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Effective email marketing
Email marketing can be a quick and cost effective way to keep in touch with clients – both old and new. But to get the most benefit, read our top tips to effective email marketing.
1. Use good data. This means using email addresses with ‘opt-in status,’ that is people who are happy to be contacted. This can help to increase response rates by up to ten times.
2. Keep it simple. Remember, your goal is to encourage your prospects to get in touch. Why are you emailing people in the first place? Whatever your reason, keep it at the forefront of your communication.
3. Don’t complicate things. It helps if your message, including the response mechanisms, can be seen on one screen. And don’t use lots of different font sizes and typefaces. It will only cause confusion and distract from your main message.
4. Make the ‘subject line’ stand out. If you can interest, amuse or intrigue with that one line, people are much more likely to read on. If you try to ‘sell’ at this point – they’re much more likely to press ‘delete’.
5. Make it easy to respond. After all, that’s the main point of the exercise! Always have a clear, concise call to action and provide immediate access to your website, email, address and phone number.
6. Keep going! Research shows that response rates increase as the recognition factor increases. So don’t think of email marketing as a one-off hit.
7. Take advantage of HTML. Wherever possible, use HTML to create the message. It looks better on screen, and you can hide URL links behind interesting visuals.
8. Track everything. By this we mean the number of emails opened, ‘unsubscribes’, clickable-links, emails received, telephone and faxes received, and so on. Simply tracking the clicks is only half the story. You should also monitor what happens when a click-through occurs on the website, and how your call centre deals with the phone calls. All this information is vital to creating successful future campaigns.
9. Get the timing right. Don’t broadcast overnight to business databases – they’ll simply be deleted. Research shows response rates are higher on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays for business broadcasts. Sending messages to consumers on a Friday can also prove successful too.