| By Tom O’Leary
In this series, we will provide an overview on email marketing, offer tips to help make your e-mail marketing campaigns more successful, review the tools necessary for effective email marketing and expose email marketing mistakes to avoid.
Part 1: Email Marketing Overview
One of the most effective ways to reach a large audience, even on a shoestring budget, is via e-mail. There are close to 1 billion Internet users in the world today. According to recent research, almost 80 percent of them use the Internet to send and receive e-mail regularly. As a result, many marketers consider e-mail to be an essential tool for communicating with their customers and prospects. It is used to promote products and services, provide support, generate traffic to websites and improve customer service. Some believe that email marketing is a science - others think of it as an art. Either way, it is the most widely used platform for online marketing today. Why? Because it works!
Many people don’t realize, however, that successful email marketing requires skill and patience. It’s not as easy as sending quick e-mails out to a list of people. Traditional and newly developed marketing tactics are required to persuade e-mail recipients to respond to an e-mail message. Because e-mail is such a popular platform for online communication, most people’s e-mail inboxes are full each day. Because of this heavy volume of e-mail, it’s not easy to catch the attention of your intended recipient. It’s even more difficult to turn that attention into action. So, let’s take a look at the different parts of an e-mail that e-marketers concentrate on to grab attention and inspire action.
There are four basic elements of email marketing that marketers focus on in their campaigns. They are the list, the message, delivery and measurement. Each element has many factors to consider.
The List
Before implementing an email marketing campaign, marketers must have a list of people to send their message to. Building this list takes time, as current legislation requires that commercial e-mail is sent only to recipients who request to receive it from the sender. This requirement for permission means that marketers must first implement a strategy to encourage people to request information from them. Often, this is done through the use of newsletter sign-ups, website incentives and partnerships with other sites that drive similar market traffic. Obviously, the content of your website will dictate if visitors will be persuaded to ask you to contact them with more information. Relevance of content is the most important factor in persuading people to subscribe to your e-mail offerings. Because organically building an in-house e-mail list takes time, some marketers rent existing lists from list providers who have procured contact details from people requesting information relevant to their business. It is important to only rent lists from reputable providers who can ensure that permission was given by their contacts to share their information. Obviously, renting an existing list is much more expensive; but it is also a much faster way to build a large list. The more targeted your list is to your market, the more effective it will be. This is why securing contacts who find your information interesting or relevant is so important. Obviously, marketers want as many details as possible from each person on their list. To personalize e-mails to a large list, it is important to have, at a minimum, each person’s first and last name and e-mail address. But marketers also find birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, company details, favorite color, etc. very important. Deciding how much information to ask isn’t easy. If you request too much information, people might be reluctant to subscribe. If you don’t ask, you won’t know. It is a delicate balance between making it easy for people to register and getting as much information as you can. Some marketers start with the basics, and attempt to gather additional information later with incentives. Subscriber information is stored in a database of some kind and eventually imported into the e-mail application used to send group messages.
The Email Message
The e-mail message itself requires much thought and strategy. The most important elements within an e-mail message are the ‘From’ field, the ‘Subject’, the ‘Body’ and the ‘Close’.
The ‘From’ Field
It is important to clearly identify who your e-mail is from. This is usually the first thing that recipients look to when deciding if the message was sent from someone they know. Generally, it is good practice to use your company name in the ‘From’ field. If your personal name is well known, you might decide to use it instead. It is important to keep your ‘From’ field consistent in order that your recipients recognize it each time an e-mail arrives. In essence, your ‘From’ field is part of your brand, and it will hopefully be recognizable and trusted by your audience over time.
The ‘Subject’
The subject of your message often determines whether or not a recipient opens your e-mail. If the subject matter is not relevant to the receiver of your message, there is a good chance that they will delete it before opening it. This is especially important for e-mail recipients who don’t have a preview pane activated on their e-mail client. Subject lines should clearly relate the contents of the e-mail. If it is an email newsletter, you might perhaps use a subject line such as “Newsletter: Issue 12” or“News from Company XYZ”. E-mail subjects that mislead the recipients as to the actual contents of the message are considered SPAM. Writing good subject lines requires practice. It is good practice to keep them short, to the point and relevant to the e-mail contents. Many marketers also personalize the subject line using the recipient’s name (John, Here’s the Latest from Company XYZ) or other personal information (Important Updates for New York customers). Personalizing e-mail messages for large lists of recipients is done using merge fields. In order to do this, special e-mail marketing software is required. Thankfully, such e-mail marketing software is very affordable today and easy to use.
The ‘Body’
The body of your e-mail contains the persuasive message to your recipients. It should clearly identify a call-to-action of some kind. That call-to-action might be to buy a product, visit a website, register for an event or whatever other action responds to the objective of your campaign. E-mail messages should be error free and professionally designed. Many email marketers use custom templates to neatly frame their content in the body of their message and represent their website or brand. Email marketing software, like Infacta’s GroupMail, allows marketers to send both an HTML and text version of their e-mail to recipients. While most computers used today allow recipients to view HTML messages, there are still some recipients who set their e-mail application to display messages in text-only format. For that reason, sending one message that will automatically detect the recipients’ settings and launch the appropriate version is considered best practice. Generally, links to products, services, support or websites are provided in the e-mail body. Links within the body of an e-mail message should take the recipient exactly where you want them to go when they click on it. If you are selling a product, the link provided in the e-mail message should bring the recipient to the product page or website checkout. The page that an e-mail link brings the recipient is called the landing page. Sometimes, marketers create special landing pages for different email campaigns. The body of a commercial e-mail is relatively short and to the point, and it is often personalized by marketers in order to create a familiar tone in the message (i.e. Dear Joe, or Joe, you might be interested…).
The ‘Close’
The close of an e-mail message contains the sender’s signature line, contact information and opt-out information. It is important that recipients of your message can contact the sender for more information or request removal from the e-mail list. Every recipient has the right to request to be removed from a marketer’s list at any time. When a recipient does so, the sender should take immediate action and stop sending e-mail to that person. Many marketers use space under their signature to include related product or service information that is relevant to their audience (see below).
Ima Marketer
President, XYZ Corp.
e: imamarketer@yourdomain
w: http://www.yourdomain.com
P.S. Do you want to reduce your online advertising costs? Click here.
Delivery
Getting your message delivered is critical. There’s no point in creating a powerful e-mail message if it isn’t going to get to the recipients’ inbox. E-mail marketers send messages out in large groups using email marketing software. Often, marketers break very large lists down and send the message in batches. Having more than one delivery list can also be a good way for marketers to segment their message to different categories of recipients, based on time zone or industry type for example. Delivery can be complicated by Internet Service Provider (ISP) SPAM filters that recognize messages with large lists of recipients. Sometimes, these filters flag messages as SPAM and delay or prevent delivery. For this reason, it is important to work with your ISP and understand what limitations and restrictions they might have regarding list sizes. Good e-mail marketers work closely with their ISP and even advise them, in advance, when they are scheduling delivery of a message to a large group. Having a good relationship with your ISP can prevent many problems with e-mail delivery. It is also important to check and maintain your list regularly. Invalid e-mail addresses will bounce back. Hard bounces are those that cannot be resolved (i.e. the e-mail address doesn’t exist). Soft bounces are those that were rejected for other, temporary reasons (i.e. the server was down during transmission). Good list management and a proactive relationship with your ISP will increase the success of your delivery rates. It is also important to decide when to deliver your e-mail message. For some time, it was thought that commercial e-mail was most effective when sent between Tuesday and Thursday. Recently though, some studies contradict this. It is important to test your own audience response on different days to see what is the most effective for you. If you send a newsletter, it is recommended that it be sent at the same time each week or month for consistency.
Measurement
Successful email marketing requires careful analysis of each campaign. Through regular measurement, e-mail marketers can identify strengths and weaknesses and make appropriate adjustments in the next campaign. The most important information that email marketers measure is open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates. This information is monitored by using special e-mail tracking software.
Open Rates
Open rates measure how many recipients opened the e-mail that you sent. This percentage is important to analyze how successful delivery was and how it might be improved next time. It also might be impacted by the quality or relevance of the subject line. Measuring open rates can help email marketers fine tune their delivery and subject strategies.
Click-through Rates
Click-through rates are very important. It’s one thing getting recipients to open your e-mail. What you really want is for those same recipients to click on one of your calls-to-action within the message. Click-through rates identify how many people clicked on each link within your message. Email marketers can learn a lot by analyzing click-throughs. Perhaps a link at the top of the message was clicked more than those in the middle? Maybe links with red buttons were clicked more than standard text links?
Conversion Rates
Without a doubt, the most important aspect to measure in an email marketing campaign is the conversion rate. Conversion rates identify how many of your recipients took the action that you wanted them to. If you were promoting a special offer on a product, how many click-through’s resulted in the purchase of that product. Conversion rates are the most difficult to ascertain, as there might be delays in action, skewing report results. Measuring conversion rates can help e-mail marketers to determine the effectiveness of their landing page and call-to-action. Was the copy persuasive enough? Did the landing page make it easy for the conversion to take place?
As you can see, email marketing isn’t simply sending an e-mail to a bunch of addresses, sitting back, and hoping that people respond. Successful e-mail marketing requires good list development and management, an effective and persuasive e-mail message, good delivery rates and regular measurement and analysis. In the remainder of this series, we will offer email marketing tips, email marketing tools and email marketing mistakes to avoid.
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Part 1: Email Marketing Overview
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Part 2: Email Marketing Tips
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Part 3: Email Marketing Tools
Getting Started With Email Marketing
Part 4: Email Marketing Mistakes
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