With a plethora of free on-line marketing tools why even bother with an email marketing campaign? Well, according to key research, no other form of marketing consistently produces such a good return on investment. It is estimated that the European email marketing sector will be worth £2.15 billlion by 2012.
Benefits of email marketing
With a large choice of email marketing companies offering a variety of email marketing solutions, competition means that an email campaign can be set-up quickly and cost effectively.
Most providers allow you to test your email campaign in a variety of browsers, including mobile browsers, for a small fee.
Sophisticated tracking tools allow you to monitor your email campaign instantly and you can see:
- Who has opened your campaign
- How many times they have opened your campaign
- What links they have clicked
- Who has forwarded your email
- Who has unsubscribed
- Which emails have bounced and why
- Who has reported you as spam (hopefully, no-one).
By reviewing the above information, it enables you to follow-up any possible interest from individuals. These can be further categorised for another email campaign, or why not pick up the telephone.
Effective email marketing
Permission, permission, permission.
Build up a list of recipients who have granted you permission to email them. Think about it. What’s the first thing you do when you receive an email, be it a sales pitch, circular, product information, etc., from someone you do not know – you delete it. You might even open it and unsubscribe from that mailing list or go as far as to report it for spam.
Build up your email list from:
- Your website
- Networking
- Exhibitions
- Surveys and so on
Always check that you get the recipient’s permission to email them. Just because you place a jam jar to collect business cards at an exhibition on the promise that someone giving you their card will win an iPad, does not mean they are giving you their permission to email you. They are giving you their card because they want to win an iPad. Make it clear, that you would like to add them to your mailing list.
You do not wish to be reported for spamming because you could run the risk of being black listed and will not be able to email anyone.
Be wary of buying in mailing lists. These can be pricey with poor results (because they don’t know who you are – and might report you as spam).
Email marketing best practice is to provide an unsubscribe button on campaigns.
How to succeed in email marketing
Now we have sorted out our list of happy recipients, here’s how to get the best from your email campaign:
- Let recipients clearly see who is sending the campaign. A client who ran small email campaigns, discovered that when they used their own name in conjunction with the company name, they got a higher open rate.
- An attention grabbing subject line – keep it short. Attention grabbing to generate interest but keeping it short because it is easier to read but also worth bearing in mind that some email providers only display 38-47 characters of the email subject line and mobile devices show even less. According to Hubspot, 80% of users reported reading emails on their mobile phones.
- Take care with images. Remember to use small resolution images in your email marketing campaign as many email recipients may have images deliberately blocked on their PCs. Larger images (you would be amazed at what size people will send in an email) may exceed recipient mail box limits and will be undeliverable. Interestingly, amongst Seasons Design’s own email clients, a few are now moving away from image and text emails to text only. They are mindful that the majority of their clients will be opening them on their phones.
- Exclusivity. “What’s in it for me?” Why should your customers sign up? As with other forms of marketing, hook them in with special offers, free downloads, latest industry news as it happens.
- Links. The more links contained within your email campaign, the higher the success of click through. If there is one particular link you are keen for people to click, refer to it in different parts of your campaign, with different introductory wording each time to entice people in.
- New customers are your best customers. This is the honeymoon period for someone who has just signed up and as such they are more receptive to news, offers and updates.
- Frequency. This will depend on what you are promoting. Someone with a product may benefit from frequent campaigns (perhaps even daily) and those supplying factual information should be looking at 1-2 times a month.
- Analyse Statistics. Don’t forget to fully analyse your statistics for onward selling.