Ten tips for successful email marketing
Posted on Tags: Ecommerce, Web, Supporting, Marketing, PRWe understand the importance of successful email marketing – especially for those that operate ecommerce websites or websites that rely on visitor numbers. It gives you an opportunity to talk directly to your customer base and present important information, products and special offers to them.
Whilst it’s vitally important to spend time getting your message right and making the design look appealing, there are also several other factors that come into play when creating a successful marketing email. From our research, we have compiled a list of ten top tips that should be taken into consideration before embarking upon a campaign.
Content
1. Content: Generally, recipients will judge the importance of your email by the title. If you get them to read on, the initial text/ image MUST give them an idea of what’s in the rest of the email or they will hit the delete button. If they are interested they will read on. Remember the old advertising adage: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.
Technical
2. The ideal width is 500-600 pixels. This allows the email to be viewed correctly in the majority of email viewing panes.
3. You should think about and give special consideration to webmail services, for example Hotmail.
4. You should include a ‘view in browser’ link.
Design
5. Simple layouts and tables work best – you don’t want to confuse the reader.
6. Whilst design is important, you need to make sure that your design will work in an HTML email.
7. The design should be able to get around anti-spam filters and what they are looking for. The content of the email should be written to avoid spam filters too.
Legal
8. You should give people the opportunity to unsubscribe if they wish. There’s no point in continuing to send information to people that don’t want to receive it – let’s just focus on the warm leads!
9. You should stay abreast of the law when it comes to email marketing and be aware that if you are found to be a ‘spammer’ you can get fined! This could also result in you being blacklisted.
Follow-up
10. Once you have designed and mailed out your email, the next (and arguably the most important) phase, is to measure performance! How many people opened it? Did your sales calls increase? How many people took advantage of your special offer?
So what shouldn’t you do?
Whilst looking for some examples of best practice, we also found some marketing emails that didn’t make the grade. You obviously want as many people as possible to open, read and take in your message and you also do not want to be marked as spam. So, whilst following our advice above, you should also strictly avoid the following!
1. Writing in CAPITALS – this can be viewed as spam and let’s be honest, can make you sound a bit ANGRY!
2. Using too many different font sizes, styles or colours
3. Using the terms URGENT! and IMPORTANT!
4. Including ‘dead links’ that do not link to anything
5. Sending email campaigns from your personal email address
6. Including too many images
7. Including text in images
8. Using background images
9. Making spelling mistakes – always get a fresh pair of eyes to check the email before you press send!
10. Finally, you should make sure that you clean up your email lists regularly to ensure you are not emailing incorrect address.