How can I make the most of my email marketing campaigns?

The first step to making emails effective is ensuring they are relevant. Customer segmentation relies on multichannel data from sources such as in-store or online. If subscribers have interacted with the brand somewhere else, it should feed back into the campaign’s messaging and creative, says Helen McCall, account director at digital and CRM agency Tangent Snowball.

She points out that many retailers tend to overdo frequency. “Do you need to send that many emails or send the same email to all your subscribers? If you’re emailing for your marketing calendar’s sake, it probably won’t be interesting to your audience,” McCall explains.

And timing can be everything. Retailers will often find sending early in the morning or just before lunch Wednesday to Friday has the best response rates. “But once you’ve selected a time, be sure to send other emails the same time on the same days,” says McCall. “Your subscribers will come to expect your email and be more receptive.”

Creativity and execution are also vital. For example, minimal, punchy copy will be more valuable and more likely to evoke a reaction than masses of prose.

Finally, McCall advises that retailers should set up their email campaigns so that they can track sales directly. She says: “Build a regular report that reviews not just ‘opens’, click-through rates and directly attributed online sales, but also social shares, tweets about the email and most clicked on content.”

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