How to improve your email marketing conversion rate

Email marketing works, but only if you instantly capture your reader’s attention. People spend less than 9 seconds per email before moving on.

That means your email content must be highly relevant to their interests. You need to understand what makes them click. But how can you develop deep, granular insights about your audience at scale?

There are five things your marketing automation platform needs to do:

1. Variable content creation: simple email templates that let you swap out personalized components

2. Easy-to-create segmentation: built-in segments based on attributes like past purchases and webpage visits

3. The ability to track each segment’s journey: across multiple touchpoints, including physical ones (e.g. events, in-store visits, etc.)

4. Responsive engagement: follow-up content that’s relevant to their interests

5. Personalized calls to action: custom landing pages based on the user’s journey

The problem is that most email marketing platforms only make it easy to create a single newsletter and track opens and clicks. Some of them don't offer tools to track visits to multiple pages over time, or to easily recognize multiple visits as being made by the same user. 

As a result, many marketers resort to integrations, which leads to datasets across multiple platforms. If you don’t have all your data in one place, it’s practically impossible to use it for responsive engagement or personalized calls to action.

What you’ll learn in this article: How you can build automated campaigns using ReachOut to create emails, build segments, track each customer’s journey, and engage them with personalized follow-up content over time.

Overview of the ReachOut solution

ReachOut is a marketing automation platform that sends personalized email campaigns, tracks customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, and generates data tables based on the results that you can use for follow-up campaigns.

Whenever a person clicks a link, they land on a page that places a first-party cookie that securely tracks their visits. These opens, clicks, and page views appear in a simple dashboard in ReachOut alongside other geographic and technical information.

You can gather further information from your audience via forms, purchases, and other data sources to build rich profiles for future campaigns.

There are four steps to get started with your campaign:

1. Create a recipient table

2. Create an email content table

3. Build your email template

4. Add ReachOut Analytics to your website

We’ll cover each of these steps below.

Step 1. Setting up your recipient list is simple

Start by creating a recipient list containing all the necessary fields in a recipient table. You’ll want to include things like name, email address, and any relevant details for your campaign, such as a past purchase.

Note: Your email template can contain variables such as {{firstname}} or {{email}} to dynamically pull information from your tables into the email template for each recipient.

Step 2. Build your email contents

Next, create your email content fields in a separate table. Keep in mind that your email template (HTML file) will pull the content components from here. The email might need a subject line, featured image, and a couple of paragraphs of main text. The ReachOut CMS lets you create, rearrange, and change fields as needed.

Step 3. Get your template ready

You can create a clean, responsive email template in HTML using any editor you like. We recommend Stripo for its template gallery and simplicity, or MJML if you prefer writing clean code. ReachOut supports Liquid.js for creating dynamic templates that use variables for merge fields, and IF cycles for conditions and variable layouts.

Remember you can introduce variables like {{content.title}} to pull in the content and populate the template with content for each individual item in the table.

Step 4. Install ReachOut Analytics

Next you’ll need to add the ReachOut library to your website. This is available as a React library or as a JavaScript embed that can also be served from your website and any domain.

ReachOut Analytics is private by design and based in Switzerland. Unlike Google Analytics and other platforms, we use a dedicated marketing database for each organization and do not allow third-party access to any user data, which is end-to-end encrypted.

Now you’re ready to send your campaign and track the results.

Bonus: Adaptive web content

If you want to make conversions even easier, you can also use ReachOut to personalize landing pages. This lets you fill in forms with data you already know.

All you need to do is update links to your landing pages with a query string so that each recipient receives a personalized link, which will identify the user across all visits, not just the initial click on the email. 

An example of a personalized link is: https://reachoutapp.io/contact?ctm_uid=f31a59de-c190-4bb6-ad25-864d10df32cd&ctm_ucn=prospect

Clicking the link will send you to a contact page that has identified you as recipient Your Very Own Page and has also pre-populated the form fields, nudging the user toward conversion. Every time you will visit reachoutapp.io you will keep being identified as this recipient but you can remove the identification clearing the cookies for our website.

Watch your users’ actions and respond

ReachOut tracks users across emails, websites, and other channels. It even tracks users arriving from other sources, like bookmarks or social media. Each time, ReachOut will identify the person from the recipient list and build further insights about their user journey.

With simple integrations like QR codes, you can also track off-platform touchpoints, such as POS transactions or RFID scans.

From these insights, you can create smart follow-up campaigns with personalized content highlighting specific actions: personalized calls to action, responsive forms and fields, and variable email content.

The first marketing platform with scalable pricing

ReachOut has no monthly cost or commitment and includes unlimited data storage for your campaigns. As such, there is no trial and you are welcome to open an account, create an organization, and start experimenting with the CMS and uploading data.

ReachOut is already delivering value across a wide range of industries:

• Events management — A crypto conference used ReachOut to promote the event, capture registrations, send follow-up emails, track attendance, and gather post-event feedback.

• Publishing — A large newspaper publisher uses ReachOut to collect first-party website analytics and be GDPR compliant to then personalize conversion journeys using recipient-level data.

• Real estate — A real estate firm uses ReachOut to collect leads from their website and send campaigns based on user analytics.

• Law — A law firm is using ReachOut Analytics to improve search engine optimization on their website and gain better knowledge about customer interests. 

If you’re ready to try ReachOut, visit our Sign Up page and create a free account. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact our team.