• by Kath Pay , Op-Ed Contributor, July 9, 2015

I had the pleasure of moderating the first panel at the fantastic three-day Email Insider’s Summit in Portugal, joined by an expert team of email marketers as panelists. Panos Melissaropoulos of Moosend, Sana Dubarry of Epsilon and Kay Kerman, an email marketing consultant, all shared their insights on the best ways to optimise for conversions with your email marketing programmes.

It was a big topic! So we decided to break it down into the following three key areas to focus on:

Testing
-- Use a hypothesis to assist in gaining a statistically confident result. You are creating a considered test with a specific question in mind and as such will be more likely to deliver a result that is statistically significant.

-- Identify your success metric before you test. What is the objective of the campaign? Is it to increase opens? Then number of opens is your success metric. Is it to drive engagement? Then clicks-to-opens is your success metric. Is it to drive conversions (downloads, registrations, competition entries, purchases)? Then conversions is your success metric. However, be sure to measure all of these metrics — but base your winning metric on the success metric that matches your objective.

-- Apply the learnings you’ve gained from your email tests to other channels. When performing an email test, you’re essentially surveying your prospects and customers to find the best performing subject line, copy, call-to-action, image etc. that helps you to meet your objective. So apply what you’ve learnt to your other channels, such as PPC, website, landing pages, banner ads, etc.

-- Don’t forget to optimise your automated campaigns. These campaigns are gems and perform an invaluable service in driving revenue – even while you sleep! So test the subject line, copy, call-to-action, personalisation to ensure you’re not leaving money on the table.

Personalisation
-- There are three types of data to use when personalising: stated, behavioural and transactional. The best results for personalisation will be when you layer all three types of data.

-- Let automation and technology do the hard work for you. The most personal emails are generally those that are sent real-time, based upon a behavior the customer or prospect took — so take advantage of this and automate as much as possible. Technology, with its powerful algorithms and use of behavioural and transactional data can result in emails that are more personalized.

Persuasion
-- Decisions are made unconsciously by our customers/prospects, so leverage behavioural economic tactics such as loss aversion, emotion, reciprocity, social proof, framing — just to name a few of the more commonly used ones.

-- Ensure you remove barriers to conversion and deliver a streamlined pleasurable experience. Cognitive ease is just as valid as physical ease when it comes to humans – we tend to take the path of least resistance. Often in the case of digital marketing, consumers abandon the road to conversion because the marketer’s set up a journey that’s too complex or difficult.

Whilst we only had time within the panel session to touch on these three points, there are many takeaways and certainly lots of food for thought. Why not start testing and applying these optimization ideas, and see if you can increase your results?