Email Marketing Tips

Email can give you something special – instant, live, two-way communication from every address you deliver to. That’s right, every single one. Even if some of your emails are bouncing back (and some will) you’ve still learned something – it’s likely those addresses are dead and you need to update your database. If you are getting 20% opens and only 22% reads then you know something about your email isn’t connecting with your readers. If it was, they would be reopening the email to re-read it, so you would be getting a much higher percentage of ‘reads’ to ‘opens’.

With that kind of in-depth information you can begin to mould your campaigns and target your messages. Improve your response rates and follow up on click throughs. In essence, learn from your mistakes and find out what works for you.

To start you on the right track. Here are 5 tried and tested ways of improving the effectiveness of your emails.

1. Keep your subject lines short and to the point. Longer than 40 characters and they’ll be cut off by many email clients. Don’t use words like OFFER or FREE or exclamation marks for emphasis!!! You’ll be relegated to the spam folder.
2. Keep it simple stupid. Don’t make your emails too long or try to cram in too much. You’ve got a second or so to grab your readers attention so keep it concise. If you’re targeting your readers well, this should be easy.
3. Let your readers know what to do next. Put a clear call to action on your email. A link to your website or your telephone number, big and bold.
4. Make it time limited. Putting a deadline on your email has been proven to increase response rates. Make it clear to your recipients that if they snooze they loose!
5. Time it right. Don’t send your email at 10’o’clock on a Monday morning when everyone is manic. It’s going to get deleted. Timing is everything so choose a time of day when your recipient will be more receptive.

Pay close attention to just these five rules and I guarantee you will improve your response rates. Good luck and remember the power of email marketing - customer knowledge!

Your customer/member database is your most powerful asset. You have collected data from each of your business contacts including their email addresses, so why not use it to make yourself some money?

Start by keeping your customers and members up to date with all your latest deals and offers through regular daily, weekly or monthly email campaigns. A customer who has brought from you previously or has visited you before will do so again. These contacts are a potential goldmine, so ignore them at your peril.

If you have suppliers or partners for your business why not ask if they would like to sponsor an email campaign to your customers or members. This is a great way for a supplier/partner to get a low cost focused advertising campaign and a way for you to cover your costs or even make a profit on each campaign you send. This method of campaign funding and revenue generation has certainly proved successful for some of our LiveWire Campaign account holders.

Please remember to ensure that you try to capture as much of your customer and member data as possible for use on later campaigns. You should always be looking to increase your database as this will strengthen your marketing power.

Example:
Business Example A Limited has 10,000 customers recorded in their customer database with their associated email addresses. They run a monthly email campaign to their customer base offering their latest product deal of Product A at the RRP of £5.99.

The monthly LiveWire Campaign costs are only £60 + VAT per month. Some LiveWire Campaign users are charging upwards of £100 for an advertising slot on campaigns of 7 - 10k, so they are in profit on every campaign they send before they even sell a thing! Plus, they can also expect at least an average return on investment from sales. A typical example from 2006 is shown below.

No. Sent – Total number of emails sent
CTR – Click through rate percentage
No. of CT – Total number of Click Through’s
CCR – Customer Conversion Rate (Percentage of Click Through’s converting to a sale)
Gross Revenue Per month – Revenue generated per month from each campaign.

* The above figures are based on average click through and customer conversion rates from 2006.

Members of LiveWire Campaign have been asking us for some time if an affiliate scheme is available. We’ve listened and introduced a scheme which is true to the LiveWire Campaign philosophy of straightforward simplicity. It enables members of LiveWire Campaign to earn revenue from any recommendations they make to the system. 

It works like this: 

All that is required is for you to sign-up your members and clients to LiveWire Campaign using a designated affiliate code that we provide to you. You will then receive a share of gross revenue received from each sign-up. It’s not a one off hit - you will receive your share of every voucher purchased from your affiliate members for as long as they remain on the system. How good a deal is that!! 

Revenue will be generated when a sign-up chooses to buy a Pay-as-you-go voucher. 

You will receive a percentage of gross revenue (less payment gateway processing costs) at the following rates: 

Up to 500 sign-ups = 10% Gross revenue
Over 500 sign-ups = 20% Gross revenue 

We don’t believe that we could make it any more simple than that and it means that our regular users can share in the future success of LiveWire Campaign. If you’re interested send us an email at affinity@livewirecampaign.co.uk

Blocking

Emails that are blocked are not processed through the ISP and are essentially prevented from reaching their addressed destination (and are, therefore, often bounced back).

Bouncebacks

Emails that fail to reach their destination (due to incorrect addresses, systems downtime or blocking) and are returned to the delivery system. Bouncebacks are recorded in the LiveWire Campaign Analyser section.

Broadcasting

Broadcasting is the process of simultaneously emailing the same message to multiple recipients.