Email is a quick and efficient way to communicate with customers and prospects. This guide tells you how to make email campaigns more effective and increase results.
Email is a quick, easy and low-cost way to keep in touch with customers or promote special offers. However, this ease of use often leads to insufficient attention paid to making it effective. You should focus on producing results, whether that’s sales or visits to your site, rather than just production.
The main areas to focus on are given below.
Make it Relevant
The same email is often sent to everyone on a list. However, do this too often and people will eventually unsubscribe as they do not see your company as relevant to them.
Use your database and customer knowledge to identify what would be of most interest to recipients and only send out emails on those topics. You may also want to split your customer list into groups and send different campaigns to the different groups, increasing the relevance to each.
Don’t Be a Spammer
Many email providers, e.g. Hotmail and AOL, detect potential spam and send it straight to a Junk Mail folder. They look for certain indicators in the email and use that to determine whether it’s spam. Software is available that checks emails for these indicators before they are sent giving you the opportunity to change it, increasing the chances of it actually getting into the recipients' inbox.
The From Address
Recipients look first of all at who the email is from. If they like the person, or it is a brand known to them, it might get opened. If they don’t, they’ll delete it. Choose a ‘From’ address that recipients will recognise and don’t try to be too clever.
Subject Lines
They look next at the Subject Line. If it’s not of interest or doesn’t appeal quickly, it gets deleted. If it passes this stage, they may move on to the next.
Preview Pane and Above the Fold
Many email clients offer recipients the chance to look at the top of the email in a Preview Pane before they decide to open it. Look carefully at what is at the top of your emails – will it appeal to recipients?
Allied to this is the content they can see before they have to scroll down, known as ‘the fold’. If your key messages are below the fold there is no incentive for the reader to scroll down so they will miss your messages. Make sure special offers and the most attractive elements are above the fold.
Tracking Results
Unless you send emails out via an email client like Microsoft Outlook, your email despatch software should provide you with a results tracking service. You will be able to see how many people opened the email, at what time of day and what they did as a result of opening it, e.g. did they click through to the site?
This information is a goldmine and should detemine when you send emails, the different offers you make and who to send it to. Use testing principles to make it even more effective. Read Generate More Business by Testing if you’re unsure about how to construct an effective test.
You will also need a suitable system to send out your emails. Read Sending Large Volumes of Email for a guide on the different options and Measuring Advertising Results for guidance on the most relevant measures of effectiveness.
An excellent general resource for email marketing is Clickz which provides regular newsletters and is where most of the information for this article was drawn. Another excellent resource (and contributor to this document) is the UK’s Institute of Direct Marketing.
