How to Set Your Email Marketing Campaign Apart From Your Competitors

The world of email marketing is a fiercely competitive arena. 

Every single day, the average consumer receives upwards of one hundred emails, many of which come from competitors launching new campaigns. 

In order to shine in this hyper-saturated space, businesses need to craft winning emails that capture audience attention and show the best of their business.

Every single day, nearly 350 billion emails make their way to consumer email accounts. As a leading merchandising strategy, this is a wonderful mechanism to get in contact with your customers. 

However, the vast majority of businesses will have the same idea, making it hard to differentiate yourself.

In this article, we’ll dive into the leading strategies you can use to set your campaign apart from the crowd, touching on the following areas:

• Design Changes
• Finishing Touches
• Personalization

Let’s dive right in.

How To Improve Your Email Marketing Campaign Design

Email marketing design is a field that constantly shifts. 

A few years ago, maximalism was all the rage, with companies using bold colors, huge text, and other design tricks to capture the attention of their audience. 

We’ve also recently been through a minimalism phase, with organizations preferring a paired-down and simple design.

When you could simply follow the current trends of the design space, this will make your emails look exactly like everyone else’s. 

Instead, one of the best ways to design for your own audience is to work out what sort of emails they enjoy. 

Luckily, it is one of the easiest fields to conduct A/B testing in as you have access to a long list of customers that you can directly draw data from.

Do You Know?:
In 2022 alone, approximately, 333.2 billion emails were expected to have been sent and received each day. This is therefore a staggering amount of daily emails. 

By sending out two formats, one to half of your mailing list and the other to the other half, you can start to conduct design experiments. Start with bold differences, like one that has minimalist design choices and one with maximalist design choices. 

From there, based on how the different groups respond to the emails, you can start to define what your audience responds to best. Explore the following characteristics: 

• Open Rate: How many people who received the email actively opened it?

• Read Time: If someone opened the email, how long did they spend reading it before they clicked off?

• Click-Through Rate: Of the people who read through your email, how many clicked on one of its links to go to your website?

Understanding how these metrics vary based on design will help you improve over time and connect with your own audience to a greater extent. 

When this may take weeks or even months of experimenting, it’s well worth it as it can empower you to stand out from the crowd.

How To Improve Your Overall Marketing Emails

Another general method of increasing the impact of your emails is to focus on developing those small touches. 

As the phrase goes, it’s often the little things that cause the biggest change, with 20% of effort resulting in 80% of the result.

Concerning creating winning emails, one simple way of boosting their efficiency is to focus on increasing the sense that your company is made up of people. 

It may seem strange to think about, the vast majority of businesses are just faceless corporations. 

Statistics:
This statistic is all about e-mail commerce revenue worldwide from 2020 to 2027. However, email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023.

In order to set yourself out from the crowd, you can focus on the human element of your company to win customers and differentiate your offering.

A great way of doing this from your account is to stop sending out emails from “Your Company” and take a more human approach. 

Instead, you can either assign employees or make up personas for each merchandising style. 

For example, all of your coupons could come from a specific member of your sales team, while information about a new product could arrive from a member of your selling team.

Sending company emails out as if they were coming from one specific person makes your business seem much more honest, playing up the human element that goes into your business. 

A way of doing this rapidly and easily is by signing off with a name and a signature.

If you’re not sure how to sign off an email, then using a signature template maker can quickly shorten the process for you. 

They’ll provide you with all the information you need to fill in, as well as clear design choices you can opt for. 

Considering these generate signatures in a matter of seconds, they’re one of the fastest ways to develop that final touch that your email needs.

How To Hone Personalization in Your Email Marketing

Another effective way to create a better campaign for your business is to focus on segmenting your audience. 

Personalization is one of the leading strategies in all forms of merchandising, with group segmentation allowing you to increase the specificity of your campaigns.

For example, if you’re selling clothing, then not everyone is going to care about the same products. 

People located in hot areas are likely not going to buy one of your winter coats while people in colder areas are probably not interested in your latest swimwear. 

Interesting Fact:
According to a 2016 report released by DMA, e-mail had a median ROI of 122%. It is more than four times higher than other marketing formats, including social media, direct mail, and paid search. 

Understanding that your audience has different interests allows you to create better merchandising materials.

The vast majority of businesses now expect personalization when dealing with a company. 

However, when most businesses already understand this, they fail to incorporate personalization into their campaigns.

Nothing will reduce a customer’s interest in opening your emails more than receiving one that has absolutely nothing to do with them. By segmenting your audience and distributing emails based on these preferences, you’ll increase engagement rates and satisfy your customers at every turn.

Final Thoughts

Email merchandising is a difficult arena to manage. With potentially thousands of emails arriving to your customers every single day, you need to put a lot of effort into standing out from the crowd. 

However, considering email offers up to $40 of ROI for every $1 invested, this is one of the most impactful merchandising streams you can concentrate on.

By focusing on the three areas defined in this article, you’ll be able to holistically increase the average quality of your emails. 

Not only will this please your customers, as they’ll receive a higher quality message, but it’ll also subconsciously allow you to win more customers, boost your click-through rate, and set your company up for a winning 2024.

Best of luck developing your strategy in the coming year!

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