Webinar recap: Leveraging your email marketing during the busy season

Email marketing is an important tactic in today’s online world and your property could benefit from including it in the mix. Learn today’s best practices, what mistakes to avoid, and how to measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns in our recent webinar.

Watch the webinar below, or jump down to the highlights and key takeaways for a high level overview of the presentation.

 

Quick highlights

  • Email marketing is a year-round tactic
  • 2.4 emails are sent every second
  • An average person receives about 88 emails per day
  • Email brings in $44 for every $1 spent
  • Find the right Email Service Provider (ESP) for you: Constant Contact, MailChimp, RezCampaigns, etc.
  • 70% of emails are opened and read on a mobile device
  • Using a person’s name in the subject line can improve an open rate by more than 25%
  • 33% of people decide to open an email based on subject line alone
    • Your email subject line should be between 40 – 50 characters
    • Your preheader text should be between 40 – 70 characters
  • Email safe fonts include: Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma, or Verdana

 

Key takeaways

  • Know what kind of email marketing campaigns you want to send
    • Newsletters
    • Promotions
    • Targeted drip campaigns
  • Be compliant with email marketing laws by always having an unsubscribe option in your campaigns
  • Segment your lists for highly targeted and relevant email campaigns
    • Segment by age, location, gender, activity in a previous email campaign, and more
    • Set up an email preference center where guests can manage what lists they’re on
  • Design for mobile users first
  • A/B test your campaigns to understand your subscribers better. Test:
    • The subject line
    • The from name
    • Email content
  • Send your A/B tests to 15 – 30% of your audience and run the test for a few hours. Winner can be determined by:
    • Open rate
    • Total unique clicks
    • Total clicks on a specific link
  • Use an easy-to-ready design
    • Zig zag
    • Column
    • Inverted pyramid
  • Keep content between one to three sentences with and exciting Call to Action (CTA) at the end
  • Use at least a 12 pt. font in your emails
  • Always, always send yourself a test version to review before sending it out to your subscribers
  • For measuring your email marketing’s performance, watch:
    • Open rate, aim for at least 20%
    • Click-through rate of at least 20%
    • Unsubscribe rate, try to keep it under 1%
    • Link tracking, see which links are being clicked on the most to see popular topics for future campaigns
    • Social sharing, see how many times your newsletter was shared on social media networks
    • Revenue, track your revenue and ROI through your ESP or through Google Analytics
  • Share your campaigns on social and encourage social followers and website visitors to subscribe

 

Conclusion

Email marketing is a powerful tactic with a good ROI. Test your campaigns to learn what works best with your subscribers and keep an eye on you performance metrics to ensure your messaging is still on point and relevant with your readers. And, try to have fun with your email marketing!

Watch the webinar recording and view the presentation for a deeper dive into this topic.

Further reading