Ever since the first spam email in 1978, companies have been honing their communication techniques to prevent their emails going straight into the deleted items folder. Email Marketing has become a specialist area within the Marketing function and one that few agencies get right for their clients. Just check your personal email account for how many you delete without reading for proof.
It's easy to overlook your email distribution, with many businesses ticking the box without thinking about how to get the most out of the activity. We handle ebusiness outsourcing for a number of brands and always take time to fully review email marketing and put a strategy in place before pressing send.
The 2010 email marketing consensus revealed a significant improvement in recent years with more than half of companies now using a hosted email service as the growth of web-based email applications continues. 75% of respondents rated email as excellent or good for return on investment. The report suggests there is still a significant amount of companies not reaping the benefits of targeted emails.
Email marketing guide:
1) The most important aspect of using email to target your customers is to ensure your distribution list is up to date and relevant to the content you will be sending. Only ever email to those who have opted in.
2) Whether you are communicating with 400 or 4000, the principles remain the same, it's the quality of your message that matters. Try not to alienate groups with specific content, keep it general and aim towards your audience as a whole. Special offers or new product ranges are great ways to immediately grab the readers' attention.
3) Go back to basics, check the spelling and grammar is top notch, you don't want your company reputation unravelling due to the simple 'their/they're' mistake, always ensure everything you send has the same level of professionalism. Likewise, ensure all links are correct and takes the reader to the correct destination.
4) Email provides a great tracking tool for your ROI as you can monitor the varying success of your newsletters. For instance, sending an email out on a Friday afternoon may yield the best results for some companies, while for others peak time will be at a weekday lunchtime. Compare, contrast and amend accordingly.
5) There are many types of email you can choose from according to your business. For example, the fashion industry benefits from largely image led newsletters, detailing new products to entice return custom to the ecommerce site. A company working business to business would benefit from an informative email, detailing company news, services and contact details.
6) A subscription list should be about quality, not quantity. Buying data may leave you with thousands of names but if this is not clean and relevant data it can quickly prove to be a waste of money. You should therefore be proactive in gaining new subscribers through things like online competitions and prize draws. That way you know the email recipients will have previously interacted with your website and will be more likely to make a purchase. In addition, to help avoid losing subscribers, always give clear instruction on how they can opt out.
7) Use every channel you have to publicise your newsletter service. Integrate a campaign through social media offering customers a special discount code, free consultation and such like to encourage them to sign up.
8) Think about creating emails that your customers will pass on to their friends, what would make you stop, read and talk about it? Competitions, news stories, trends, whatever floats your audiences boat, do it!
9) Learn from each newsletter you send, how much ROI did you receive, what could you improve on? Analyse the results and ask your audience for their input, they will be flattered and often jump at the chance to get involved.
10) The last piece of advice is if you would like to encourage engagement with your audience, set up an email address the newsletter comes from to which they can reply - always reply to customers within 1-3 days. Often by including a name in the senders email address it encourages interaction and creates a human persona. On the other hand, to ensure no replies, use a donotreply@emailaddress.com.
For more information please visit www.chaptereight.com
