Email Marketing Tips

Email marketing is no longer about a ‘one size fits all model.’ Incorporating personalisation into LiveWire campaigns and delivering appropriate content to the recipient increases response rates and return on investment.

There are several different ways to personalise your LiveWire campaigns. The most obvious is to address your recipient by their name in your messages rather than as ‘Dear Sir.’ LiveWire allows you to upload your list containing a field for your recipients names and it will place the name into email template for you when it is sent.

List segmentation should be used to further personalise your campaigns and can be based on any number of factors. Market sector is probably the most obvious and the easiest to implement a message that is tailored to it. Messages targeted in this way are much more likely to connect with a recipient. Segmentation can also be based on purchasing trends, lifestyle preferences, previous responses, job type, renewal dates to name but a few.

Personalisation should also take the subject line into account. A little creative thought put into this very important area can pay dividends and massively improve open rates if it is personalised to the recipient.

Another useful idea, which is often overlooked. is to incorporate the recipients own logo and branding into the campaign. This is especially effective if you are sending campaigns to multiple users from the same organisation but care must be taken that the campaign doesn’t look like a scam, and that you are trying to fake a legitimate email from your recipients own company. However, if the look and feel of the recipients branding is incorporated within your own email template it can help to break down the initial barriers and start the dialogue.

Most advertising does not result in a direct sale. Rather it is an introduction to the products and/or services of the advertiser and an invitation to begin a dialogue. Email marketing is no exception, though it does provide an unusually direct route to a sale - a link to the website.

I’ve noticed that, for some LiveWire Campaign users, links to the website almost seem like an afterthought. I know that many users use LiveWire more as a way of imparting information than as a sales channel, but for those users who are selling direct, the website link is of prime importance. One of the main reasons for poor click through rates is the placement of the link way down the page in a very long email message. Any email where the recipient has to scroll more than twice the length of the email window on an ‘average’* screen is too long.

The old saying ‘less is more’ could not be truer than with email marketing. When we create an email marketing campaign for a customer at least 50% of the creative time is spent making the message as simple and succinct as possible. It’s always time well spent. I find that messages that can be opened in full at an ‘average’ screen resolution are always the most successful in terms of click through rates. It stands to reason that if the message is simple and direct, and the ‘call to action’ is right alongside it, then we will get a better result than if we ask the recipient to take time out of their busy schedule to read through swathes of text and click a link at the bottom of the page.

It’s worth bearing in mind that, no matter how relevant the product or service, most of us are too busy to read all the emails we receive in our in-box. We prioritise by relevance, timing and by the actual time we have at our disposal to read the mail. So, simplify the message as much as possible. If there’s a lot to say split it over multiple campaigns. A simple message, with a strong call to action, will almost always beat a longer message in terms of results.

*It’s almost impossible to categorise the ‘average’ computer screen because there are a limitless number of ways to configure a PC. I’m using the term purely for shorthand purposes in the writing of this article. It’s a subject that we will look at in-depth on this blog at a later date.

Some of our users have been having problems with their email campaigns ending up in the spam folder. This usually has something to do with the content of the email rather than the way the email has been constructed. Legitimate email will get spam filtered if there is something about it that makes it look like spam, so users will need to take a few steps to ensure that their emails arrive in the in-box.

Firstly, and most importantly, only send to opt-in lists. NEVER use bought in lists. We don’t allow users to send campaigns to bought in lists for a very simple reason - many of these recipients will report the email as spam. If too many recipients hit the ’spam’ button (and this is very easy to do on AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN) your email will be filtered. So, only ever send campaigns to people who have given permission for you to do so.

Split large groups of recipients into smaller groups in your database. Splitting down into batches of 10,000 or less is a good idea. Large email hosts such as AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail and MSN have instituted greylisting policies that stop deliveries of emails from IP addresses that send a large number of messages to their servers in a specified period of time, even if the mailings are legitimate and permission based.

The subject line of your email is also vitally important. If you send an email with the subject line: ‘Be a WINNER! Enter our FREE competition,’ it will almost certainly be relegated to the spam folder even though the recipients have signed up to your communications. Do not use subjects that include words or phrases with a sexual conotation or that include names of pharmaceuticals or illegal drugs. This is also true of the body of your email, so be more creative and look for alternate ways of saying the same thing. If it sounds spammy, it probably is.

We are continuing our development of the LiveWire Campaign platform and we are presently putting our latest beta version through testing. We’ve made some big improvements to the mail sending functionality, so users should see some speed improvements when sending out large campaigns. Other changes we’ve made out too numerous to mention but they are all aimed at making the system quicker and easier to use.

The next phase of development will include some new template designs and improvements to the templating system in general. We’ve also got some ideas for additional functionality that we think many of our users will find really useful, so look out for those.

Of course, as always, if you have any ideas on additional functions you’d like to see added to the system please email us and we’ll see what we can do.