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Email Marketing White Paper 1. Timing is key. Think
about your target market and when they will be most
receptive to your email. SmARTmail data suggests that
office based users have higher open rate on Tuesday
or Wednesday at about 2pm. However different times
work well for different industries, for example recruitment
communications are more effective during the weekend.
Monitor your calls to action, a user may open an email
at one time but actually follow up on it later. If
you spot a trend around the timing of follow ups then
this could be a better time to send out a newsletter.
2. Statistics. Set goals for
your open rates, click through
and make sure you measure the
success of your email campaign
by how much money it actually
brings you. Some of our customers
have found that different content
receives less click through
but greater revenue overall.
Track links in each emails
sent and track them all the
way to a sale. Therefore each
newsletter can show exactly
how much money it is bringing
in.
3. Remove
Unsubscribers. Make
sure you are using software
that automatically removes
the unsubscribers from your
list. Keep inline with email
guidelines and always include
an unsubscribe link in all
communications.
4. Choose
wording carefully. Avoid using spammer type wording
to reduce the chances of the
email being rejected as SPAM.
Either get someone to run the
email through a spam filter
or do it yourself. Create several
email accounts with the main
ISPs hotmail, yahoo, msn, gmail
etc, do a test sending and
make sure it gets through.
Avoid, dear friend, saving,
free offers, etc – see
our other white paper on avoiding
spam filters.
5. Create
incentives for what you want
to achieve. If you
want more information on the
users in your email list try
setting up a competition where
to enter they have to complete
a profiling form. Follow up
in the next newsletter/communication
with who the winner was as
this creates more entries into
the next competition. Think
about the technology that is
now available such as mp3 files
and movies that users can click
on, but make sure it is all
ISP compliant.
6. Opt
in permission. Always,
always only send to lists that
you have opt in permission
to send to. Unsolicited mail
could make your mail server
become blacklisted on the major
ISP list. All your hard email
crafting gone to waste!
7. Be
consistent, use a similar
style, send a regular times
and make sure your other marketing
is in sync with and supports
you email message.
8. Clean
your list pre sending
and de-dupe content. Also quickly
remove all bounce backs that
are of a permanent nature (usually
the error code starts with
a 5xx) as resending to these
address can make you get blocked
in the future from the ISP.
9. Look
for trends in your
feedback, does a certain segment
respond better at certain times
with a certain title. Send
targeted email content to these
groups.
10. Send
in multi format. As the user often has to click
to allow images to be downloaded
from the server, set up the
email in a way that allows
it to be readable even if the
images are not there. Also
send the message in multi format
i.e. both text and html so
that if the user has outlook
set to allow allow text messages
through then the message is
still delivered.
Using and following all these
points will help you produce
newsletter that deliver effective
communication. If you are interested
in learning more about the
more advanced techniques that
we employ in our email marketing
and feel that we could help
your business then please contact
us at: |
