Email marketing campaigns

Email marketing campaigns

Let’s take a look at the best way for you to design your e-mail marketing campaign. As with most other types of marketing, e-mail marketing campaigns work best if they follow a marketing planning format.

Based on marketing principles ask yourself who exactly are you targeting your e-mail at? Who are your customers and clients? Who is your target audience? There may be a number of segments that you are targeting, and in which case you would adapt or change your e-mail campaign.

Keep the message short and succinct, and use constant and straightforward text. Your logo needs to be strongly placed at the top of the e-mail, and the first few sentences are your opportunity to make an impact, because if they don’t the recipient will not read on.

Once the recipient has opened your e-mail you need to direct them through a text or image link to your website. Hence you need a landing page on your site that will take the recipient through to the next stage. This is also no as funnelling, where the following start wide and then directs the recipient to the point of purchase. Landing page needs to be consistent with your brand and also the e-mail. Key aspects of your offering need to be repeated on the landing page to reassure your recipient, and again include a call to action to move them towards the final stage purchase or signup (obviously it depends on what your purposes).

Next you need to test your e-mail. This is really simple when you use one of the popular e-mail marketing services. Simply send an e-mail to yourself or to staff and colleagues, and ask them to respond with any necessary changes. This is also reassuring to you.

The campaign must be measured and monitored, so that you can compare and contrast success of various strategies. You can measure of all sorts of indicators including how many e-mails were delivered, and many were opened, how many recipients on your link and began her journey through your funnel. You should be able to compare the amount of e-mails which you sent to your actual sales. Again some e-mail marketing providers allow you to measure the value of each individual client in your mailing list, and you can rank and prioritise them.

This also allows you to remove people from your mailing list it don’t open your e-mails and will never become customers. Again this may reduce the cost of the mailing. The mailing list needs to be current โ€“ so if many of your emails bounce, remain unopened or induce the client to unsubscribe, then you need to refresh your list and/or change your approach.

Keep trying new ideas. By comparing and contrasting your relative success you will make your campaigns more successful. By changing small details you may notice unexpected improvements.

You need to set yourself smart objectives. For example, to inform my 100, 000 strong mailing list about a product range launch within seven days. You also would need to consider the finance needed to plan, write, implement and monitor the online campaign. Measuring your campaign is vital, and all e-mail marketing service providers give you a toolkit to control your plan, and there is always Google Analytics in addition.

Having decided that you are going to prepare your campaign you will need to segment, target, and position your message not only for the entire email-shot, but also for each individual that you are communicating with. Your campaign should have meaning for everyone with whom you are in contact. Your purpose is to achieve a sale or call-to-action, and success is more often down to segmentation rather than creativity.

To grab the attention of your reader you need to make sure that your subject line or title, jumps out and distinguishes itself from the other communications in your potential customerโ€™s inbox. This will also help you overcome spam filters. Keep it relevant to your topic and include your website name where possible, for example Marketing Teacher Launches New Course, which would be of interest to our clients.

Next – you need to get creative! As with all marketing communications it is important that you design an email structure or template which is strong enough to entice and retain customers. So here are a few tips to help you to construct engaging e-mails.

Remember to give your respondent the opportunity to unsubscribe from your mailing list. It may be that they have changed jobs or have other interests and no longer require your services.

Keep them keep the actual physical size of the e-mail small enough for your clients e-mail program or browser to be able to open it. If you pack it with Flash imagery many e-mail packages will not open anyway, and think about those people in countries where bandwidth is small where the Internet service will be much slower. Therefore it is also good advice to give readers the choice of HTML or text versions of your correspondence.

Write in simple language so that readers can quickly scan through your message.

The call-to-action should be prominent. This is what you want the respondent do as a result of reading your message.


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