What is email optimisation and how do I do it?

8 min read

Email marketing is a valuable asset in your digital marketing arsenal. It ensures you stay in touch with loyal customers to keep them up to date with your business, let them know about upcoming events and special offers and – ultimately – remind them that you’re here and they should continue to spend their money with you.

There is a right and a wrong way to approach email marketing – and when you get it wrong, it can be really wrong. Not only can it impact your revenue, but it can also harm your relationship with loyal customers and potentially even lead to fines and long-lasting damage to your reputation.

This is why email optimisation should be a key component of your marketing strategy. You might already have an email list filled with customers, so how can you capitalise on that and send out relevant, timely and fully optimised emails to maximise engagement and revenue?

You need to do what you can to give your email marketing a much-needed kick up the backside and make sure you achieve the results you’re looking for. Whether you’re a newcomer to email marketing or a seasoned veteran, there are always ways to optimise. Yes, you might even be getting great results, but they could always be greater.

Below, we’re going to highlight some of the key ways you can optimise your emails and continue to build on your customer loyalty.

What is email optimisation?

Before we dive in at the deep end, if you’re new to digital marketing you might be asking what is email optimisation? To put it simply, it’s the improvements you implement to your email marketing campaigns to increase their effectiveness and efficiency. Doing this improves the customer experience, leading to better engagement, click-through rates and conversions.

Email optimisation could be something as simple as creating a more attention-grabbing subject line, for example:

Subject: Don’t forget about our summer sale! could be optimised to drive engagement and become Subject: Sale ends at midnight - order now for 20% off! which has a sense of urgency and gives instructions so the recipient knows exactly what to do and when to do it by.

The changes you can make aren’t always this obvious. It could be the design, the content, the tone of voice used, the date and time emails are sent, effective segmentation… the list goes on. And we’ll cover some of the biggest optimisations you can make below.

Why is it so important?

Email marketing is one of the best ways for your brand to keep in touch with loyal customers who have specifically opted in to receive communication from you. Email optimisation ensures those customers remain loyal so you can continue to grow your email list, decrease the number of unsubscribes, and increase your engagement, click-throughs and conversions.

Data shows that customers read brand emails for just 10 seconds, so you have to draw your customers in and show them the kind of content that interests them. And you’re only going to do that through regular optimisation.

Key email optimisation strategies

Email optimisation might sound simple, but if it was, every business would be sending flawless email communications to their customers and average unsubscribe rates would be at 0% (currently around 0.12%). So, there are always improvements that can be made to your strategy. Here, we’re going to cover some of the key optimisation strategies and let you know how you can give your engagement rates a much-needed boost.

Engaging subject lines

We’ve already touched on this above, but the importance of an engaging subject line shouldn’t be understated. It should be equal parts attention-grabbing and urgent, but also remain honest and fit your brand’s tone of voice. If it isn’t, you either risk getting lost among the mire of a customer's busy inbox, or worse, you get flagged as spam.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to an engaging subject line, as it depends on your industry and your customers. However, A/B testing can help you gain insights into what works and what doesn’t.

Ways you can consider optimising your subjects include:

• Personalisation (such as using the customer’s name)
• Keep them short and snappy so they’re not cut off
• Consider using emojis (if appropriate)
• Add a sense of urgency
• Address specific pain points
• Create a sense of mystery
• Increase the relevance
• Avoid clickbait
• Ask questions
• Don’t use spammy techniques (like ALL CAPS or excessive punctuation!!!!)

Send to the appropriate segments

Email segmentation should be high on your list of priorities, as not all of your email communications will be appropriate for everyone on your email list. You can segment your customers by demographics, geographics, engagement, behaviours, purchase history, cart abandonment and more.

Once you’ve segmented your users, you’re in a great position to start contacting them with super-relevant content. For example, you wouldn’t want to send an email to a customer in Scotland about a deal specific to customers in Cornwall – that’s something that will very quickly result in higher-than-average unsubscribe rates.

Segmenting your users is also something you should do to make sure you’re not inadvertently breaking compliance laws – not exactly exciting, but critical if you want to avoid landing in hot water.

Optimise your preview text

Preview text is the little bit of copy your recipients see before they choose whether or not to open or bin your email. So you should use it to your advantage and convince them that opening your email is worth their time and effort. This means, avoiding the temptation for something like, ‘How are you? Did you know more than 160,000 plastic bags are used second…’ Be succinct and convince them to keep on reading.

Similar to the subject line, there are plenty of ways you can optimise preview text to improve open rates:

• Keep copy concise and relevant
• Build intrigue and curiosity
• Highlight the value proposition
• Include a clear CTA
• Include personalisation
• Don’t repeat the subject line – add additional value

Personalise your content

With so many marketing emails landing in your customers’ inboxes, personalisation is critical if you want to stand out. Data found that 71% of consumers say personalisation would influence their decision to open and read brand emails.

Use the data you have at your disposal to improve the customer experience and make them feel like their business is valued and they’re not simply a walking wallet.

An effective way to manage your data is through Apteco Orbit, so you can access all your data sources and automate data-related tasks, to have fast and actionable insights. This can then be used to improve the personalisation of your emails.

Ensure you have engaging copy

Just because you’re sending content to customers on your mailing list, it doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to read it. In order to grip your readers and for them to engage with your email in a way that aligns with your campaign goals, your copy must be strong. Your brand’s tone of voice has to be clear and consistent with your website and social media content to ensure an omnichannel experience.

If you don’t already have one, make sure your business has a tone of voice and copy guidelines that highlight your brand values.

When it comes to email marketing you might have a lot to say, but you definitely don’t have a lot of words in which to say it. Keep copy succinct, clear and to the point. Tell your customers what they need to know, not necessarily what you want them to know. This can be tricky, but A/B testing is a great way to discover more about what resonates with your customers.

Include a clear call to action

Your call to action should be the most crystal clear part of your entire email because it’s why you’re emailing your customers in the first place. Whether you’re telling them about a limited-time offer, an exclusive webinar, a product launch or something else, let them know exactly what they need to do. There’s no point in hiding your CTA behind some vague anchor text – if you want your customers to buy something, tell them what they have to do to buy it.

Ensure the email is optimised for all devices

Around 43% of all emails are opened on a mobile device, so if you want to reach almost half your customers, make sure it’s correctly optimised. This means test, test, test – even if you’re strapped for time or you’ve done it a million times before. All it takes is one incorrectly formatted image or a gif that doesn’t work and your campaign won’t perform as well as it otherwise would, or it could be flagged as spam.

Ensure the email has links for sharing

If you’ve segmented your users and created personalised and high-quality content that’s going to resonate with them, there’s a good chance that they’re going to want to share the information in your email. Not including links for sharing means that’s unlikely to happen, so make sure you make it possible for brand advocates to share your content.

Ensure users can unsubscribe

Many global email marketing privacy and compliance regulations – such as GDPR – explicitly say that you must give customers the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list. You must always abide by this rule unless you’re prepared to take a hit to your reputation and finances. Unsubscribe links should be easy to access and don’t require the user to jump through hoops.

Of course, you don’t want your customers to unsubscribe, but that’s why you should implement the above suggestions to discourage anyone from wanting to.

How to implement these email optimisation strategies

Implementing these email optimisations may initially seem fairly straightforward. Making some tweaks to your subjects, tightening up your copy and improving personalisation are all big but impactful changes that might not seem like they’d take too long to action. And that’s true – but it has to be done carefully and you shouldn’t go in blindly.

There are steps you should follow to implement these changes and get the impact you’re looking for.

• Audit the performance of your campaigns to identify the most important areas that need improvement.
• Refer to the goals of your email marketing strategy so you can optimise your emails in the right ways. Any changes you make should align with your objectives.
• Make sure you know your target audience. For example, funny or sassy copy is a great way to engage an audience, but only if it’s the right audience – it probably won’t have the desired effect if you’re a B2B office stationery company.
• Take a long hard look at your call to action. Is it clear enough so your audience knows exactly what to do, when to do it and how to do it?
• Make sure you test your emails after every change you make. Even the smallest change can potentially break everything.
• Be open to making continuous changes to refine your emails based on the most up-to-date data you have.
• Regularly update your email list to remove inactive subscribers and reduce bounce rates. This is a great first step in making your data much cleaner and more reliable.

When should you optimise?

As they say, there’s no time like the present. However, that’s only appropriate if you have the relevant data to make accurate and informed decisions.

Emails should be optimised whenever an opportunity arises. Don’t wait for an obvious issue or error to present itself – schedule regular reviews to look at data and trends to see what you can do to keep your strategy up to date. This should be in addition to analysing the results of every campaign.

Learn more about Apteco’s email marketing solution

Now that you can confidently answer the question ‘What is email optimisation?’ you should be in a better position to boost your business’ email marketing strategy. See how Apteco can support your business and improve your email marketing efforts.