Email marketing requires many different strategies to come together as one to achieve success. Understanding the complexities of deliverability and automation are essential, but they’re not all you need to know.
All the email strategies in the world won’t matter if you don’t have any emails to send. For this reason, email development is the most fundamental aspect of an email campaign. Nothing else would be possible without this process.
Read on to understand and appreciate email development.
What is email development?
Email development is the process of constructing an email, which includes body text, images, and design layout.
The inside of an email isn’t all that needs to be developed; there’s also the subject line that entices your subscriber to open the email, as well as the preheader text that accompanies and accentuates your subject line.
Adding a preheader can increase your open rate by over 30%.
While strategy is vital to a successful campaign, email development is the core of email marketing.
How to measure email development
Measuring the quality of email development is only truly possible once the email is complete and sent to your subscribers. Email marketers can work on an email all day long and think it’s fantastic, but the metrics that come in from the campaign will tell them the truth.
Once these metrics come in, email developers can use them to alter their approach. They can either double down on specific aspects of the email or go in a different direction.
Unique open rates
Unique open rates let you know how many subscribers opened your email. Unlike standard open rates, unique open rates only count one open per subscriber. So, if a subscriber opens your email 20 times, that will still count as only one unique open.
Your unique open rate is directly correlated with your subject line and preheader because these two aspects of email development are specifically designed to lure the reader into opening the email. Therefore, a low unique open rate means your subject line and preheader need reworking.
When it comes to writing subject lines, remember to be precise and personal. Use a subscriber’s first name and let them know precisely what he or she can expect inside.
Click-through rates
A click-through rate will let you know the percentage of times the content of your email was engaged with. This engagement usually involves a hyperlink, an image, or a CTA, but it could be any number of things.
Considering that CTAs are the part of your email most closely involved with engagement, a low click-through rate requires taking a second look at your CTA. Additionally, the content you’re offering on the other side of a link is vital for a high click-through rate.
Source: Really Good Emails
Does it really matter?
There would be no email marketing campaigns without email development.
Email development doesn’t happen by itself; several email marketers pour all of their creative energy into ensuring that emails are not only visually pleasing but rich in content and easy to engage with.
Even though email development is paramount, that doesn’t take away from the necessity of strategy. Both of these processes have to work together to ensure that an email marketing campaign gets to as many eyes as possible and gets results.
What now?
After you’re familiar with the importance of email development, you should educate yourself on some of the shortcuts that technology provides. One of those shortcuts comes in the form of templates. Here is everything you need to know about making your own promotion email templates.