For a tender, I answered 5 questions about email performance optimization.

For a tender (won!) with a comm' agency, I had to answer some questions about email best practices and email campaign performance optimization. Here is a summary of the answers.

1. In your opinion, what is a good emailing activity/strategy?

A good emailing strategy is one that will mix commercial and editorial emailings.

Thus, for commercial emailings, we will clearly look for the click to convert. The email should be short, in the form of a inverted pyramidIn the case of a CTA, the sentences will be short, a punchy CTA that goes straight to the point, with a tone that arouses interest.

For the editorial emailings on the other hand, we will seek the opening and the click but the objective here is toto bring relational, advice, service and thus to decrease the feeling of mass communication and increase the relational dimension (The email may be longer).

A good emailing strategy is also one that will communicate regularly with its contacts Avoid months without communication, and avoid doubling the volume of mailings from one week to the next.

Also target your campaigns according to the interests of its contacts. The initial challenge is to qualify its base in centers of interest. Several means can be implemented, via :

• Purchases made (and/or)
• Categorization of newsletter openings and clicks (and/or)
• Collection forms by asking directly for the centers of interest in an email. For example during the welcome scenario (and/or) during a customer winback scenario....
• Via the categorization of the pages seen on the website

The centers of interest are often the reflection of the products/services universe you offer. For example for Badsender, it will be : Deliverability, Strategy, Design/Integration, The email builder...

2. How to participate in the optimization of email performance such as the opening rate?

Several factors influence openness:

The sender's label

• It must remain stable. It should not vary from campaign to campaign.

The object (this lever will allow to maximize the openings) :

• It must be short (- 10 words, - 50 characters).
• It must generate interest : shifted tone, catchy, word play...
• The most important words should be placed at the beginning.
  What works well: the numbers (4 reasons to...)the question that calls out (What to do with your moldy gifts?)…
• The object must absolutely be tested.

The preheader :

• The sentence must be complementary to the object.
• The most important words should be placed at the beginning.

Display its logo next to the sender's name:

For this, 2 techniques:

• Set up BIMI. For the moment, it is only possible on Yahoo! but Gmail is currently working on it and the other webmails/FAIs will certainly follow. One condition for this, your DMARC must be activated! We can help you with thatNow is the time!
• The gmail annotations : here we have logo + banner + promo code + expiration date to give visibility to the offer even before the opening. It's very easy, you "just" have to add a piece of code. In addition, we have industrialized it in The Boss (look at the bottom of the this article)

Segmentation (and it is really this lever that will maximize the openings and therefore optimize the performance of your emails) :

• Segment according to content interest will maximize the openings.
• It is necessary to target Openers under 6 months (and set up a reactivation scenario for the + 6 months) to preserve its deliverability.

3. How to optimize clicks?

The email must be well structured:

• The optimal structure is in the form of inverted pyramid (1st block takes all the width, then 2 columns, 3 columns until 4 columns).
• The reflection must be done in the form of blocks.
• A catchy title The tone can be offbeat if the content lends itself to it. Here, we just wrote an article on the storytelling precisely!
• A Engaging CTA and clear placed in the top third of the email. After some tests on a few clients, "I" seems to work better than "you", or the infinitive or imperative. ("I make an appointment", "I make myself happy", "I offer a gift"...) But I encourage you to test it on your own.

Animations to attract the eye and engage the click without affecting the display on the different ISPs/webmails. There are of course the classic animated gifs and countdowns. But to make it more eye-catching, there are also some latest innovations:

• L'typewriter effect
• L'effect on mouse over Change the color of a button or add a shadow on a content element, a zoom effect on a visual, etc...
• and many other innovative techniques that always allow to gain in display quality: simulation of the "absolute" positioning" , Multiple background images , l'apng…

Create a reading rhythm:

• Play on different colored backgrounds for give rhythm to the reading of the email.
• Prioritization of information is very very important:

Title

subtitle

Text

CTA

• The email must be understood in less than 3 seconds. Reading Titles + CTA should be enough to understand the purpose of the email.
• Short sentences, pictograms, bullets points...

4. How to reduce churn?

Satisfaction comes first and foremost from good targeting. Thus, the brands that really maximize their clicks and satisfaction are those that target their campaigns according to the interests of their contacts. For each campaign, we will calculate the dissatisfaction rateand it will be ensured that it is lower than 20%.

5. How to work well on a daily basis to achieve good results?

You have to coach yourself!

Create a mailing schedule:

1. Make sure you have a regular volume of mailings.
2. Include the segments to be targeted.
3. Include the A/B tests you want to measure:
   - 1st month: testing of several object axes (offbeat tone vs. factual tone, first name vs. last name, promo vs. question...)
   - 2nd month: preheader test
   - 3rd month: test of the catchphrase
   - 4th month: CTA test (color, location, text, shape)...

Measuring the effectiveness of a campaign:

1. Look at the stats for test A and test B.
2. Draw lessons from the tests and record them in a document so that you have a "lessons bible.

Make a quarterly assessment on the effectiveness of the emailing strategy.

Is it:

- The number of emails sent is increasing?
- The number of campaigns sent out is increasing?
- The number of ushers is growing?
- The number of clickers is growing?
- The dissatisfaction rate is below 20%?
- The churn rate is below 0.5%?
- Is the turnover per 1000 emails sent growing?

Then, break down these stats, according to:

• Targets requested (active/inactive, buyers/ex-purchasers....)
• On the typology of campaigns : commercial emails / editorial newsletters.
• Triggers and scenarios. Here it is important to ensure that the number of emails sent is constant. For example, if from one week to the next you have a big difference in the number of abandoned shopping cart emails sent, there is probably a technical problem somewhere. The idea is to monitor that everything is working well. Also, pay attention to the statistics of each email that makes up a scenario. For example, if the third email of a scenario reveals a high dissatisfaction rate, then you should think about removing it and adapting your scenario.

If you wish to be coached or trainedWe look forward to hearing from you.