Four Factors to Keep in Mind When Developing Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Email Marketing is a powerful promotional tool and it’s getting more powerful all the time. With people using email for a greater part of their interactions and spending longer emailing via mobile, email can be a highly effective way of getting your message out to people.
However as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. For email marketing that means careful consideration of each aspect of a marketing campaign. In order for you to get the most out of that campaign while also offering recipients something of value you should keep these four elements of email marketing in mind when you put together your strategy.
Design
Before a recipient gets to your site from an email and purchases something, there are a number of steps they have to pass through to get there. Design plays a large role in determining whether or not the mail gets opened, read then clicked or unsubscribed and sent to spam.
The first points of contact are the From/To fields and subject line. These should immediately convey your brand and what the email is promoting. If your brand or name is familiar to the recipient, make sure to use it here as this distinguishes it from spam. The subject line should not be more than 40 characters long but should be as informative and captivating as possible.
The article content should be engaging and clear. Use plenty of whitespace so as not to overwhelm the reader with text. Consider that many emails don’t automatically display images. Your email content should work just as well with text only.
Don’t forget about mobile devices. Make sure the platform you are using provides for responsive design. Mobile users may form a huge part of your list so it’s critical you don’t leave them out.
Recipients
Email addresses are the currency of the internet so spend them wisely. Once you lose an email to a spam filter you can’t get it back.
Don’t Spam. Even if you are genuinely offering free trips to the moon if you say so in your header your email will go directly into the spam folder. If your email looks like spam or sounds like spam it will get treated like spam. Terms such as Free, Offer and Discount are likely to trigger spam filters.
Remind recipients how they got on your list and why they are receiving the email. Don’t hide the unsubscribe button either. If the recipient doesn’t want your emails there is no value in keeping them on your list. All it can do is damage your brand.
When you are building your list make sure you have real names for your “To” fields. Also, give plenty of options for recipients to add details such as their company’s name so you can give them personalised special offers.
Timing
Every hour after your email arrives in an inbox the chances of it being opened diminish exponentially. More than a quarter of email opens occur in the first hour after an email is received. After two hours that figure drops to less than 10%.
Getting your promotion to inboxes in the hour before most people will be checking their mail can really improve your open rate. Studies suggest that most opens occur between 8 and 9 in the morning and between 3 and 4 in the afternoon.
Know your list. These times and figures only apply generally. The specific target of your list may have different habits and responses. Business related offers are likely to be opened during work hours, consumer promotions may be more likely to be opened outside of work hours.
Review
One of the benefits of email marketing is the sheer quantity of data that can be gathered on a campaign. But if it isn’t acted on then it’s not worth much at all.
It is important to look at who is opening your emails and who isn’t and try to figure out why. Is the content as relevant to those people as it could be?
Test, test and test again. Try out different subject lines, headers and even content in A/B tests to see which are more effective. You can often be surprised by the difference even a simple word rearrangement makes. Take out the less successful variants and try again with new ones.
You can even send different emails to different groups or segments and see if their responses vary. Customising an email to a group can greatly improve its effectiveness.
If you keep these four aspects of email marketing campaigns in mind you should have plenty of opens, click-throughs and conversions from your campaigns.
Ezine.ie
With Ezine.ie Inspiration provide a range of email marketing services from DIY to fully managed campaigns. Inspiration’s email marketing platform offers plenty of features including responsive design, tracking, subscriber management and social media integration.
Sign up for free by creating an account and get started with your email marketing campaign.