All email campaigns – even your best performing ones – deserve an occasional update. What better time than now to give your emails a much-needed makeover? Many factors across industries, technical requirements, design trends, and best-practices evolve and shift throughout the year.
In an ever-changing media landscape, customers can easily fall into complacency and boredom when faced with stale, repetitive content. A new start allows you to evaluate the quality of your campaigns and strategies as well as account for changing trends and standards.
Where to start
An email overhaul can be daunting, but refreshes don’t have to be monumental. Even small adjustments, from subject-line testing to new layouts or templates, can create incremental improvement for your engagement metrics. Here are a few ways to approach a campaign refresh:
Design
Content
Future-proofing
No matter how you choose to refresh campaigns, testing is an integral part of the process. Continually measuring customers’ responses to change will help you understand how to create the most impactful campaign for your audience.
Try a fresh design
Keep subscribers on their toes by changing up the templates for promotional sends. It’s easy to rely on habits and fall for convenience, but a facelift for your templates will garner renewed focus and interest from your audience.
For example, instead of sticking to a column layout, try a broken-grid design that can give content a unique look and feel.
As more emails are opened on mobile than on webmail or desktop environments, make it this year’s goal to improve how your email displays on a variety of devices, including smartwatches. You don’t want to lose subscribers just because of poor mobile experience.
If you do have an older, but high performing campaign, it’s easy to set it up and forget it for extended periods of time. Most brands have one or more of these legacy campaigns, created years ago, performed well, but haven’t adapted to the ever-changing market. There is a lot to gain by modernizing successful campaigns.
But, be wary of change for just for the sake of it. Test new designs against your current campaign and optimize based on your results.
Content is still King
Content should be at the core of any email campaign. Slick design without meaningful content will not be enough to engage your audience and lead them to action. To keep your message relevant, consider using dynamic content.
Dynamic and personalized blocks of data can be added to an email, allowing you to create specific messaging for a variety of configurations. You can move past the one-size-fits-all templates and send content that resonates with every part of your audience. You can create different templates based on a variety of configurations, such as demographics, location, and segment.
Mapping out your entire customer journey and tracking the number of campaigns involved will also help visualize where your content needs updating. With Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, you can identify key moments within the customer journey and make updates as customer relationships and lifecycles evolve.
Future-proofing
By creating better experiences for customers now and for the future, marketers can become more efficient. Use artificial intelligence to recommend words and visual assets based on customers’ preferences and behaviors. With smart predictions, insights, and recommendations, you can ensure content doesn’t go stale and updates are easier than ever.
In order to grow your AI and automation, take a look at your current data storage, CMS, lists, and integrations. Your current systems and assets must be organized before they can be utilized for better content creation.
This year, set out to give your emails the attention they deserve. With a few strategic updates, you’ll be on your way to fresh content in no time.
This blog post is an adaption of an article by Salesforce. To read the original article, click here. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2020/02/refresh-email-campaigns-new-year.html
