Email Marketing Tips

Keep it simple. Ironically, for most things in life that’s not as simple to do as it sounds. Keeping your e-marketing simple is no exception. 

I receive many messages, newsletters and offers in my in-box that seem to subscribe to a philosophy of more is more. I strongly disagree. Trying to pack ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ into your communications only serves to confuse your recipient. Offer after offer, link after link. Most of the time the message only has a split second to make its impact - to ‘get the message across,’ but by trying to tell our customers everything, we actually tell them nothing. Business people, and especially the successful ones, are usually busy so they don’t spend much time trying to decipher a confusing message. We’ll scan it and can it within a split second if we don’t think it’s of use to us. 

The hardest thing for most of us to do is to decide what to leave out. We’ve got so much good stuff to tell our customers and clients about and we want to tell them everything right now. However, by spending the time and effort required to pare down our message to its most straightforward form, we can increase its impact one hundred fold. It’s time and effort well worth putting in. 

Try it with your next LiveWire Campaign. Make it as simple and straightforward as you can and I guarantee you’ll see better click through rates in Analyser.

A/B Split 

When the list is divided into two segments, each of which is tested for different creative’s. 

Above-the-fold 

The part of an email or HTML page that is visible without scrolling. It is generally desirable placement because of its high visibility. 

Acquisition versus Retention 

The presentation and content of an email marketing message or campaign often depends on whether the objective is to acquire new customers or encourage loyalty and repeat purchases from existing customers. Acquisition efforts are more likely to focus on encouraging action, retention efforts on building relationships. 

AIDAS 

Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction - elements of a campaign that establish and sustain the prospect’s momentum from initial contact up to and beyond response. 

API (Application Program Interface) 

A means by which programs written outside of an in-house system can interface with a third-party system. 

Audit 

An audit is the use of a third-party to verify inventory of a permission-based email lists. Auditing services may confirm subscriber membership; number of recipients within a list or publication, and active email addresses. 

Auto responders (Mailbots) 

Automated programs which are established to return a prewritten message upon receipt of email. The program will grab the return address from the header of the message. Typically, these programs will send out the response message within seconds of receipt.

The database is absolutely key to the success of your email campaigns. You need a comprehensive list of business email addresses. You’ve probably heard this a thousand times before, but would you believe that most businesses still do not collect the email addresses of everyone who contacts them.

Every time a business fails to capture someone’s email address they’re turning down the opportunity to contact them for free, for weeks, months and years ahead. Secretary’s, sales and telesales staff as well as the web site should all be used to collect companies email addresses. When you have the emails keep them clean, when you get bounce backs in your LiveWire Campaign reports contact your users to find out why they bounced and update your records.

Sometimes, I get newsletters and marketing messages via email that have everything except a clear call to action. They’re beautifully designed, a joy to read, and they get me in the mood to do something — if only I knew what the sender expects me to do. I don’t know where to click, what link to follow, where to order.

One of the crucial elements of an email marketing campaign is a clear call to action.

• Lay out exactly what you want the recipients of your message to do, and
• Design the message to make that path clear for the recipient, and easy to follow.

Don’t distract with too many links or offers, and make not only the call to action clear but also what recipients can expect when they click through. This can be as simple as “Click here for a 20% discount on your next weekend trip.”

 It’s an exciting time at Gencia as we watch LiveWire Campaign blossom and grow. Years of experience creating high profile email marketing campaigns for blue chip companies has enabled us to put a wealth of knowledge into building a powerful email marketing tool for SMEs.
Every day the system gains more users, which is great for the whole LiveWire team to see, but over the last months we have witnessed a trend that is even more encouraging. Existing users are logging on to the system more often, buying more vouchers and sending more campaigns. We take that as a signal that we’ve got a lot right with the present version of LiveWire Campaign but we’re not about to rest on our laurels.
Development is already under way on a new, improved version of LiveWire Campaign. We’ve listened to everything our present users have said and we are setting about the task of making the system even easier to use. Our main priority is to make the system more intuitive. Yes, we also want to include some new functionality but, if we do things right, most of that will be hidden away behind the scenes. We don’t want to fall into the trap of adding more and more ’stuff’ just for the sake of it and ending up with a fat, slow application that’s hard to use.
We’re relishing the challenge and looking forward to making LiveWire Campaign unquestionably the simplest and best email marketing tool there is.