Improving your Email Marketing Campaign Results
Delivering your email marketing campaigns should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy. Whether you are sending out a newsletter, promotion or new product announcement, the main goal is to deliver your message to the user’s inbox, have it read and hopefully generate an action or response to your message.
Below I am going to highlight the most important aspects of any email marketing campaign as well as things not to do.
Important Items ‘To Do’ as part of your Email Marketing Campaign Strategy
1. Ensure the email addresses you are sending to are valid and deliverable
It amazes me how many companies overlook this simple, yet so important factor. Sending to dead and undeliverable email addresses will only be a detriment to your IP Reputation and hinder your overall email marketing performance. Email Validation should be on the top of your list when looking at ways to improve email deliverability.
2. Use Intriguing Subject Lines to Pique Interest and Get Users to Open your Email
Using a boring or uninteresting subject line will usually send your email to the trash without it even being opened. As most people, on a daily basis I usually receive between 20-40 email marketing campaigns. Some delivered to my inbox and some delivered to the junk folder. The only item I look at to help determine if I open and read it or send it to the trash, without even viewing it, is the subject line. Make your subject lines stand out in a crowded inbox.
Take a minute to read: Email Marketing Subject Lines you Never Want to Use
3. Provide Value in your Email Marketing Message
Don’t waste people’s time or send email marketing campaigns where your message has no value to the recipient. Make sure your offering, whether it’s a newsletter, promotion or announcement will provide a benefit to the recipient.
4. Have a clear and concise message and call to action
Don’t be cagey or have a vague message and call to action in your email campaign. Be clear, concise and detailed about what you are telling your readers. Explain the details of your message or offering and tell your reader why they should do what you are telling them to do and how it will benefit them.
Important: Triple check to ensure you do not have any spelling mistakes and your content is well written and without any grammatical errors.
5. Be Trustworthy
The majority of people buying something online will only do so if they trust your company and the service or product you are selling. Nobody ever wants to get ripped off, so you MUST provide a comfort level and give your potential customer that warm, fuzzy feeling. When it comes to the legitimacy of your company and your ability to be trusted, by the consumer or business that has an interest in doing business with you, being viewed as honest is of the utmost importance.
Important Items ‘Not To Do’ as part of your Email Marketing Campaign Strategy
6. Don’t Sell in your Email
This might go against all of your inherit instincts, but you need to learn how to sell without selling. I know this might sound confusing, but once you realize how to do this, you’ll find your sales and conversion rates from your email marketing campaigns will increase dramatically. Don’t be ‘salesy’ in your message or make it seem like your offering is something too good to be true. Offer something of value to the recipient. Be a problem solver, a company with a solution, not a salesman. Don’t sell your service offering or product in your message. Instead, sell the benefit it offers your reader.
7. Don’t Over Send or Become a Pest
Don’t over send to your email marketing database. It will only accomplish one thing – it will get people to unsubscribe from your list. Losing potential business and customers, because of your overzealous email deployment schedule, is a terrible way to lose customers and potential new business.
8. Don’t Load Your Message with Too Many Things
Keep your message clear and simple. Don’t load up your email creative with too many different things and expect your reader to look at or care about everything you want them to read. Simplicity is your best bet when delivering an email message you want to be read or act upon.
9. Don’t Overuse Images
If you use too many images or your recipient has their images blocked, you might be delivering an empty looking email to your list. Make sure you have a proportional amount of text to images in your email creative. Make sure you test and look at your email creative with images blocked to ensure it doesn’t look like an empty mess of blocked images and slop. Design your creative to be readable with images blocked. This will help ensure if the recipient has an interest in what they see, it will encourage them to unblock their images and continue reading.
10. Don’t Send your Campaign Without Testing it First
Test, test and then retest again. Once you think your good to go, test it one more time. Make sure you have multiple people on your test list to be positive your 100% and ready to deploy. The benefit of having many people within your company reviewing the email campaign is that if you don’t pick up on a simple mistake, someone else will. You can never have too many eyeballs on your email campaign test prior to deploying to help catch a big mistake before you can’t fix it.
Some Additional Advice to Improve your Overall Email Marketing Strategy
Learn from the experts and Gurus in the Email Marketing Industry
Find industry experts and company blogs that give quality, sage advice and signup to receive their newsletter. This should provide a great benefit for a few reasons. You’ll get to see the frequency in which they mail, the content they send and advice or solutions they are offering. Learning from industry experts is free. All you need to do is be diligent in finding the companies or individuals that you feel provide worthy words of wisdom and that you can learn a thing or two from. One small trick or tip learned could garner a sizeable improvement in your response rates and bottom line.