Discover how top CMOs are driving stronger returns on email marketing efforts.
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Email Marketing: Proven Strategies to Boost Email Conversion Success
Craft an email marketing strategy based on value, not volume
Forty-four percent of CMOs say email marketing is essential to their marketing strategy. But changing consumer preferences and dwindling open rates pose a major challenge.
Gartner’s Digital IQ for Email Marketing Benchmarks examines emerging trends and examples of marketers who are adjusting to reap better returns. Use our guide to:
Benchmark tactics against competitors and industry peers
Create campaigns that connect more deeply with customers
Deliver greater value with best-in-class email content
Drive customer value with a tight email marketing strategy
Despite many challenges, email marketing remains one of the top channel investments for CMOs. Maximize your returns by taking these key actions.
- Assess Email Performance
- Adjust Email Strategy
- Boost Email Effectiveness
- Try Our Digital IQ Index
Evaluate and improve email marketing performance by optimizing current tools
Email marketing still ranks consistently high for performance across all stages of the purchase funnel. But marketers are less likely to say the channel exceeded its goals, largely because mail privacy tools, brand indicators for message identification (BIMI) and increased use of secondary inboxes exist to shield users from “email bombardment.”
While AI, machine learning and improved automation tools often dominate the email marketing discussion, you can make significant improvements to performance by enhancing internal processes and improving your use of existing email marketing tools.
Start with these actions:
Assess your email marketing solution to confirm whether it supports your overall email and digital marketing strategy and still has room for growth.
Determine whether optimization opportunities exist in campaign design, content, execution, delivery and reporting capabilities through your current provider before resorting to system replacement.
Decide whether your email marketing needs will remain channel-focused or if you need a broader, more comprehensive multichannel marketing hub solution.
Assess whether improvements to customer data management can improve email marketing more effectively than changing email marketing solutions.
Find synergies between your email marketing program and other complementary communication channels, such as mobile (SMS, as well as push and in-app messaging) and search.
Investigate different options for collecting contact data to expand email’s value. Look into tools that allow you to link implicit data such as browsing history and location, with explicit data captured to improve the relevance of emails to readers.
Explore where and which integrations are necessary for your email program to support digital commerce objectives — e.g., the ability to synchronize common transactional messages through your email platform based on stored customer profiles.
Account for email volume and frequency requirements, as well as messaging-type support (e.g., marketing versus transactional) when choosing vendors.
Encourage better returns from email marketing by formalizing your strategy
To maximize email marketing efforts, facilitate a more holistic approach that breaks through the noise of busy email inboxes using this five-step process:
Step 1: Refine audience targeting and email segmentation
Emails fall flat when the message is generic, meaning that in time, even your most relevant emails might be sent to the spam folder. Prevent this by standardizing a process for targeting. When segmenting email marketing lists, create manageable groups based on key characteristics, such as:
Geography
Industry
Age of contact in your database
Personas (e.g., buyers, end users)
Step 2: Develop messaging that conveys relevance and drives urgency
Clear email targeting yields better-fit messaging. Consider and lead with the pain points that are encouraging your prospects to prioritize their buying needs. Think like a buyer and use situational context to increase the relevance of your message once it hits the inbox. Connect the message, and how your offer uniquely resolves the audience’s problem by demonstrating differentiation and value, to your included CTAs.
Avoid messaging that is overtly salesy or too focused on features and functions. These emails are more likely to be seen and filtered as spam or result in opt-outs by the recipient.
Allow time to test messaging and storytelling before hitting send on large lists.
Step 3: Determine the content needed and how it fits into campaigns
When choosing content to include in your email marketing campaign, consider the recipient’s likely stage of the buying journey. Once you’ve identified the buying stage, tailor your content to ensure it answers the buyer’s questions about their challenges and why they are in the market for a new offering.
Step 4: Include clear, goal-focused calls to action
Use CTAs to prompt readers to take specific actions that will help them through their journey. Clear CTAs motivate people to take action in their favor and minimize the risk of confusion for the reader regarding the action you expect them to take.
Importantly, be sure your CTAs do not compete with one another. Always include a CTA that aligns to both the specific email campaign’s objective and the target audience’s location in the buying journey. At the end of the email, include a CTA that drives the audience to connect with you (for example, in your signature section, you should include a direct link to schedule a call with you).
Step 5: Create a compelling subject line
The very first thing your reader will see is the subject line, which will have a profound effect on the open rates of your email marketing campaign.
Write the subject line last, after you’ve had a chance to digest the content in the body of the email. Aim to follow these general rules when writing subject lines:
Avoid the use of jargon.
Create urgency by highlighting why the recipient should click now.
Keep to 40 or fewer characters to make the subject line viewable from the inbox.
Customize it to the recipient list by using buyer keywords.
Increase email marketing relevance and value by breaking down internal silos
In many organizations, email communications are sent by various sales, marketing and CX teams, making messaging consistency hard to achieve. Customer data such as online browsing behavior, past interactions and purchase history are often siloed, making it hard to maximize audience relevance and receptivity.
To ease these challenges, align channel-specific KPIs (such as click-through rates, open rates and email traffic) with wider goals to help your peers understand the value of collaboration, assess the overall success of any email marketing plan and optimize it for increased sales performance over time.
Centralize data to send targeted messages that drive conversions
“Triggered” campaigns (emails based on changes in customers’ noted behaviors or product status) typically perform better than other promotional campaigns that are sent on a fixed cadence or day of the week. These are often personalized based on the action taken, such as a cart-abandonment message that addresses a specific item in a customer’s cart. Personalization in digital commerce improves the following KPIs:
Conversion rates (88% increase)
Order values (41% increase)
Recommendation acceptance (66% increase)
Reduced cart abandonment (39% decrease)
However, data that can improve email relevance is often siloed. Seventy-six percent of marketing technology leaders say they have capability gaps in turning data into actionable insights.
To improve the availability of data that would impact the performance of email campaigns, focus efforts on personas and break down silos between marketing and CX teams by ensuring digital marketing collaborates with peers.
Keeping a pulse on information from other parts of the business — whether signals of changes to buying behaviors or news of supply chain disruptions — can go a long way to ensure that your email marketing messaging is relevant to audiences. Given typical business structures, this flow of information is not seamless. Consider establishing cross-team working groups to build communication pathways while maintaining your email marketing team’s channel focus.
In times of stress, it’s easy to take a myopic view into a single channel, campaign or event. Help your team remove their blinders by seeking insights from social media and customer service teams to quickly A/B test digital commerce communications and assess the impact on conversion rates.
Measure your brand performance
The Gartner Digital IQ Index is a proprietary research tool that lets you benchmark your brand’s digital performance.
This impartial, outside-in benchmarking solution offers concrete marketing performance insights and a clear read of the industry landscape to help you:
Assess your individual brand performance and improve digital maturity
Compare your brand’s performance and digital footprint against key competitors and leading brands
- Understand the top trends impacting your industry to inform your key actions and decisions
We rank brands by industry or digital channel, based on evaluation across hundreds of distinct data points, to give you a clear framework for prioritizing your digital efforts.
Our CMO and marketing leader clients use the Digital IQ Index to:
Measure digital reach, growth and effectiveness in the context
Identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to optimize
Prioritize investments
Maintain brand relevance across channels
Get specific, actionable recommendations on how to boost brand performance
Learn more about the Digital IQ Index and request a demo here.
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FAQ on email marketing
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the use of the email channel to deliver and optimize marketing messages — such as brand newsletters or contextually relevant, real-time and personalized communications — in support of multichannel engagement across the customer journey.
Transactional email messages (messages sent automatically by email servers upon completion of certain events, such as order-confirmation emails) can also cross over into email marketing programs to the extent that account statements or order confirmations include recommendations, promotions or offers based on customer insights.
How does email marketing contribute to overall CMO strategy?
Email marketing is one of the most mature and commonly used channels supporting digital marketing strategy. Email platforms are nearly universal in both B2B and B2C martech stacks and are increasingly used by non-DTC consumer brands as a data capture funnel. Our research revealed that 44% of CMOs say email marketing is essential to their overall digital strategy, allocating nearly 8% of their entire digital marketing budget to the channel.
Why is email marketing important for businesses?
Email marketing continues to be among the most efficient marketing channels that use personalization, yielding valuable customer insights and first-party data.