3 S’s that will instantly improve your email click-through rate
and make email marketing easier for you
Single Segment Send:
Single focus on one topic in one email
Segment your audience
Send relevant stuff to the segmented audience
(Credit to Vicki Handley and her newsletter for helping me generate this idea 💡)
Have one topic focus in an email
Have you ever seen the study on choice?
Original study was conducted in 2001 by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper and published in a paper called “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing”, lovingly called The Jam Experiment online.
The findings were that less choice led to purchase much more often than more choice:
The psychologists found that while more shoppers that passed the display table with 24 jams stopped to try when compared to the number of individuals who stopped at the display table with six jams, people in the limited-choice condition were actually more likely to make a purchase. The researchers concluded that while an abundance of options might initially seem attractive to consumers, having too many options might actually cause someone not to make any decision at all.
Source: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/economics/the-paradox-of-choice
And there have been more studies made on this since as well. Turns out, the more not the merrier. At least not when it comes to choice.
Same applies to your email:
If you give people too much choice in your email, they’ll much more likely do none of the things.
But if you ask them to do one thing, they’ll either do it or not. That’s just one decision to make.
This also means you can email them more often with short emails that only have one topic. This will also ensure they don’t forget about you in between emails and have a positive perception of your emails, as you are not overwhelming them.
Stick to one idea!
Segment your audience
Always, whenever possible, segment your audience!
You could do this at the sign-up stage or through engagement emails after.
But you don’t need to ask them to segment themselves all the time, you can do that yourself:
Segment the most engaged from the least engaged.
Segment based on their location.
Segment based on what they’ve clicked on in past campaigns.
Segment not just for you to see and go “aha, that’s interesting”.
Segment so that you can send that group relevant information in your emails. Which takes us to the next point:
Send relevant stuff to the segmented audience
Now that you’ve got segments and are only sending one topic in one email, send different emails with different content to your audience segments.
People want to hear from us, they’ve signed up, so speak to them.
The nuance is to bridge the gap between what you want to get out of email and what they want to get from your emails.
Don’t send cat content to people who have dogs.
Do reward your most engaged and loyal audience with unique content just for them, such as behind-the-scenes, a sneak peek, or just an extra bonus.
Don’t email weekly those that have indicated they want monthly updates, and vice versa.
Do use dynamic content in your campaigns to provide personalised content to a segment without needing to send different campaigns.
That’s it: Single Segment Send.
Maria Malaniia
email marketing for nice people