Improving Email Marketing Effectiveness

Before deciding to send out an email for your business you need to think through the strategy carefully. If you have spent time and effort collecting email addresses from your customers through a combination of newsletter signups, collection at point of order and even offline signups in store, you don’t then want the first email going out to this list to be a disaster and have half the list unsubscribe.

This obviously applies whether the email is being used in B2B or a B2C context and if you have spent money on a targeted list that you plan to send out to, you don’t want to suffer from high unsubscribe rates or low click through rates. If this is your first email campaign then I have listed a few pointers that should be considered when making a campaign plan which you should find more than useful. If this is not your first email campaign it is vitally important to use any data collected from your previous emails to improve your future campaigns.

Making an email campaign plan

Below are some questions to consider when making an email campaign plan for getting the best out of your emails and ensuring they are as effective as possible.

1) What do you want to achieve by sending out the email?

This is probably the most important question you need to ask. If you don’t know a good reason for sending out the email then you shouldn’t be sending one out. You need to be clear about the objective of the email as this should dictate the tone and content of the email when it is being designed. For example are you simply trying to drive traffic to your website or are you promoting a specific product or service on your site? Are you trying to re-engage inactive customers or inform current customers about a change to your business? All of these are valid reasons for an email but your must have your objective clear before commencing the design.

2) What can you do with the email to make it work?

This is the hardest part and you will need to rely on your marketing experience (or use us if you want help with this!). Knowing what will work obviously depends on hundreds of factors and what are you promoting will affect how this should be advertised. If you are promoting a proposed long term business to business partnership then focusing on cheap prices is not likely to be a deciding factor in the customers mind. Conversely promoting a product that is being sold by hundreds of retailers really needs to focus on good price, free p&p and good delivery lead times as well as being from a reputable company. It’s pointless promoting something that the customer potentially finds somewhere else for half the price if there is no incentive to buy from you instead.

3) Designing and building your email!

The first thing to note is that most people on your email list will also be on tens if not hundreds of other companies email lists. You need to do something with your email to make it stand out. Using pre-made templates that are given with a lot of email software may seem like a quick convenient way of getting emails churned out but what’s the point if people then don’t read them. You need to make your brand stand out and send people something that makes them want to open it and click through. This should be a unique offer each time and not just harassing people who will at best not read your email and at worst unsubscribe from your list. Other considerations need to be to the way the email is built. The coding should look right in the whole spectrum of email clients such as Google, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail etc. The email also needs to be built in a way that is friendly to spam filters as you don’t want to end up in the users junk folder or the email be so large that it takes someone 5 minutes for it to open in their browser.

4) How good is your email send list?

The only thing that is going to affect your results as much as the content of the email is the quality and size of the list you are going to send to. If your list is made up of previous customers who have made a purchase and you are sending them a promotion relating to their interests you are going to experience much higher click through rates and conversions that if your list is made up of people who have only submitted their email for a competition. With this in mind, if your list is large enough consider segmenting it out and sending a more targeted email to a particular group in the list.

5) Is the subject line catchy enough?

The subject line is sometimes the only way you will catch the users attention as they may not even open the email if the subject is not catchy. With this in mind you need to summarise the emails content and offer some incentive to click all in a small sentence. Also bear in mind the target audience and ensure the subject offers something that will make them want to click. Using multiple subject lines is a good way to ensure the best one is sent out to the majority of your list and this can be done within all good email software (our system can handle this for you so again if you need some help with your email marketing just give us a shout).

6) Is the email fully tested before you send it out?

Don’t put in all the effort on all the above areas to then have it ruined through sending out an email with a mistake on it. Double check the email and its content during some tests and ensure the offers and any details are all correct. Once the email has been finalised it should be sent to a test email account for all the different email providers to ensure it looks correct and does not go into the junk folder. Once this is done your ready to send. Good luck!

In Summary

Before sending out any email make sure you have the objectives clearly set out. You need to make the email unique and offer something to differentiate it from the competition. Ensure the subject line is catchy and the email is built and designed in spam friendly manner to ensure better click through rates.

I will discuss post send reporting and how to improve your campaigns in the next post. For the moment please feel free to ask any questions using the box below. Happy holidays!