In part one of the email marketing series, I gave a brief introduction on how email marketing can improve your customer relationships and promote sales. I also covered the different types of email marketing, and the advantages of building an opt-in list. In part two, I discussed a few reason why you should choose a third party email marketing website instead of mass-mailing yourself and then reviewed some of the more popular email marketing websites out there. In part three, I reviewed MadMimi, Aweber, Benchmark, iContact, and CampaignMonitor. In this, the final article of the series, I’m going to be giving you 25 tips on how to get the most out of your email campaign.
Once you’ve managed to amass an opt-in email list and chosen an email marketing website to handle the logistics of sending your email messages, it’s time to focus on the most important part of your email campaign; the message itself. It’s not enough to be sending out messages; you must also consider content, formatting, readability, timing, and branding.
The popular consensus in marketing is that potential customers need between five and nine marketing impressions before a sale it made, meaning a customer has to see your printed ad/commercial/billboard five to seven times before they finally commit to buying your product. On the internet, many marketers adjust this figure to around twenty marketing impressions, which makes keeping subscribers around through at least the first twenty messages very important.
What follows are 25 points to consider when crafting your email marketing messages that will give you a head-start if you’re planning your first campaign, or will help you retain subscribers and improve results if you’re an email marketing veteran.
What To Put In Your Messages
Depending on what kind of email marketing you choose, coming up with new content that will thrill your readers can drain your creative reserves. The newsletter format is arguably the most difficult to keep fresh and interesting, but the writing process can be made much easier if you keep an eye out for ideas all week long instead of only the same morning that you’re trying to write the newsletter.
- Upcoming Articles – Including a list of articles that will be appearing on your blog or website can inspire subscribers to visit between emails and keeps the reader looking forward to your upcoming content.
- Answer Questions The Reader Might Ask – If you’ve got a FAQ for your product, consider posting a few of the most popular questions in your newsletter. The reader may be holding off on buying until they can call your business and get a few more details on your product; consider fielding their most likely questions before they have a chance to call a competitor instead of you.
- What’ s Hot In The Industry – Some of my favorite mailing lists keep me abreast of news in industries in which I’m interested. Summarize the latest breaking news in your industry and how it relates to your products.
- Use The Holidays To Your Advantage – The calendar year is full of ample opportunities to show your product in a favorable light. Have a holiday related contest or sale and promote it via email, but be sure to send your messages before the holidays begin to avoid having it ignored until early January.
- Create Valuable Content – The most important thing to ask yourself while writing message content is whether or not what you’ve written will be valuable to the reader in some way. Include interesting facts, humor, research, and tips on how to get the most out of your product. Ideas that help save the reader time and/or money are welcome in nearly all inboxes.
How to Increase Reader Response
- Personalize The Message – Most email marketing website allow you to integrate data fields from your customer list directly into your message automatically. You’ll need to get this information when the subscriber signs up, but it adds to the message when you can address the reader by their name or include messages geared toward the reader’s location or purchase history.
- Do Not Use All-Caps in Your Personalization – Some signup forms convert names and other information into capital letters for simplicity, but including these fields in your email messages in all-caps makes it seem like you’re yelling at the client. It’s a minor aspect of your message, but can make a difference.
- Use Your Own Name In the “From” Field – Readers are more likely to open messages from “John Smith” than from “XYZ Corporation”. Knowing (or thinking) that the message comes from a human being helps build a relationship.
- Avoid Spam-Like Markers – Many spam messages are caught by anti-spam filters because they frequently use certain word combinations, symbols, and formatting. Avoid using dollar-signs ($), exclamation marks (!), and the words “free”, “sex”, “income”, “winner”, “loans”, etc. Excessive changes to text color, size, and font can also trigger a spam-filter. Many email marketing websites have a spam-checker which will comb through your message and tell you if you are in danger of being marked as spam, and it’s well worth the time and money, especially if you’re sending several thousand messages.
- Be Bold – Instead of over-using exclamation marks, use the bold HTML tag to call attention to key phrases. Simply put, if you use the exclamation mark to end every sentence, it loses meaning.
- Be Consistent With Your Branding – When the reader opens your email message, they should be able to tell it’s from you before even reading a single word. Every message should use your corporate colors and logo, every time. It makes your message look more professional and builds your brand.
- Focus On Your Core Message – In online marketing, the term “above the fold” means the content that is shown without the user having to scroll down. Advertising space costs more to be near the top of the page because often it’s the only thing the reader sees before they move on. Likewise, you should consider that the content located at the top of your email message will effectively be the entire email message to many users. Include your most important points in the first paragraph and your most important link just below it.
- Move Boring Explanatory Stuff Down The Page – Following up with the point above, the explanatory text (contest rules, sale conditions, minor stories, etc.) should be moved further down in the message or removed altogether and placed on your website’s landing page.
- No More Than Four Topics – It’s best for response to limit each message to a single topic, but can be hard on your marketing budget. If you do find it necessary to include more than just one main message per email, separate the email into four sections at the most, and order them with the most important message at the top.
- Use Proven Text Formatting – Many websites include customizable templates that will show you the best way to format your text. Use short paragraphs and bulleted lists to improve readability. Keep your paragraph width in check by using HTML tags or hard line-breaks in plain text messages. Use sub-headers to separate topics.
- Visible Unsubscribe Link – Position a text unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message, making sure it’s large enough to see. If the reader no loner wishes to subscribe to your emails, unsubscribing is the preferred alternative to being marked as spam.
- Clear Call-To-Action – Phrases like “Call us for a free quote” and “Click here to visit our website” work well at the end of your message because they inspire the reader to initiate further contact. Use a short phrase that clearly states what you want the reader to do.
- Send Once Per Week – Sending more frequently than once per week can become come off as annoying, while sending less frequently can cause the reader to forget about you.
- Send On The Right Day Of The Week – If your email message is work-related and you want it to be opened at the office, send your messages in the afternoon on Wednesday or Thursday. If your email message is home or hobby related, send your message early on Sunday. Mondays and Fridays are the worst days to send emails because on Monday the reader’s inbox is usually full and your message will be skipped over and on Friday readers are wrapping up the week and unlikely to follow a call-to-action.
General Email Marketing Tips
- HTML or Plain Text – There is no popular consensus regarding whether it’s better to format messages in HTML or plain text, because each format has pros and cons. On the pro side of plain text, it looks virtually identical in every email client (including handheld devices), it requires no graphics design skills to create (because there are no graphics), and it allows readers to focus on the core message of your email. However, plain text doesn’t allow for custom text formatting (colors, size, font) that may be part of your branding, nor does it allow for message tracking, inline images or hyperlinked words (links must be fully typed out). HTML allows for a breadth of formatting options, colorful graphics, and tracking options, but it doesn’t render the same in every browser, many browsers do not load images by default, and it can take a while for the message to load over slow internet connection. The best compromise is to make your email message in HTML but have the major points and calls-to-action of the email still readable as text in case the HTML cannot be rendered or the images cannot be displayed.
- Test In Multiple Email Clients – Even when HTML emails can be displayed through an email client, there can be issues having to do with how the HTML code is rendered. In the same way that web pages should be tested in several internet browsers, HTML email messages should be tested in several email clients and in several popular screen resolutions to ensure they display correctly.
- Email Before The Holidays, Not During – People tend to take vacations or visit family during the holidays, which means that they don’t check their email until after the holidays, when all of the emails have had a chance to pile up. When purging their inbox, readers are likely to delete message they might otherwise take the time to read. Avoid sending in late December and early January, as well as late in June and early in July.
- Learn How To Interpret Campaign Reports – Email open-rates can be helpful for tracking how well subject lines are received and are a good indicator of distribution issues. Experiment with link placement and compare to similar campaigns with different placement. By honing in on what works, you can optimize your campaign for maximum effect.
- Handle Unsubscribe Request Immediately – There are few things more infuriating to an email user than to unsubscribe to a mailing list and to continue receiving mail. A former reader who feels that their removal request has been ignored will mark you as spam at the very least and may go so far as to file a report with the FTC regarding your violation of anti-spam laws.
- Optimize The Landing Page For The Campaign – When a user clicks a link in your email message, the web page that they end up on is called a landing page. Create a custom landing page with links or information that relates to your message content or even link directly to a product purchasing page.
With so many contradicting tips about how to get the best response, how a message should be formatted, and whether you should be sending HTML or plain text emails, it’s important to remember that your circumstances are different from other marketers. Your business has its own unique strengths and weaknesses and needs to appeal to a certain type of consumer, so your results will be different from other marketers. Even if you follow the advice of top email marketers every step of the way, you can’t anticipate every reader’s reaction.
Running an email marketing campaign is a learning experience. A successful email campaign is one that changes over time based on statistical data that comes from message tracking reports (which is why comprehensive message tracking is so important). Emphasize the message that gets the best reaction, eschew or minimize links that never get clicked, and listen to what your readers want, then adapt accordingly.
