When stepping up your eCommerce email marketing game, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You might want to focus instead on how you can turn to optimize for conversions. Maximize your return on investment (ROI) by working with what you already have. That is the true hack behind highly-converting emails that isn’t just cost-effective—it’s smart too. You can start by revisiting the elements of your emails.
So while your email marketing strategy is already paying your eCommerce store in dividends every month, there is still more you can do to further increase it cost-effectively.
Remember, email marketing is one of the gold medalists (if not the gold medalist) when it comes to being the highest ROI generator. In fact, email marketing is known to generate up to 3,800% ROI (and some data analytics recording higher!).
So to get the maximum returns email marketing has to offer, here are the 5 hacks you need for crafting highly-converting emails!
1. Subject Lines are Your Email’s Verbal Posters
Be it engaging, converting, leading your customers to click your CTA, or generating returns—your emails don’t start working until they’re opened. So it’s no surprise that optimizing your subject lines is your first major hack for crafting highly-converting emails.
Your subject lines act as your first line of advertising, catching your customers’ attention and piquing their interest enough to open your emails.
Did you know that 47% of email recipients would decide to open your emails based solely on the subject line? That’s not all, 69% of recipients would report email as spam based also on the subject line.
So not only will it affect your open rates, but a subject line can either save your email or doom it into the spam folder.
Here are some important tips you should keep in mind when crafting your subject lines:
a. Be Mindful of Your Subject Line Length
It is highly recommended to keep it within 65 characters for your subject lines. Base your subject line length on what email clients your customers use.
As much as possible, the important part of your subject line is visible at a glance.
Are you highlighting a promo, coupon code, or sale? Make sure those pieces of information aren’t cut off from the subject line view.
As you all know, it doesn’t matter if your email is gorgeous and has all the right CTAs. Even if your emails ride on the wind horse of excellent deliverability and land in their targeted inboxes, if they aren’t getting opened they won’t convert.
Subject lines are your best friends here—email subject lines are what get your foot in the door. Here are some examples of our favorites:
- Save 30% TODAY before price increases in 48 hours!
- Do you feel like nothing’s happening?
- Summer Sales ends tonight!
- Here’s a gift for all your hard work
- Real girls. Real reviews.
b. Implement Personalization
It’s more than just including the name of your recipient. Curate products based on your segment lists and highlight those that are relevant to your specific groups of customers.
c. Make it Sound Urgent
Creating a sense of urgency, when done right, would be that one gentle push for your customers to open your email.
Mention your closing sales, expiring coupon codes, or limited-time discounts and your customers might scramble for a last-minute purchase.
d. Avoid Repetition
Even when sending similar emails of the same topic, avoid copy-pasting your subject lines. An inbox full of emails with subject lines with the same words, spacing, and style would just turn off your customers. A simple hack, yes, but this is just one of the many finer tweaks that bring about highly-converting emails.
e. Use Numbers
Here’s a little tidbit for you—blogs with titles that have numbers are opened 45% more often than those without.
So when it comes to highlighting your discounts, include the discount number in the subject line. And in tandem with adding a sense of urgency, you can include the number of hours they have left before a promo code expires or sale ends.
f. Adding an Emoji is Fine Too
An emoji adds a level of friendliness to your subject lines, making your brand feel more approachable and human.
However, don’t overuse emojis nor force emojis into your subject lines if they don’t align with your brand’s tone.
See how one simple emoji can really make your email stand out from a crowded inbox?
g. Be Creative
Don’t stick to a formula or blueprint, it can get old and your customers will notice. Maintain a healthy level of creativity in your subject lines by using humor, puns (good ones), and wit.
h. Simplicity is Key
Don’t think too much about your subject line. As long as it gets your message across then your subject line should be good to go!
i. Get Straight to the Point
As mentioned above, try not to fill too many flowers in your subject lines. Always tell your customers straight up what exactly they’ll be seeing once they open your email.
2. Preheader Text
If your subject line were the cover of a book, the preheader text is the synopsis. This part acts as the preview of what’s in your email.
Serving as the summary of your email’s content, this is the best place to highlight more of the important details that you couldn’t squeeze into your subject line.
Make sure you highlight the interesting parts of your email, though. Mention more about your sale, discounts, promo codes, etc.
3. Even with Emails—Timing is Everything
You’ve crafted and optimized everything in your email. The design, eye-catching. The content, engaging. But some time after sending your email, no response.
No responses could mean one thing—your customers aren’t opening your emails. And rather than them unwilling to, it’s more likely your costumes might not have seen your emails in the first place.
Here’s where one of the external factors of email marketing comes into play, namely email send times.
Optimizing your email send times can greatly help your open rates. Yes, your emails would still land in your customers’ inboxes. However, chances are your emails would get buried under tons of other senders’ emails.
So for this highly-converting email hack, it would be best to send your emails when your customers are most likely available to see them right away. Study your target audience’s online behavior.
After all, industry benchmarks are a good place to begin. According to the 2020 Global Email Benchmarks Data, the best sending times according to the specific email metrics look like this:
- The best day with the highest email open rates is Tuesday (18.3%)
- For the best days with the highest click-through rates, you have Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday (2.6%)
- While the best days with the highest click-to-open rates are Thursday and Friday (14.4%)
- Then the best days with the lowest unsubscribe rates are Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (0.1%)
- And finally, the best day with the lowest bounce rates is Wednesday (0.6%)
But, we often forget the human factor or our email lists that can’t simply be reduced to global averages and statistics that don’t account for differences in lifestyle habits, interests, and buying habits.
Here’s some food for thought, would your optimal send times differ if you were selling prenatal health supplements to women than if you sold golf equipment in your store? How would the engagement habits with your emails between these two target audiences differ?
Your customer lists are the lifeline of your eCommerce store, so your segments are great places to start when looking for your optimal email send time.
4. Optimize Your Messaging
Another hack for highly-converting emails involves the use of effective messaging, which boils down to two things—timing and engaging content.
We should remember that the customer’s journey begins as soon as they make an action on your page, automation frameworks are great tools to move them along the pipeline towards a purchase and build rapport with them.
What if you could build relationships while you sleep and create consistent brand communication?
But you don’t have to manually monitor for these specific triggers, of course. Implementing email automation to your email marketing framework should make that part more efficient.
With timely acknowledgment of your customers’ actions, it makes them feel valued while building engagement and customer relationships—strengthening your tribe.
By setting schedules and triggers, you can automatically send the right emails at the right times!
5. Use Clear and Action-based CTA
Make sure your CTAs are clear, both in figuratively and literally.
Figuratively, your CTAs should tell your customers what exactly the action is. ‘Buy Now!’, ‘Claim My Reward!’, ‘Activate (Promo) Code’ are just some of the clear action phrases you can use for your CTAs.
Literally, your CTAs should stand out from the rest of your email’s content, in terms of design.
Quick tip—the button color can be a contrasting color (depending on your branding) to make it pop out of the rest of the design.
Also, don’t be afraid to get creative with your CTAs. Using puns, images, and even animated GIFs can give your CTA that extra attention-grabbing quality.
6.Create Compelling Content
Storytelling adds more than just color and flavor to your content. Effective storytelling can help your customers visualize the benefits of your products or services.
Also, it can help your customers remember your brand’s personality 220%—great for building your brand image and recognizability.
Metaphors and analogies add a nice spin to your content, making your email copy more fun and engaging to read.
7. A/B Test Again and Again
And finally, A/B testing galore! There is no such thing as enough A/B testing. In fact, you should be testing your emails throughout a year in preparation for big sales events—like the upcoming BFCM sale!
Taking all of the above and putting them through tests can help you find the better version of each category.
Subject lines, preheader texts, send times, messaging, CTAs—all of these will benefit from A/B testing.
Always strive to find which iteration of each category performs better than the other. Don’t stick with the idea of creating the best email—always focus on crafting a better one.
Implementing these hacks for highly-converting emails might sound easy, but there’s a lot that goes into making everything work for your brand, specifically.
Enter the Lab
So if you’re looking for a community where high-voltage idea sharing is the norm, data-driven decision-making is the standard, and brutal A/B testing is a must—feel free to join our Facebook page eCommerce Email Lab!
References:
Campaign Monitor — 75 Stellar Retail Subject Lines
Campaign Monitor — How to Determine the Best Length for Your Subject Lines
