Top Tips for Creating an Effective EDM Marketing Campaign in Hong Kong

Many businesses in Hong Kong are already familiar with the concept of EDM marketing (Email Direct Marketing) and use it to engage and generate leads. But more often than not, the open rates, click rates, and engagement are not the results they want to see. For most businesses in Hong Kong, their EDMs perform much lower than the average global benchmarks. 

The truth is, a lot of the time, there is little to no strategy for their campaign, and instead, we see so many businesses sending cold emails that get lost in the recipient's inbox or marked as spam. How do you know if you're doing well or not?

The Current EDM Marketing Landscape

See the below breakdown of EDM marketing benchmarks by industry in 2024. Compare your EDM campaign performance to the averages in your industry.

Updated 2024 email marketing statistics are from Campaign Monitor

At Oxygen, we have helped our clients achieve x3 more than the global average rates for EDM campaign performance.

If your EDM marketing performance isn’t up to par with industry standards, that’s okay. Most likely, it may just mean that you need to tweak your approach to having more success. Here are some of the most common mistakes made by Hong Kong businesses when it comes to EDM marketing: 

❌ Buying email lists
❌ Not using subscription settings 
❌ Not using lists
❌ Lack of follow-up automation
❌ Not tracking data
❌ Not linking open rates to a contact within a CRM 

If you are doing any of the following practices listed above, it’s time for you to revamp your EDM strategy to achieve the best results. 

Four Ways to Optimise Your EDM Marketing Campaign

1. Personalise Your Emails 

Emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.  

– Campaign Monitor

One-size-fits-all communication doesn't work anymore. Personalisation for EDM marketing is key to driving high engagement and improving customer experiences by sending leads helpful, useful content at the right time. Most of all, your EDM’s are much less likely to be marked as spam. 

Here are some of the best ways to personalise your EDM's: 

• Use personalisation tokens - Personalisation tokens are codes that you can insert into your email. The token will automatically be inserted with the corresponding property value once the EDM is sent to a contact. When sending an email to a contact in the HubSpot CRM, you can personalise that email with snippet personalisation tokens. 
• Send your emails at the right time - By this, we don't just mean sending emails to people at peak hours of the week or their preferred time zone. If you have enough information about your leads, you should know their stage in the buyer's journey. That way, you can customise and tailor your content to meet the specific needs of your leads.
• Change the email sender to a person - Another small yet effective way to personalise emails is to change the email sender and name to a person, not the business. People are more likely to trust and relate to an email that comes from another person.

2. Automate Your Follow-Ups Based on Engagements

Another key way to optimise your EDM campaigns is to send automated emails to recipients based on their engagement. Using the workflow's tool on HubSpot, you can set triggers to target and segment your contacts who received your first EDM. If they didn't open or click on the first email, they could be sent follow-up emails. By sending automated follow-ups, your EDM campaign can see a higher response and open rates.

3. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly 

Mobile accounts for the majority of email opens at 51%. So if you want to attract your audiences to open your EDMs, consider these suggestions for making your EDMs mobile-friendly: 

• Keep your copy clear and concise - More often than not, we see so many Hong Kong businesses stuffing as much information in one email. The more information, the more valuable, right? In fact, it's quite the opposite. Long emails can be overwhelming for recipients, reducing response rates and slowing response times.
• Have one focused call-to-action - If the purpose of your email is to achieve high conversion rates, having one CTA helps accomplish this. Having one CTA can avoid confusion for recipients and will increase the chance of them clicking the CTA. 
• Avoid placing too much text on images - Avoid text-heavy images to ensure that they will look right on all device sizes. More importantly, avoid placing important information within images as some email programs block the automatic image downloads by default, which could cause your recipients to delete your email or even mark it as spam. 
• Reduce image file sizes - Big image sizes slow download speed, especially on mobile. Try to keep file sizes smaller than 300Kb.
• Resize images for mobile - Make sure you preview your email on both desktop and mobile before sending it out to ensure that images are displayed clearly on all devices.

4. Track & Monitor the Success of Your EDM Marketing Campaign

If you can't measure something, you can't improve it. Tracking the success of your EDM campaign is crucial for understanding what's working and what isn't so you can adjust your strategy accordingly. But how do you measure success? 

A/B Test Your EDM Campaign

One way to do this is via A/B testing. A/B testing EDMs is the process of sending half of your subscribers one variation of your EDM and the other half another variation with the goal of understanding which version gets the best result. A/B testing is a good way to see how specific changes to your EDM can impact your results. To run an A/B test for EDM's, consider the following: 

• Test one variable at a time - This will let you determine precisely what element in the EDM is responsible for achieving the results. 
• Make sure your list is big enough - Having a sample size of a few hundred people is not enough to get accurate results. 

HubSpot's A/B testing tool allows you to test variations of your EDMs with a sample of your recipients. After creating your EDM, you'll create a second version to test how a single variation impacts email opens or clicks. Over some time, HubSpot's A/B test tool will pick a winning version to send to the rest of your recipient's list.

Track Customer Engagement With the Help of CRM

CRM is crucial to leveraging the performance of your EDM campaigns by helping track and monitor email engagement history. While popular EDM tools like Mailchimp offer all the necessary tools for creating an EDM marketing campaign, they lack the CRM and user engagement features to track and monitor performance. 

Hubspot ranks as the #1 CRM platform in 2024. Creating your EDM campaigns on Hubspot can allow you to track email engagement history saved to an individual contact record. In doing so, you can create targeted, personalised campaigns by sending follow-up emails based on engagement.

For a comprehensive overview of which marketing software is best for your business, read our Hubspot vs Mailchimp blog here.