When you prune a garden correctly, you encourage healthy growth and flowering, as well as good looks. Email marketers can learn from this gardening technique to create emails that drive conversions. Here are some tips to help you create high converting emails this Spring.
Weed Out Inactive Subscribers
In order to weed out inactive subscribers, segment your lists into active and inactive subscribers. Use Critical Impact’s dynamic lists to find the subscribers who haven’t opened a message from you in the past year, or who haven’t clicked on a specific category of link. Then weed these subscribers out of the majority of your mailings. This will help yield a higher open rate and inbox placement, as ISPs see that your emails produce higher engagement.
Identify Past Sends that Didn’t Produce Fruit
Take a look at your past sends to find those emails that had the lowest open rates, click rates, or conversions. Compare the subject lines to see if there is a pattern in wording, length, etc. Then avoid using these types of subject lines in the future. You can run an A/B test as well, to send two subject lines to a small portion of your list. Then the higher performing subject line will be sent to the remainder of your list. This automatically prunes the worse subject line from being used for the majority of the send.
Trim Content to Create a Compelling CTA
Subscribers typically do not spend much time reading your emails. That’s why it’s a good idea to trim excess content that is distracting people from your main call-to-action. Highlight your CTA by adding a bright button, compelling text, or an interesting image. An easy to see CTA will encourage more conversions.
Let Good Practices Take Root
Many email marketers are missing the powerful opportunity to give people a sneak peak of what will appear inside the email. Take a look at the preview text (also called preheader text) that appears for your messages. Preview text is the short text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in some email clients.
Place the most important information in the subscriber’s preview pane, so that they can see your key offer without opening the message. Critical Impact’s preview text tool makes it easy to customize what appears in the preview pane, which will help your open rate blossom.
Don’t miss the opportunity this Spring to prune your email marketing practices, in order to make room for better conversions.