There are many great online tips available on what you should consider when creating your email marketing campaigns. Below we also have listed some of our favorite resources on preparing and writing great email campaigns. We have also prepared some of our essential tips that we hope you find valuable.
So, here we go:
1. Get to know your readers
Knowing your customers and their interests will help to determine how best to market to them with the right message. Not all of your customers are the same, and they also won’t appreciate being treated the same.
Rather than sending the same information to all of your customers, consider how can provide a more personalized experience based on how they interact with your service. This means that if you offer a service with multiple products, then as much as possible, use what you have learned about their patterns to tune the message to their desires.
2. Email with purpose
Give them something in the email. Point them to a helpful article you know they will not want to miss, send a message and deliver it to your target audience with information that they are looking for. People love free and exclusive stuff, so anything you can give like that will only help your long-term marketing goals.
3. Make it valuable
Today, consumers expect more from the businesses they interact with online and off. They are getting bombarded with smarter and cleaner emails from many of the online services, so your message not only has to cut through, it has to provide clarity and value.
If you want your audience to remain engaged with your content, you need to make sure you’re offering something of value. For some readers, that means offering a special discount or an exclusive promotion to your email list. For others that could mean offering a how-to article from your blog or a piece of content that’s more than just the typical sales pitch.
Make it valuable and make it relevant.
4. Limit yourself
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Be aware of all the emails that you are already sending to your recipients. Just because they have opted-in to receive your emails, it doesn’t mean that you should be sending one every day.
By overexposure to your emails, your subscribers will fall asleep. Your message will become stale, and they will ignore your emails, so when you truly have something great to tell them, you will not get the right effect. Alternatively, they will get so upset, they will look for the exit door and unsubscribe as fast as they can.
What is the right amount depends on your service. If you are doing regular emails as part of your offering, then perhaps you can think about clever positioning of offers amongst those emails.
5. Use the email marketing systems or application to send your email blast.
Most email marketing software allows you to efficiently manage your database of email subscribers and contains a platform in which you can compose email blasts.
Our CMS for example has an embedded emailing facility integrated directly with the website subscription service, so you don’t need to have a separate emailing facility. It allows you to pick your exact target market based on the customer’s subscription status, as well as the products that they have ever used. This coming year, we are introducing new email targeting features on our CMS that will help build multiple campaign rules and events to occur all based on what a client does.
6. Measure your results
Have you taken the time to view the results of your emails. How many people are clicking on your campaigns and in turn, buying something? If you’re not checking the results, how can you improve the email for next time?
Measuring your email marketing results starts with looking at your email reports. For example, our CMS provides summary details on number of people viewing and clicking on emails broadcast, so you can start getting an accurate figure on success rates.
This will lead into activities such as split testing – altering the message on a very similar email to see which one gains more success.
Useful resources:
1. Check out Constant Contact’s Hints and Tips section:
http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/hints-tips/index.jsp
2. Mailchimp – we are sure you’ve heard of them, their blogs are a great resource:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/
3. Email On Acid – amazing email testing tool to make sure your EDMs work on multiple devices:
http://www.emailonacid.com/