While many may complain about it, email is still one of the most important marketing channels for your jewelry business. It’s a way to speak directly to your audience and encourage direct engagement. Make sure you’re taking advantage of this line of communication by delivering the most effective message possible.
Even the best thought out email can see poor engagement. If you’re noticing a dip in engagement in your campaigns, it’s time to start improving your email click-through rates.
Testing is one of the best ways to improve your email marketing strategy. Here are some tips from a presentation Stephan Hovnanian gave about smart testing for your email campaigns.
Decide what to measure
Before you begin testing it’s important to identify the different metrics you will need to track:
Click-through-rate (CTR) is the percent of emails that had at least one click. This metric generally tracks general engagement.
Click-to-open-rate (CTOR) is the percent of opened emails that had at least one click. CTOR measures the design performance of your email and whether your audience is performing the action you want them to take.
Create a tracking document
A tracking document can help you organize the links you’re including in each email campaign and the engagement you received from your audience for that campaign.
To help with this, classify all of your links into one of three categories: primary, secondary, and tertiary links:
Primary links are the main action you are trying to encourage your audience to take. This includes any buttons, in-text links, or even image links.
Secondary links are similar to sidebars; they are complementary links. These could be links to relevant content or other articles that you’re including to encourage increased engagement.
Tertiary links are anything that is included in the email template; social media links back to your website, or links to your online jewelry shop. While you won’t want to actively track them on your sheet, you will want to account for them because these could be drawing attention away from the primary goal. Begin your experimentation by removing these to see how your clicks improve.
Begin to test
There are a variety of different tests that you can run to see how your engagement improves. A few basic tests you can run on your email campaigns include:
Segmenting your list: Cut out those who haven’t engaged with an email in a while or send an email asking your list to indicate their interests. By splitting your list into subgroups you can better target them.
Test a subject line: Split your list and send half of your list one subject line and the other half another. This can help you see if your group prefers seeing your offers up front, and what language they react to.
Include less calls-to-action: It may seem like a good idea to include as many topics as you can in your emails, but that may not be the case for your audience. Test simple emails with more complex heavy content ones to see what your audience truly prefers.
Improving your email click-through rates is easy with testing
Hopefully, these tips for testing will help you in your quest for improving your email click-through rates. Do you have any other tips for running effective tips? Share them below in the comments!