Whether you’re considering implementing a new campaign or expanding a current one, email marketing may be an overlooked investment full of opportunities.
First, you have to gauge your email marketing success. Start by monitoring the health of your current campaigns and see which templates are performing the best. For example, which templates generated the most opens, clicks and unsubscribes? Other helpful campaign metrics you should be watching out for are conversion rate, revenue, average cart value and cost per email.
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It’s also worth looking at other aspects of your email program that drastically impact its performance. Specifically, I’m talking about the relationship between reliable data and dynamic content, how your emails are rendering, and deliverability.
Dynamic content
Dynamic content uses logic to pull in your subscriber information. The logic is used to personally address your subscriber, as well as for product recommendations, automation, localized content and determining which email template to send.
The logic is entirely dependent on the quality of your subscriber data. Up-to-date data ensures that your emails are as relevant and personalized as possible. No subscriber wants to receive a birthday message three months after the day, nor an offer for a product they already purchased.
When used successfully, the marriage between reliable data and dynamic content will facilitate the customer life cycle, driving brand loyalty and generating more revenue. In its simplest form, including a subscriber’s name in the subject line rather than “Hello, Customer” is more engaging to them and thus makes it more likely they will open your email.
An email template built with logic will pull in localized content and personalized product recommendations, both of which can influence subscribers to purchase or renew. Data and dynamic content help automate your campaign, determining which content block the subscriber receives and when.
Render testing
What’s email rendering or render testing? Rendering engines read HTML code for individual email clients, but display the content differently. When tables break or images are slightly skewed, your emails may look sloppy to your subscribers
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I recommend creating render testing accounts for the major email clients — Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL — and sending test emails to these accounts. Below are some common email client issues to note:
- Use inline tags, not CSS in Gmail. Gmail strips head, body and style tags from emails.
- When aligning nested tables in Yahoo, use “table-layout: fixed.”
- Hotmail and Outlook 2007/2010 won’t display background images, so apply a background color as a backup.
- GIFs don’t render in Outlook, and will only display as a static image.
When testing, be as thorough as possible and use different browsers — Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. You should also perform render tests on different operating systems, computers and mobile devices. Compare how your emails display and make any necessary adjustments.
Source : http://www.emarketingandcommerce.com/article/3-email-marketing-basics/1