How many times have you heard the phrase ‘Content is King?’ I know I hate the phrase as much as the next person, but it’s true. And in terms of marketing, finding the right content is key. It needs to centre around the customer rather than itself, it needs to attract customers, not irritate them and it needs to be more about them than about you. Having an email that is full of great content but also laid out in a way that it’s easily skimmable for the notoriously lazy reader. Long and untidy emails will be overlooked and will not get the desired message across.

But how do I achieve this, I hear you ask, well the good news is that within Mailchimp, yes I’m specifically discussing email marketing…again, there is some help at hand.

You may have already read some of our blogs on Mailchimp, such as
6 Tips To A Creating A Successful Drip Feed Email Marketing Campaign
How To Tackle Abandoned Carts With Email Marketing
Make Your Marketing Go Further By Understanding Your Audience
Why Sending an Automated Welcome Email is Good Practice

but in this blog I am going to run through another feature within the popular CRM Mailchimp, allowing you to understand your data, and make your marketing budget go further.

Other CRM systems are also available and operate in a similar fashion, but as Mailchimp is what many of our own clients use, as it is free for us to 2,000 subscribers, up to 10,000 sends a month, with a daily send limit of 2,000, I will be focussing on this platform in this blog.

Welcome Content Optimiser!

Mailchimp as we already know collects data from previous campaigns and offers suggestions on how to create and design future marketing content. Content Optimiser essentially offers extra guidance with analysis based on industry best practices.

To access Content Optimiser’s detailed analysis requires you to have a standard marketing plan or higher. Full details of plans can be found on the Mailchimp pricing page.

You will also need to be familiar with the different types of data that can be found within an email report. Such as:

• How many emails were opened?
• How many orders were received?
• The average order revenue
• The total opens
• Total unopened
• Total bounces
• Total Clicks
• Click performance
• On page analytics
• The 24hr performance
• Discover subscribers with the ost opens

The list goes on but above are just a few obvious ones to study. Once you have got to grips with the data within these reports this will help you shape and refine your future campaigns.

So how does Content Optimiser work?

Basic information on your campaign can be found in your reports as discussed, but Content Optimizer will also give you feedback on your content and design. Important information based on industry best practices.

The analysis will include insights on your word count, use of external links, images and much more. This information can be found with your reports, within the Content Optimiser section.

Ideally, many of these features should and could be set up when first creating a branded template, but carefully consider these suggestions to help improve your emails in the future:

Skimmability
Mailchimp will review how easy your email is to skim read, counting how many words are in your email and estimates the time it will take to read. The higher the skimmability score the better.

• Keep it short and simple. Content will be easier to skim and understand quickly, which can increase your audience’s intake and retention.
• Avoid using large words and long sentences, this will help ensure your audience can easily understand your content.
• Use no more than 200 words to ensure your audiences average read time is less than 45 seconds
• Try and use 25 or fewer words per sentence.

Text and Visuals
Mailchimp will analyse the use of images and headings in your email, giving you a better understanding of the visual interest and engagement, your audience has with your email

• Ensure you use at least one image
• Ensure your headings contain 8 or fewer word
• Subheadings should contain no more than 30 words

Links and CTA’s (call to actions)
Mailchimp will analyse the use of CTA’s and links in your email, that connect with your social platforms and web pages

• Ensure you include at least 1 link
• Use plenty of call to actions to drive as much traffic as possible to the relevant areas of interest on your website
• Don’t forget your social media links, these are default to Mailchimp and are all too often overlooked

Typography
Mailchimp will check for inconsistencies of font size and styles. The use of a font can go a long way to increase the professional look of your email, so well worth considering at the template creation stage.

• Body Font – Use a font that is at least 14px
• Increase the font ratio between your heading and subheading by 1.25 ratio, this will help lead the eye to the important information and help with skim reading
• Ensure you use the same font size for all your body copy blocks, this will make it easier to read and skim
• Your heading font should be at least 18px
• With a subheading font size of 16px
• Ensure your heading and font size is a good ratio (1:25 as a guide)
• Be consistent with your headline size and fonts throughout the email

Considering the content of your email is as important as to how you structure and display the content. Once you have a better understanding of how your audience engages with your emails you can refine and repeat, and Content Optimiser is a great tool within Mailchimp to help with this.

So, Start turning your data into action and get more from your marketing!

InSynch has a strong in-house team of experienced digital marketing experts that deals with the crucial aspects of promoting and publicising businesses, to ensure they achieve maximum exposure and success.

Email marketing is covered under our Total Digital Marketing Packages
If you would like any more information about putting together an effective email marketing campaign, book a FREE initial 1-2-1 consultancy session with one of our Digital Marketing Experts.