Smart email marketing: How to send targeted and interactive emails in today’s digital world (Part 1)

Email marketing is seen as an integral element of engagement for most of today’s digital businesses. While sending emails still takes the primary focus for most of us, delivering emails successfully to recipients’ inboxes is catching up the top position too.

So it’s not just sending an email campaign that can ensure a place for it in a recipient’s mail folder. There are other methods to make your emails “smart” and “intelligent” in a way that they not only land safely but also don’t get lost in the long trail of other emails in your contacts’ inboxes.

With Zoho Campaigns, you can create and send emails that are personalized in both content and time of delivery, interactive, tested for open rates and clicks, spam-compliant, and extremely relevant and consumable to every contact who receives them.

Let’s look at some ways you can perform smarter email marketing and how Zoho Campaigns can make this process easy.

Testing that’s impact-driven and not imperfectly driven

It’s common wanting to run an experiment to test different versions of your email, but it’s important to list your reasons before you do. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want to run this experiment?

• What variables are you comparing?

• What is the end goal and which is this the winning version?

A/B testing for emails is the best way to find out which type of email has more impact on your audience. Where people get A/B testing wrong is by not running a test at all before sending an email (when it’s highly required) and running imperfect testing by comparing wrong attributes (when it’s not recommended). Don’t forget that A and B are just versions that need to differ by the same attribute. A meaningful result will only come when you try to compare relevant versions.

With A/B Testing from Zoho Campaigns, you’re able to test emails for different attributes like subject line, sender address, and email content. With the ability to pick your own decision criteria for selecting the winning version of the email, you can have the entire experiment run under your control without being data-blinded.

Sending emails when a recipient is most active

What if every email you send is opened instantly by your recipient? It sounds like magic, but it’s really just metrics! Understanding your recipients’ prime open times will help you deliver emails that get noticed.

Time calibration plays a key role in estimating the time during which a particular email that you send will be opened by a contact who receives it. Your contacts may have subscribed to multiple brands and are likely to receive a sizeable chunk of emails every day. What can differentiate your email from the rest is when you choose to make that email appear in their inboxes.

Using Zoho Campaigns’ Send Time Optimization, you can make sure to send emails to your mailing list contacts at the exact time each of them will be active. This time will be unique for each contact, so, in simple terms, you’re now able to personalize the time of email delivery!

Safeguarding your domain reputation with email splitting 

All of us are aware of this simple science—the more air filling a balloon, the more chances of it bursting. Imagine the same scenario but with your mail server in the place of the balloon. Sending bulk emails is fine, but what matters more is how you’re handling the bulk. The bulkier your email sending gets, the riskier your sender reputation becomes.

Sending too many emails at the same time can strain your server and make your domain look inauthentic. The best way to prevent this is by splitting your huge email numbers into smaller batches and sending each batch at periodic time intervals.

Zoho Campaigns’ Batch Send option helps you conveniently split your mailing list—and your emails—into multiple batches, as well as letting you define the time period between the delivery of each email batch. This also gives you room to study the performance of each set of emails and optimize them further for the next set.

Handling of bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints

The health of your mailing list and the overall performance of an email campaign depends on three primary metrics: bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. These terms are as crucial as other performance measuring units like open and click rates.

A high bounce rate clearly indicates the inability to deliver your emails, which in turn shows that your mailing list is unhealthy and doesn’t contain contacts from authentic/trusted sources. Unsubscriptions happen due to a variety of reasons, the most common being a lack of interest in the brand, irrelevant engagement, spam experiences, change in reading preference, and so on.

Similar to unsubscribing from a list, people can also mark emails as spam. When the unsubscribe process is complicated, recipients tend to mark specific emails as spam with the expectation being they won’t receive any further emails from the sender. A holistic maintenance of all these three metrics is essential for smooth email delivery.

Zoho Campaigns provides automatic handling of bounces (soft and hard bounces), unsubscribes, and spam complaints so you don’t have to stress about managing these for every email campaign. Also, when a sender is exceeding their bounce rate or spam complaints, we automatically notify them in order to help them get back on track with some best practices.

Seeing emails the way your recipients would 

Today’s online buying process has been revolutionary, but it hasn’t given up on one thing—the catalogue. Buying decisions are still based on product images. Buyers still want a sneak-peek at what they can expect from the product.

It’s the same case with your emails. Previewing emails before sending them to recipients helps you not only proofread the various email elements, but also get an idea about how your email will look in the their inboxes. This will reduce human errors as well as help you seamlessly deliver emails across multiple email clients, devices, and browsing platforms.