‘Email Marketing’ Articles

A good newsletter is one of the best ways to stay in touch with your clients. If used correctly, your newsletter can entice customers to come into your store, provide them with valuable information, let them know about a special offer that appeals to them, or just keep your company’s name on the tip of their tongue.

It’s difficult to consistently send out a good newsletter. You want is to promote your own business, but you’re also try to do so while providing valuable and intrusive content. The best kind of advertisement doesn’t seem like an advertisement at all. Achieving this is no simple task.

1. Don’t over do it, don’t force it.

Send your newsletter only as often as you can produce interesting content. Nowhere is it written that you must send a newsletter weekly or monthly. Be self aware enough to realize when you have nothing to say. You’ll start to see recipients unsubscribe left and right if your newsletter becomes boring. It’s a real struggle to regain interest once someone on your list decides your email is boring or unhelpful.

2: Target specific consumer groups.

Create multiple versions of your newsletter based on customer interests. You can gather this information by giving people the ability to designate their own interests on your sign up form. Not only will you be able to use this data to target groups in your newsletter, but it can serve as a small sample of your overall customers interests. Sending multiple newsletters is more work because you may need to produce content for several different newsletters but the result is well worth it.

3: Don’t try to trick your users into signing up for your Newsletter.

Many websites will have the default action of signing up as a user of their site or using their checkout form result in the user signing up for their mailing list unless they opt-out by removing a check from a selection box. This is a common practice that you should avoid. Considering that sending email isn’t free, why waste your money on sending to people who don’t care about what you are sending them? These types of practices increase complaints and can cause you big headaches in the future. Why risk having people click the “spam” button in their email client because you tricked them into signing up for your mailing. Building trust with consumers is far more important than building your mailing list.

4: Include an explicit and easy to follow call to action.

You really can’t expect your customers to give you much of a response if you don’t ask them to. If you want them to do something in response to your email, you have to ask them and then make the action as easy as possible. If you want them to make a comment, give them a simple way to do it. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to go through with it (duh). Make your call to action clear. Ditch subtlety in this case, straightforward is the way to go.

Hopefully these tips will help you create and execute a better newsletter. For more email marketing best practices, check out this post.

Going from cold to hot isn’t so tough.

It’s no big news that email lists can go cold. It can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the list building process took longer than you expected, maybe your boss wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on email marketing when the list was forming, or maybe you’ve just bored your list to tears. Regardless of the reason, you can heat your list back up with some fairly easy methods.

Don’t be afraid to ask your customers why they haven’t been responding to your email.

Communication is key. While you may think that asking your customers directly will make you look bad, it doesn’t. They will respect your honesty and if they do have an issue they will know that you care and are making efforts to correct it.

Offer exclusive incentives to returning customers.

Even if a customer has begun to ignore your email, a particularly good incentive can bring back even customers with the most waning interest. If someone was at one time interested in what you have to offer it’s very likely that they will be again under the right circumstances. Give them a reason to come back.

Change your strategy.

If providing one kind of promotion doesn’t seem to be exciting your audience, try something new. Maybe your recipients are still interested in buying something from you but have just grown tired of the same old offers. If you send them a coupon for 10% off every time, it’s not going to be much of an attention grabber after a while. Consider changing up your offers and occasionally doing something very unique to make your customers do a double-take when they receive your email.

Consider an email redesign.

While content may still be king, good looks certainly can’t hurt. If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your campaign, you may consider taking another look at your email design. A really bad design, and trust me they are all over the place, can scare someone away faster than just about anything. If you want your consumers to trust and respect your company your email should have a design that promotes you in the best light, not as some two-bit spammer.

Re-examine your demographic.

Their wants, needs, and how they interact with your company/organization may have changed over time. What was once a popular subject among the people on your list may now be sorely out of date. Make sure you stay current with the interests and trends among your list. Keep your products and ideas up to date. If possible you could offer incentives to some of your recipients for filling out a survey. A great way for retailers to get people into their store is by giving out a five dollar gift card. Since barely anything costs just five dollars, it’s pretty likely they will be spending some of their own cash once they get started.

If you’re only using your email statistics to judge the effectiveness of your email campaign, you are missing out on a vital tool for improving the success of future email marketing endeavors.

If you want to tap into the full potential of your email marketing, your work isn’t finished after you send out your campaign. The next step in the process is to analyze your campaign statistics. You should give your recipients a few days to read and respond to your email. Not everyone is glued to their computer screens and some recipients take longer than others to act on offers. After you have given ample time for your campaign to be received, you can begin to utilize your statistics. You should start by getting a general feeling for the overall success of your mailing. You can do this by observing your opens and clickthroughs, but you don’t want to stop there. Below are several other ways you can use campaign statistics to improve your ROI and move your marketing plan forward.

One of the best ways you can use your campaign statistics to your advantage is by doing targeted follow up mailings. You can send follow up emails to targeted groups based on what links people have clicked on or based on who opened the email. For example, if someone clicked on a link to one of your products, you might want send them out a coupon. Done correctly this can nudge interested recipients into becoming a paying customer!

A slightly more advanced technique is doing a random 50/50 split of your list and sending out an ‘A’ and ‘B’ version of your email. In each version you can vary the content of your email. You might want to change the subject line or present a different offer. Once you have the statistics from both of your campaigns, you can compare the results and get a general idea of which tactics were more effective. Doing this every once in a while will help you get to know your audience better and will make it easier for you to create successful campaigns.

Another tactic that can be useful is to download your soft bounces and do a directed mailing specifically to them. It’s best to usually wait a short period of time before sending out to your bounces again, but a specific mailing to them can accomplish two things: 1) You’ll eliminate addresses that aren’t active more quickly and 2) Soft bounce will often times resolve themselves and you’ll be able to contact them on your second mailing.

Oh, what’s in a name?

Language is a beautiful thing. It’s perhaps mankind’s greatest and most significant invention. With language we are able to convey so much with so little. It has enabled us to keep a record of our thoughts and to build on the accomplishments of those who have come before us.

Email marketing is an advanced form of communication. From cave paintings to the printing press, the human race has moved forward to this point. We can now send communication nearly anywhere in the world with a simple click of a button. Email is an astounding and revolutionary piece of technology. Communicating with it should be elegant and effective. So why has email become, in many cases, so cold, crass and downright rude?

I personally lay a large portion of the blame one word, one word that represents much more than people give it credit for, one word that has become a common representative for bad email marketing.

Blast.

That dirty little word that drives me so crazy.

What’s wrong with the word blast? Pretty much everything. Let’s break it down. For the moment we will set aside the connotation of the word, which is probably the worst part, and focus on the denotation or the literal meaning of the word. Sometimes we use a word for so long that we don’t even stop to think about its meaning.

• Here are a couple of my favorite definitions pulled from the dictionary:

If it’s your first time conducting an email marketing campaign, the entire process may seem overwhelming. It’s true that there are many factors to consider and a lot of work to be done, however; following a simple set of rules can make email marketing simple and manageable.

The major challenges of email marketing can be conquered relatively easily if you’re dedication to planning and thoughtfulness. You can create a successful email campaign for your organization by adhering to the golden rule and by relying on some common sense methods.

What do I mean by the “golden rule approach”?

I’m referring to the simple idea of sending campaigns that you would want to receive yourself. It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your recipients, understanding your target market is a crucial component of producing valuable content. The golden rule approach is essentially an exercise in common sense and targeted marketing.

One of the first things that I tell any customer about their email campaign is that they need to be transparent and open with their customers.

We’ve all heard the phrase “honesty is the best policy,” this applies heavily to email marketing. Your main objective must be to let your recipients know why they got the email, what the email is offering, who the email is from, and how they can stop future mailings if they no longer want to receive the email. If you give your customer all of these pieces of information, your campaign will be easily understood and you’ll receive less complaints and unsubscribes.

The success of a campaign is determined by many factors, but the single most important aspect to any email campaign is the quality of your list.

This is one of the most commonly overlooked of all email marketing ideas. You must have a good relationship with your list in order to have a successful campaign. This is the main reason why buying a list is such a bad idea. If you buy a list, you have absolutely no relationship with your recipients. You want to have members on your list who have signed up for your newsletter, who want it, and who have a firm understanding of what to expect from it. Be clear in the sign up form about what you will be sending and how often you will be sending it .

There are many other examples of common sense practices to improve your email campaign, but most questions you will have to answer on your own. Don’t rush an email campaign and always remember to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

To stay focused on common sense and the golden rule, ask yourself these questions before sending out a campaign. Does it look trust worthy? Does what I’m sending follow what I told recipients I would send when they signed up? Does the mailing live up to its offers or promises? Are the offers or information provided in the mailing relevant and worth while? Ask yourself these questions with each mailing and ensure that you can answer each question with a firm “Yes!” Don’t forget the most important question when using the golden rule approach, how would you feel about receiving your own campaign?