It’s pretty hot in the UK at the moment, with temperatures that most Brits would find stifling, and yet like many others on Sunday afternoon, I eschewed the chance to sit in the garden and soak up the sun for a few hours sat in front of the TV watching the Mens’ final at Wimbledon.

It was a classic “old vs new” battle between Novak Djokovic and Nick Kyrgios, with the elder statesman coming out on top.

What I found fascinating was the analysis they did on why Djokovic won. He went in with a clear strategy to handle the unique challenges that Kyrgios brings to the table… using a number of specific tactics to ensure he won.

..and if you want to succeed at email marketing then you should be doing the same – creating an action plan and identifying the tactics you need to win.

With nearly 33.2 billion emails sent daily, if you don’t have the right tactics, your emails aren’t going to work.

If you want to improve your email marketing efforts and be truly effective, follow the five tactics (5Ts) that can guide you towards email marketing success: tease, target, teach, test and track.

Tease

We’ve told you this before and we’ll tell you again, everything starts with the subject line.

Subject lines are the first thing people see when opening their emails, they’re one of the very first impressions you have on your email recipients. It’s no surprise that over a third of your subscribers decide whether or not they will open your message based on the subject line.

..and remember, if they don’t open your email… all that lovingly crafted content you put into the email is for nothing.

Which is why It’s so, so important to craft subject lines that are compelling enough to get people to click through.

Generate curiosity by not giving away all of the information in the subject line, instead use your subject line as a way to tease the email content inside. The key here is to make your subject line as engaging as possible to peak the reader’s interest.

When you tease what’s inside the message you can naturally generate a higher open rate as the reader has to (and hopefully wants to) open the email to get more information.
Just don’t be too obscure, or your email could end up being seen as spam by the recipient…

Now, get your content to convert…

Once the reader has opened the message, continue to stimulate curiosity within the body of your message.

Tease them some more with captivating content that drives click throughs,

Make sure your Call to Action (CTA) is precise, short and compelling. A good CTA grabs the customer’s attention and prompts them to click and engage with your message.

All you need to do is determine what action you want your customer to take. This in turn will make clicking on your CTA the next logical step in your subscribers process thus driving more traffic to your website and potentially increasing conversions.

Target

The only way to truly target your subscribers is to understand them. Use what you know about your recipients to truly give them content that they are more likely to respond to

Make sure each campaign you send is directed towards the correct target audience. It’s all about targeting the right people with the right content at the right time.

The more personalised content you provide to your readers, the higher the chance you have to engage them and convince them in taking action.

Targeted audiences are nothing without proper segmentation

The best way to begin segmenting is by targeting your existing list first. This begins with the signup process, the more information you can get about your audience at this stage, the more options you’ll have for segmentation.

Once you have segmented your list into various target audiences, you can create campaigns tailored specifically to those groups of people. Of course, effective tagging and labelling of customers makes deciding who to send each message to, easy.

Different targeted email marketing campaigns will call for targeting based on different factors. In short, you need to write different emails for various segments of your customer group.

Targeting by Demographics

Information such as gender, age and location can tell a lot about a person’s needs and interests. Make sure you gather this data at sign – up.

Targeting by their depth of relationship with you

All customers are important but that doesn’t mean you interact with them all the same way.
For example, for a group of brand-new subscribers, their emails should be more generalised – such as a series of welcome emails introducing them to the brand.

Targeting by Behaviour

You can segment by engagement by designating active vs inactive users.
With Mailchimp, this is simple to do, just navigate to the “Activity” tab where you have options to see a variety of subscriber behaviour.

Active users: This group comes in handy if you want to create a loyalty program or get customer feedback with a poll or survey

Inactive users: Target with a re-engagement campaign to bring them back into the fold

You can also create targeted campaigns focusing on subscribers who engage with your emails most often.

Teach

Whatever your email marketing goal is, it all hinges on email marketing copy.

So craft email content people care about.

Give value by fulfilling your target customer’s needs, leaving them with helpful information. We call this the teaching tactic.

People enjoy reading emails with highly relevant, informative content. We all appreciate learning tips and tricks to make our lives easier. When you send such emails, your audience will always look forward to hearing from you.

Using your email as a teaching tool not only increases customer engagement, but also helps build your brand perception illustrating your brand’s expertise in the industry.

Use the most informative content – that means content which includes tips, tricks and other information that the subscriber may not already know.

Here’s how you can incorporate the teaching tactic into your email content

Avoid hard selling: The ploy here is not about pushing your subscriber to buy your product or service rather it’s about giving an educational and informative insight.
Provide solutions to problems: Think about the questions your subscriber is likely to ask such as “What’s in it for me?” or “Can this product/service solve any of my problems?” Now solve these problems. The idea is to present the benefits of making a purchase and not to just specify the product’s features.

Offer informative content: The key here is to make the content relevant too. Great content also gives you an excuse to email your reader again. For example, liked our blog on deliverability? There’s more where that came from!”

Test

Test and test again, conduct A/B testing over a few variations of subject lines, layout, send time or any other number of factors.

What we are saying here is to basically, test everything you can.

At the end of the day, it’s the combination of a great subject line, layout, images and body copy that drives the most conversions.

Running email tests allows you to understand how your prospects or customers want to receive information. It also enables you to maximise open and click-through rates whilst helping you establish customer trust.

Mailchimp makes it real easy to test and there’s almost no downside to testing things out and learning what works (and doesn’t work) with your audience.

Track

The only way to know if your campaign is working the way you want is by tracking it. When you track your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), you can measure whether you’re hitting your goals and moving your business in the right direction.

Tracking means you will be able to see exactly what content your audience is engaging with which can enable you to take actions based on hard data.

For example, you might find that one topic performs particularly well compared to others. You can track everything from who opened and clicked your campaigns to where the subscriber lives and which links they clicked on. (and of course, if you’re using testing, as you should be, tracking is just as important.

It’s crucial that you determine exactly what it is you’re looking to achieve with your email marketing before you begin to measure your emails. figure out which metrics you’ll need to track in order to determine how you’re progressing towards your goal.

When tracking email performance every email marketer should be tracking the following as standard.

Open Rate
Click-Through Rate
Clicks per Link
Conversion Rate
Bounce Rate
Unsubscribes
Spam Complaints
Forwarding Rate

Aside from the standard metrics, you’ll also want to be keeping tabs on your overall strategy goals such as list growth and your ROI.

List growth rate

Your list growth rate is the rate at which your email list has grown over a certain period of time. It’s important to keep steadily building your list, as well as to audit existing lists. Your emails will likely contain calls-to-action such as “Subscribe to Our Blog” or “Join Our Weekly Email List.” So of course, the most important metric you should be tracking for this goal is the growth rate of your subscriber list.

ROI

This metric indicates whether you’re making money back from your email campaigns There can be numerous factors that impact your business’s ROI.
You’ll want to look at areas like:

● Personalization
● Email frequency
● Email quality
● Email layout
● Cost to send emails

Final Thoughts

Email marketing continues to deliver results. Now is the time to update your email marketing strategy.

You need to tease your subscribers, send targeted messages, and ensure those messages are teachable. You also need to test your campaign results as well as tracking them. Use the 5 ‘T’s to continually improve your email marketing strategy and create better-performing campaigns that generate undeniable results for your strategy.

If you implement these new changes into your email marketing strategy your customers will be more responsive, your campaign performance will improve and your business will continue to grow…. And although you won’t get a shiny gold trophy like Novak Djokovic when you win, a healthier bottom line should be all you need to celebrate being an email champion.