Tracking your email marketing performance while proving ROI, managing multiple campaigns, and dealing with manual processes is a daily, ongoing struggle.
Seeing your email performance decline dramatically, with no idea why, can be terrifying.
Below, we’ll look at five factors that could cause a significant drop in email performance, and what you can do about it.
1. The subject line
This is an obvious one, but it needs to be said.
If you’re seeing a big drop in open rates, then the subject line could be to blame. It’s been found that 33% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone.
What subject lines have you been using recently? Have you tried to take a different approach or tone and it’s not being received well?
If your subject lines are too long that could be a factor. It’s been proven time and time again that shorter subject lines, generally under 50 characters, perform better.
If you can, try to get personal as well. According to an Adestra report, personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened.
Your subject line should also grab a recipient’s attention with a relevant incentive, though avoid spammy buzzwords like free, cash, percent off, or dollar signs.
Finally, if you truly want to understand the effectiveness of your subject lines, you need to A/B test.
2. The mobile experience
Currently, 86% of people in the U.S. access one or more of their email accounts via a mobile device and mobile opens account for 46% of all email opens.
Given this vast majority that are viewing your emails on mobile devices, are you catering to them? Are your emails mobile responsive or mobile optimized?
If they’re not, you’re actively discouraging subscribers from clicking on your emails, as you’re making their customer experience clunky and unwieldy.
Address this gap by generating emails that are mobile responsive, which means they automatically transition between PCs, tablets, and mobiles seamlessly.
The stensul email creation platform empowers marketers to build mobile-responsive emails in minutes, without marketers having to touch code.
3. Your automated emails
Are you sending triggered emails to your database? If not, it might be why your email performance and ROI is suffering.
Triggered emails could be sent when welcoming a subscriber to your community, congratulating them on a milestone like a birthday or anniversary, or re-engaging them when they haven’t been active in a while.
Whatever the reason, you need to take the workload off your shoulders and rely on automation to streamline your email marketing efforts.
This will then give you more time to work on strategy and further email generation.
It also helps that triggered emails yield 71% higher open rates and 102% higher click rates than non-triggered email messages.
4. Deliverability
Deliverability is an ongoing issue for email marketers, with 77% of U.S. emails actually getting through to inboxes, compared to 80% for the global average.
You’re clearly going to see a drop in email performance if your emails aren’t getting through to inboxes, so what can you do?
Use a dedicated IP address and private domain to control your sender reputation, and warm up this IP address so ISP filters recognize it as trustworthy and authentic.
Clean your email list regularly by removing subscribers who haven’t engaged with you in the past year, remove email addresses that bounce, and ensure the unsubscribe process is as easy as possible so recipients don’t mark you as spam out of frustration.
5. List segmentation
According to MailChimp, segmented campaigns have a 14.4% better open rate than non-segmented campaigns.
Create segments without your list based on location, interests, or other demographic factors and send targeted emails to each segment.
Instead of getting a generic email about a range of your products, your subscribers could get personalized offers that align with their interests, region, and age.
This should help improve both open and click rates, while raising your email marketing game to new heights.
If you want to chat about how you can aim even higher, schedule your personalized demo today.
