When brands think of optimization, efforts tend to favor search engines for getting found and websites for generating leads, i.e. email addresses.
But what happens once you’ve generated those leads?
As the number of emails sent each day continues to rise, and the number of environments your subscribers open them with grows, optimizing your emails becomes a critically important challenge.
Email is not only the preferred method of brand communication for consumers, but it also offers the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, generating a $50 return for every $1 spent.
A lot goes into a creating a successful email marketing campaign. In The Ultimate Guide to Email Optimization + Troubleshooting, you’ll learn how to:
Define goals for each campaign
Before you start writing copy or planning your design, define your campaign’s goals. We walk you through how to define goals that guide the direction of your campaign, and make it easier to measure the success of your efforts.
Determine the appropriate audience to send to
Sending a message to your entire list may not be beneficial to accomplishing your determined goal—and could lead to frustration, declining open and click rates, higher opt-out and spam complaint rates, and more. We cover how to determine the right audience for your campaign.
Craft your content
The content of your email has many components, including headlines, subheads, body copy, and calls-to-action (CTA). Learn how all of these aspects work together to achieve the goal of your campaign.
Optimize for the inbox
The decision to open (or not) takes place in the inbox, where the subscriber will frequently see a few key pieces of influential information—your from name, from address, reply-to address, subject line, and (sometimes) preview text. Discover how to optimize each of these critical elements.
Create great designs
Your design should be readable, actionable, and accessible to everyone. We dive into how to account for screens large and small, use bulletproof CTAs, optimize for image blocking, and more.
Avoid spam folders and reach the inbox
Even carefully crafted copy and brilliant design can’t perform if it doesn’t reach the inbox. Learn about the numerous factors that play a role in creating campaigns that get delivered, including sending only to those that have opted-in, only including relevant content, and properly handling inactive subscribers.
Thoroughly test your emails
Between incorrect links, spelling errors, and broken designs, there is a lot that can go wrong when it comes to email. Sending an email with errors may not only affect the results of that campaign, but it could negatively affect your brand reputation, too. We cover each step of thoroughly testing your emails before sending.
Troubleshoot common rendering issues
Once you’ve identified issues in your campaign, it’s time to fix them. Discover strategies for troubleshooting common rendering issues, like blue links on iOS, broken media queries, Gmail rendering quirks, and more.
Analyze results to inform future campaigns
After you’ve sent your email, it’s time to analyze the results. Learn how to compare the results against the goals you originally sent, and also look at other key metrics to determine its performance in your overall email marketing strategy.
In The Ultimate Guide to Email Optimization + Troubleshooting, we cover in-depth how to optimize for each of these steps in the email creation process, including plenty of real world examples that you can start implementing today.
Lauren Smith was the VP of Acquisition and Lifecycle Marketing at Litmus.
