Optimising Your Email Content Without Being Obvious

There are several ways that you can optimise your email content. This will yield great results, like higher click through rates, better conversions and less email subscriber churn. However, sometimes we can take it too far and optimise content so much that users start to see these tricks and ‘rebel’. This is when we start to see the opposite impact and campaigns start to fail.

So, how can you optimise content in your email without it being too obvious to the reader? Here are some of the top options.

1. Stop With The Name

One of the top ways is to not personalise emails with a name. It is obvious you’re just doing a mail merge function and these have been around for more than two decades now. Your audience don’t see it as personalisation, they just see it as normal practice.

Personalisation should be about the way you’re publishing content. Audiences should receive specific content that is relevant to them at the right time. Not generic content that could be sent to anyone.

2. Optimise Images Outside Of Your Email Program

One common problem with emails is that they have high-resolution images that are memory intensive. This makes it hard for them to be seen on mobile devices and can take a long time to load on desktops.

Images are however very good at converting readers into consumers. So they are essential. Therefore, the most important aspect is to make sure that you’re optimising images. This should be via the size of the image (smaller the better) and the image size. Using programs like RIOT are excellent because they can reduce the memory usage significantly, without you losing any quality in the image. And it is a free image optimiser.

3. Don’t Do Too Many Tests At Once

Split testing is really important. It allows you to see what audiences prefer. However, split testing and changing aspects on every email isn’t very efficient. Audiences become more aware of what you’re doing and don’t associate a style with your email marketing campaigns.

This can have a negative impact on what happens. Many audience members might abandon your content and might spread more bad news around.

Ideally, you also want to increase the number of times you repeat a test for a few campaigns. For instance, if you run the same test of which colour the call to action should be five times, you might find that four out of five of those tests show audiences slightly prefer a red call-to-action button. However, if on that fifth test they overwhelmingly prefer a blue button, there is a hard decision to make. The averages might show the blue button is better.

Therefore, one email can’t determine the true results from a test.

4. Use Third-Party Data Where Possible

Optimisation is an important part of running your email campaigns. However, you don’t have to rely on your own data. The internet is a fantastic place where you can find lots of information, including the results of how other people’s email campaigns have succeeded. This includes what changes they’ve made and how audiences have responded.

This can therefore, allow you to cut out some of the split testing phase and implement optimised content from the start. Things that might be mentioned include what colours text, buttons and images should be used in addition to timings and lengths of emails. So you can make lots of informed decisions before you even send your first split test email.

Conclusion

Email marketing is always about creating highly converting content for your audience. However, to do this you must optimise emails. It is very hard to achieve without at least some split testing. However, you can use some of the tricks and tips above to reduce the amount of testing you need to do and ensure that it isn’t obvious you’re testing audiences.

How do you optimise email content? How do you make it less obvious?

Let us know in the comments.

Tagged in: email design, split testing