Email optimization is an important and necessary part of your email marketing journey when it comes to maximizing the ROI of your campaigns.

As we’ve touched on throughout this guide, sending successful email marketing campaigns for your SaaS is a bit tougher than simply hitting send. There is a fine balance between sending the email campaigns when and how you want and following best practices to ensure the highest chance of success.

Another aspect to consider when beginning your email marketing journey is email optimization. 

This one is actually pretty fun. It’s a small part of the overall email marketing journey but is is a part that you will likely feel like you can actually have a personal impact in shaping the outcome.

Let’s dive in.

What is Email Optimization?

Email optimization is the process of improving the performance of your email marketing campaigns through continuous testing and tweaking of various elements such as subject lines, preview text, email content, the overall design, calls-to-action (CTAs), sending frequency, segmentation, time of sending, etc. 

You get the point. Basically, optimizing the actual content of the email campaigns you’re sending. Finally!

Email optimization involves using data and metrics to identify areas of improvement, testing and tweaking different variables to see what works best, and ultimately implementing changes based on the results. 

Rinse and repeat. Email optimization is never over. There will always be areas of improvement. 

The goal of email optimization is to increase email engagement which will increase the success of your KPIs and product-led email marketing goals.

Some of the most common strategies for email optimization include A/B testing subject lines to see which grabs the most initial attention, personalization inside the email, and segmentation. 

By continuously testing and refining your email marketing campaigns, you can improve their overall effectiveness and maximize the ROI for your email marketing efforts.

Why Email Optimization Matters

Every marketer would love to think that the email they just sent was amazing and extremely relevant to the recipient. But how could you possibly know for sure if you just sent the same emails over and over without any sort of optimization? 

You couldn’t. 

At the end of the day, email optimization matters because it can significantly impact the success of your email marketing campaigns and therefore your entire SaaS. 

In the introduction of this guide we highlighted why we strongly believe that email marketing campaigns are a more effective and efficient way to connect with your desired audience when compared to the always changing social media ad networks that are also frequently used by marketers. If that is true (and again, we strongly believe that it is) then you should be putting maximum effort and resources into ensuring that your email marketing campaigns are as strong as possible.

Areas To Optimize

There are several areas of an email campaign that you can optimize in order to improve its performance over time.

The most common would be the KPIs we touched on in chapter 1. These would be things like open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate.

We mentioned that open and click rates will continue to become increasingly unreliable over time. However, it’s still possible to track open and click rates for the time being as not all providers have yet stripped open and click tracking from emails.

And while the metrics may not be 100% accurate, they will be able to give you directional information that will allow you to optimize your emails.

Email Open Rate

For example, if you’re optimizing for a higher open rate and are A/B testing two separate subject lines, you will still be able to get an overall feel for how each is performing on a granular level.

‍Email Click Rate

If you were optimizing for a higher click rate, you may A/B test your CTA in an email. Maybe one CTA would be a bright button while the other is simply hyperlinked text.

Once you optimize for one area, you are then able to optimize on that winning result as well. On and on you can go optimizing your email campaign to squeeze out the best results possible.

Email Optimization Best Practices

Ultimately, the best way that your SaaS can increase open rates over time is to send relevant and timely content to users.

For example, if a user joins your newsletter or waitlist, it is completely reasonable to expect an email confirming the action taken. You can also expect a high open rate on this email.

If you were an ecommerce company and sent emails every few days with a promo code or random offer, you could expect a low open rate that would likely continue decreasing over time.

In our experience, these are the best ways to increase your open rates:

• ‍Require double opt-in

• Ensure you’re only sending emails to an audience that truly wants your content by adding an additional confirmation step for customers/readers to begin receiving your emails.

• Ask customers to ensure you are moved to their primary inbox during the initial onboarding email flow

• As mail clients like Gmail aggressively move emails to their version of a “Promotions” or “Updates” tab, users will often miss the send if it doesn’t arrive in the “Primary” tab. For more on this subject, see the Deliverability section.

• Create an intriguing subject line and preview text

• Give your readers a reason to open your email in an inbox with hundreds (thousands?) of other emails fighting for their attention. This is not an open invitation to send “click-baity” subjects. Respect your user and send subject lines that accurately reflect the content within.

• Send emails at a relevant time to your audience

• Send when your target audience is available. Sendinblue has found that for SaaS businesses specifically, sending during the week (specifically Tuesday-Thursday) during the hours of 2:00-3:30pm will often see the best results.

• Note: With increasingly global user bases, as well as inaccurate IP data and blocked tracking pixels, you may find that location sending time is getting less effective. It doesn’t hurt to try to time your sends, but keep in mind they may not be 100% accurate even with the best systems.

• Segment your email list

• Sending relevant content that provides value is easier when you’re sending to the right users. See the Segmentation section for more.

• Write great content

• If you wouldn’t find the content useful yourself, there’s a good chance your intended audience won’t either.

If you consistently follow these best practices, you will likely have higher than average open rates on your email marketing campaigns.

A/B Testing

A/B testing, or split testing, is a method of testing in which you compare two or more versions of something — in this case, email — to see which performs better. With email split testing, you can test different subject lines, calls to action, images, copy, and more to see which version of your email achieves your objective at the highest rate. Why would you do this instead of simply crafting what you think is your best email and hitting send to your entire audience?

Because humans are often wrong! 

I’ve consistently been on the wrong side of a split test. What you think is the best email you’ve ever written might not resonate how you expect it to.

A/B testing is a surefire way to ensure you are sending the most effective emails to the majority of your audience.

Keep in mind that the best way to implement split testing is actually by using the end goal of the email (conversion, sale, signup, lead, etc) as the testing KPI you’re attempting to optimize. You don’t need to test strictly based on email first metrics like open rates and click through rates.

It is considered best practice to set up your A/B tests with noticeably different outputs and your end goal should always be top of mind when setting up your different versions of the test.

Simply A/B testing for the sake of A/B testing is unlikely to deliver you the true results you are seeking.

You will be able to refine your A/B tests even further over time as patterns and trends begin to emerge. What may have started as testing based on a hunch or theory will begin to take a more scientific and creative approach.

While you can (and should) A/B test all kinds of factors, we suggest starting with just these three items. They're likely to deliver the biggest impact for your campaigns.

Email Subject Lines

This is the first thing your audience will see related to your email. It’s important to pull them in with an intriguing, but honest, subject line. Maybe your audience is drawn to emojis 🤷‍♂️. Maybe they are drawn to something more serious.

Example 1: 🔥 New Loops features!

Example 2: Loops Update: New A/B testing features & more

Which one do you think will perform better?

Email Call to Action

A call to action or CTA, is the primary goal you’re intending to have a user complete when they interact with your email. While focusing on click rate and conversion rate to achieve your product goals, the call to action in your email campaigns is extremely important. It’s important to test various calls to action to see what encourages users to take the desired action most effectively.

You’ll usually see a CTA represented as a button or text link in an email. This could be a button asking your customer to finish their onboarding, a push to have your customer invite additional team members to the account, or links to social media accounts to follow.

Regardless of what the call to action is, you need to be sure that it is enticing to your reader.

Example 1: Simply adding an inline link to text within an announcement.

“Head on over to Product Hunt to show us support and start daydreaming about the new workspace setup you never knew you wanted (needed) until today.‍

We will be there all day answering comments and questions! 😸

Thanks,

Chris”

Example 2: Add a colorful button that asks your reader to support you.

Images

Using images to pull your reader in is a great idea but not all images are created equal.

A/B testing may help you decide whether your audience gravitates towards images of your product’s new feature or abstract unique sketches that roughly highlight the idea.

How Many Users Are Needed For A/B Testing?

You’re probably wondering how many subscribers you need for A/B testing to be statistically significant and be worth your time.

The more subscribers you have in your audience, the more statistically significant your A/B tests will be. The common recommendation we like to make is that you should have at least 1,000 contacts before beginning to expect accurate results from an A/B test.

It is recommended that you A/B test with 10-20% of your total subscribers. That way, you are able to send the better performing campaign to the remaining majority of your audience. If you only have 100 subscribers, A/B testing an email to 20 recipients will not yield accurate results.

Don’t Be Scared of Email Optimization

Email optimization should be a fun exercise for your marketing team to take advantage of. It is one of the simplest ways to ensure the success of your email marketing campaigns.

And not simple in the sense of “the easiest thing they will do all day” but simple in that optimizing your emails over time will begin to bring trends and data to light that continue to make sending campaigns easier and easier.

If email optimization is done right, you will be able to continuously measure and refine your email campaigns in a way that will achieve higher open rates, click rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated for your SaaS while also reducing unsubscribe and churn rates.

This is a recipe that will set your email campaigns and business goals up for success.