3 Tips for Optimizing Email Content in Real Time

Focus on your subject lines

One row in their inbox—a subject line and preview text—is all the space you have to convince someone to open your email. The effectiveness of your subject line can be the most crucial part of your email campaign.

Mailchimp was founded in 2001, so we’ve learned a lot about what works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to subject lines. Every audience is different, of course, but we’ve found that there are a few common threads that connect many successful email campaigns with high open rates. Here are a few tips that can help you boost your email engagement this holiday season.

• Keep it short. We generally recommend limiting your subject line to a maximum of 9 words or about 60 characters. A concise, to-the-point subject line can help grab recipients' attention—especially during the holidays when inbox competition is fierce—and improve the user experience for folks checking email on their mobile devices.

• Make it personal. Relevant, personalized emails are key to an effective email marketing campaign. That personalization should extend into the subject line, too. Including the recipient's name and location in your subject line can help your message stand out from the other emails vying for their attention. If you’re a Mailchimp user, merge tags make it easy to include personal details automatically and at scale.

• Create a sense of urgency or scarcity. During the holiday shopping season, there may be times when you want to encourage customers to act quickly so they don’t miss out on a specific sale, product, or deadline. You can utilize words like “urgent” or “important” to let folks know that your email requires immediate attention. But be sure to use this tactic sparingly; if every email you send conveys urgency, customers will become less likely to engage.

• Test your subject lines. Don’t leave the quality of your subject lines to chance. When you use an email marketing platform like Mailchimp, you can perform A/B tests that allow you to try out different subject lines for a single campaign to determine what works best. After sending, you’ll also have access to analytics and reporting tools that make it easy to take a deep dive into your campaign’s performance. Over time, you’ll learn which types of subject lines resonate most with your audience.

Want an even easier way to test? Mailchimp’s subject line helper—powered by machine-learning AI—analyzes every email sent through the platform and uses all of that data to provide real-time feedback on things like word count, punctuation, and emoji use to help ensure your emails are as effective as possible.

Be at the top of the inbox

During the holiday season, marketing emails are often time-sensitive. Whether you're promoting a Black Friday sale or sharing details about order and shipping deadlines, the timing of your email matters. And when you consider that your customers may live in different time zones or have different email usage habits, the delivery time of your email could mean the difference between being at the top of their inbox or being buried below messages from all of the other businesses vying for their attention.

There are a few ways to ensure that you’re sending your email at a time when your audience is most likely to engage. First, look through your website and social media analytics data to determine when your site typically receives the most traffic or when your social channels are most active. This information can serve as a good starting point as you think about when to send your email campaigns.

If you’re a Mailchimp user on a Standard plan or above, you can also take advantage of our Send Time Optimization feature. Send Time Optimization takes the guesswork out of determining when customers are most active. It uses data science to figure out when your contacts are most likely to engage, and sends your emails at that time.

Make sure your content seals the deal

Congratulations! You got your timing and subject line right, and your customer opened your email. Now it’s up to the words and images in the email itself to help you drive holiday sales.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to creating content for every audience, but here are a few things to ask and consider as you get started.

• Is it skimmable? You may not have the readers' full attention; even if you do, you won't have it for long. Make sure your message is clear and concise, and try to convey your key points in easily digestible ways.

• Is it visually interesting? Think about how you could add relevant imagery to keep your reader’s interest in a way that aligns with your style and brand.

• Is your typography consistent? Keeping consistent fonts and headline structure can help draw the reader’s eye through your content.

• Does it accomplish your goal? Whether you want to drive people to your website, boost sales, re-engage customers, or just increase brand awareness during the busiest time of the year, make sure the content of your email helps you reach that objective.

From there, the key is to continue optimizing. Just like with subject lines, reviewing campaign analytics and running A/B tests on content can provide you with valuable data and give you ideas for improving performance over time.

If you’re a Mailchimp user with a Standard or Premium plan, the Content Optimizer can be helpful, too. Content Optimizer compares your email content against millions of other top-performing campaigns in your industry and offers suggestions to improve your future emails. You’ll get data-driven feedback about your links, CTAs, copy, visuals, and layout to ensure your marketing is as effective as possible before the whole world gets to see it.