As we covered in last month’s post, you can use email marketing to promote an upcoming trade show appearance, to produce multi-touch campaigns, or to help with webinar marketing. This month, we’ll take a look at some real-world examples of the areas that we covered.

Try Testing Your Email Subject Lines with an A/B Test

As a reminder, A/B testing is the art of testing a portion of an email before deploying the entire send. The goal is to improve the open rate – and hence your overall engagement from your audience.

Wondering what a real-life example of a test looks like?

Here’s a real-word example of an A/B test we did for a client to help them promote an event (insert your own event’s name):

• Subject line A: How to Get the Most from [Your Event]
• Subject line B: Insider Tips – How to Get the Most from [Your Event]

In this case, 25% of the audience got subject line A and another 25% got subject line B for the test portion.

The winner?

Subject line B, with a 35% higher open rate over subject line A in the test. We then sent the remaining 50% of the audience emails using subject line B.

This likely resulted in at least ten more opens overall that would not have occurred without the test. In the email marketing world, that can be significant.

Experiment with a few of your own and see if you can move the needle on your results. Some additional A/B testing ideas can be found here.

Provide Value with Multi-touch Campaigns

One of our clients recently held their annual customer event. Instead of sending out one email promoting the event and hoping that people would come, we built an entire multi-touch email campaign was built that included reach-outs before the event, sends that occurred during the event, and post-event touches that included a save-the-date notice for the next event.

What does a multi-touch email campaign look like?

Below is a sampling of the schedule and one that you could consider building around all types of events:

• Email 1: Early Bird Registration
• Email 2: Call for Abstracts
• Email 3: Early Bird Registration Reminder (A/B Test)
• Email 4: Letter from the CEO About Importance of the Event
• Email 5: Presentation Highlights and Promo Rate Ends Reminder
• Email 6: Hotel Block Deadline and Introduce Event Mobile App
• Email 7: Highlight Social Event (to Registrants Only)
• Email 8: Last Chance to Register
• Email 9: Day 1 Highlights – Sent During Event to Attendees Only
• Email 10: Downloadable Content Offered After Keynote – Sent During Event to Attendees Only
• Email 11: Day 2 Highlights – Sent During Event to Attendees Only
• Event 12: Thanks for Attending (to Attendees Only)
• Email 13: Save the Date for Next Year’s Event

Email #10 was sent to all attendees immediately following the CEO’s opening keynote address and offered a related topical white paper download. This email achieved a 48.4% open rate and 21.4% click-through rate. As we mentioned last month, an event-related email typically achieves an open rate of 21-30% and a click-through rate of 3-11%.

Tip: Consider offering an exclusive piece of content that event attendees get in advance of your other audiences. Attendees will feel like they’re getting extra value from the event and you can evaluate what kind of email open rates you get for this type of “live” content distribution.

Email Templates Can Improve Results

How many times have you received an email on your mobile device and when you try to read it you have to move the screen around to read the whole message? What has likely happened is that the email wasn’t optimized for mobile devices, and this is where templates can help.

Many email systems come with pre-selected templates you can choose from, and I recommend trying one of those to start with to get better mobile results.

Here’s an example of one of our favorite templates:

While some templates may not be to your liking exactly, there are often simple options available to remove and add sections (like header banner images, photos, logos, and text areas). The template above was used to promote our own blog posts to our audience, and 25% of the opens on this particular blog promotion in December 2019 were opened on a mobile device.

Tip: If you’re not sending mobile-friendly emails, you’re disappointing a good portion of your audience – which may lead them to unsubscribe or delete it before being read. It has been suggested that as many as 15% of users will unsubscribe when a mobile email displays poorly.

Most email marketing systems also have an option to choose a mobile preview, showing you what the email would look like to recipients opening it on a mobile phone or other device. See if that feature can help you adjust your headline spacing and other features so it is mobile-friendly. Not all devices will show your email exactly as you wish, however you can maximize readability using this feature.

There are some additional mobile display tips available here.

Improving your email program – even just your open rates – doesn’t mean you need to move boulders. We can help you get more ROI out of email. To start a conversation, call us today.

Author – Scott Fuhr
Scott is a marketer with concentrations on lead generation campaigns, marketing automation programs (Marketo, SharpSpring), Google search and display ads (PPC), social media strategies, and business writing.

Brandwidth Solutions serves the healthcare, life sciences, energy and contract pharma industries. We work with companies that want to make the most of their marketing – who want their marketing empowered to help drive leads – and ultimately sales. If you want to move your product or service forward in a smart way, we want to work with you. Call us at 215.997.8575.