Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

We haven’t focused on email marketing in this newsletter for some time, but it remains a powerful online marketing tool, if used correctly. Whether you want to find new customers, or communicate with existing clients, email can be used in a number of ways, as long as some key principles are followed.

A successful email marketing campaign needs to be carefully planned and implemented, so these are our top ten tips:

1) Have a clear objective ‘ be clear what you want to achieve with an email marketing campaign and how your objectives can be achieved. Will it be a one-off promotional campaign, or an ongoing communication channel? What will be the measures to ensure the campaign is effective?

2) Use a good list ‘ this can be one of the main barriers to running a campaign, as the recipient list needs to be targeted, relevant and legal (especially in Australia where the spam mailing regulations are very strict). There are suppliers of good email lists but, depending on your market you may need to hunt them out, or it can be better to ‘piggy-back’ on an established mailing to your ideal target list. If you are developing your own email list, make sure recipients have opted-in to receive your mailings.

3) Avoid the junk filter ‘ this is increasingly becoming another barrier to getting your message out, since trigger words in your message or the formatting of links to a website can mean your email will be automatically blocked, or the recipient alerted to a potential spam message.

4) Get the email opened ‘ the recipient will scan the email subject and sender and within seconds decide whether to junk it, or open it. You therefore want your recipients to recognise who the message is coming from and to give them a reason to take the next step.

5) Get the email read ‘ the content needs to be relevant and interesting to the reader so that they continue reading and do whatever the email aims to achieve. You’ll need to grab and hold the reader’s attention, make it interesting and appealing and avoid any reason for them to stop reading before completing the desired action.

6) Have a strong call to action ‘ depending on the objectives of the mailing, lead the reader through to the final action and make it easy for them to take an action, whether it’s to complete a sale, sign-up for something, complete a survey or make an enquiry.

7) Track the email ‘ it’s essential to monitor what happens once the email is despatched, from open and bounce rates, to clickthroughs and eventual sales. Many email marketing services provide tracking data on each mailing and you can link the email into an analytics package to trace actions through to a website.

8) Test and improve ‘ based on the results from a mailing, or a series of mailings, the tracking data can provide invaluable information to help you test and improve the performance of your mailings. If you’re sending a mailing to a large list, run a test mailing first and spot any potential problems from the responses.

9) Schedule the mailings ‘ decide when to send the mailing, or test different days over a period of time. Research has shown that the highest email open rates occur on a Monday with the lowest on a Friday, but this could vary depending on your market and email subject.

10) Include an opt-out ‘ On all your mailings you need to include an Unsubscribe option for recipients to decline future mailings. Make it easy for them to do so to avoid any negative feelings towards your company or brand.

As shown here, there’s lots to think about and put into action for any email marketing campaign, but effective planning and tracking can dramatically improve the quality of responses.

If you’d like to find out more or discuss your email marketing plans, please contact us now for a discussion.

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