Despite advances in social media and mobiles apps, email remains the dominant force in driving online retail sales. Marketers are constantly challenged to come up with a fresh approach to email campaigns that will keep readers engaged and push click-through rates. To stay on top, marketers have to constantly update basics like subject lines while paying attention to creative in order to boost engagement with customers and improve open and click-through rates. This spring, take a few minutes to dust up your email program.

Check your approach

The first thing to consider is the pace of your campaigns. Are you emailing often enough — or perhaps a little too often? Examining your metrics can help you find the sweet spot. A recent Econsultancy blog, How often should retailers be sending out emails? provides some useful insights. Econsultancy admits that there is not an exact science or formula to use to find out how often you should be emailing your customers, but the article does suggest that even the most sophisticated retailers need to make sure they are monitoring customer response and keeping  a critical eye on unsubscribe rates. The article also suggests asking customers how often they prefer communication when you’re signing them up for your email list – pay attention to what a majority of your new subscribers say — if this is something you’ve done for a while, is the answer trending differently?

Test subject lines

As you tweak the pacing of your emails, the next thing to focus on is the all-important subject line. A MarketingProfs article titled, Email Subject Lines: Words and Tactics that Boost Open Rates, provides some helpful insights for retailers to consider. Statistics collected by MarketingProfs show that creating a sense of urgency or time sensitivity has a big impact on open rates.

Personalization also boosts open rates, particularly when you use the first name only. Even something as seemingly unimportant as whether or not you capitalize a header can make a big difference — it turns out open rates improve when the entire subject is capitalized. It’s very important to continually test subject lines with your audience to gain insights via metrics. Their taste can change with time, trends, and device, so you need to change with them. Read more about testing in in our recent post on the topic.

From open to click-through

Increasing open rates is step one. Step two is grabbing the reader’s attention and getting her to take action. Focus on what you say and what the reader sees. Engage with lively visuals. Hubspot provides a host of compelling statistics on why visuals work so well in their article, 19 Fascinating Statistics that make the Case for Using Visual Content in your Marketing. Here’s just a few reasons:

• 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text

• Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video

• Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t

Make your emails visually appealing — low on text, high on white space — and use compelling visuals to quickly convey the intent of your email and engage readers. Also consider using visual cues that your customers are used to seeing – for example, create a clever announcement about an upcoming sale to look like a screen shot of a text conversation. Or find simple but clever ways to present promotional information in an infographic format – play with visual cues you know your readers will instantly recognize to increase their likelihood to stick with you and read your message.

One of the most critical visuals in  your email will be the call-to-action (CTA) button. Don’t underestimate the power of your CTA. This video from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2013, talks about how critical CTAs are to conversions, and provides insights on how the right CTA can increase conversions by up to 90%.

And, of course, testing your CTA is critical in understanding how well various approaches impact your audience. Entertain a littleDon’t focus solely on selling. Have a little fun. Mashable knows the answer to why quizzes are so popular. The site points out that quizzes drive likes, shares, and traffic, and notes that there are many ways to approach them, particularly for branded quizzes.

For some retailers, it may be as simple as co-branding a quiz that’s already gained popularity, or coming up with something fun and catchy, like  “What kind of shopper are you?” A quiz can increase click-throughs and lead your subscribers to just the right landing page, so start thinking about topics they’ll love.

Humor can work in your favor, too. According to Peter McGraw, a researcher and author on the topic of humor in retail, there are three main reasons why retailers should use humor: Customers want to be entertained and enjoy their interactions, employees want to work for a clever company, and humor helps brands delight customers. Here’s a roundup of recent plays on April Fool’s Day in retail emails curated by Responsys.

The emerging power of video

Social Media Today explored the topic of video in an article, New Study: The ROI of Video in Email Marketing, an overview of research conducted by the Relevancy Group. The study interviewed more than 250 marketing executives, and the big findings were that 80% of marketers reported that they were somewhat or very likely to begin using video in email marketing, and that using video in email marketing campaigns increased email marketing revenue by 40%.

The article provides some good tips on how to start getting results like this – including the good advice to start slowly and small. There are still some glitches with video that can actually hurt the performance of your campaign (think browser compatibility, load times, etc.,) so work with your team to use the best technical options as video becomes the next most important aspect of email marketing.