Email Marketing Tips

Send too many email campaigns and your recipients are likely to suffer from ‘email fatigue’ and start deleting your communications without opening, or worse still, reporting your mails as SPAM. There are many, many articles on the web advising against contacting your list too frequently but not contacting your subscribers often enough can lead to the same end result. If you go for long periods of time without sending any messages, and then bombard your list for a specific event or a new product launch, you may once again trigger unsubscribes or spam reports. 

Try not to let more than a month go by without contacting subscribers, either with regular content relevant to the list or with administrative requests, such as an invitation to fill out or update your preferences. 

Contacting subscribers on or around a regular date each month, so that they come to expect your communications, will also help.

E-mail marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of finding new clients and building a stronger relationship with current customers, but only if performed well.

Get personal – personally addressed e-mails with, if possible, personalised content is going to have more chance of establishing trust and a relationship. The alternative could unfortunately resemble spam.

Write a meaningful subject line and opening – write a succinct, transparent and descriptive overview of the offering you wish to promote. The reader should be able to work out within a few seconds if it is of interest and whether they wish to learn more. Of course be persuasive and use your copy to entice the prospect but keep in mind the above guidelines.

Copy – a few rules that you should follow:

• Be concise – reading lengthy copy on the screen is hard on the eyes and your prospective clients’ patience
• Use short sentences, paragraphs and bullets points to ease reading
• Use the correct spelling and punctuation
• Avoid the over use of capitals
• Avoid jargon

Be sure to proof the copy – silly little mistakes stick out like a sore thumb and spoil all that effort you invested to make the perfect e-mail campaign. Not only proof yourself; give it to others not working on the campaign so that there is a fresh pair of eyes to read over it.

Test your e-mail before you send it – do a dry run to yourself and a sample group, as it will be infuriating to find a glaring error once you press send on that all-important e-mail shot. Even if there are no mistakes, a test run can still help refine and improve the message.

Be prepared to handle inquires – it sounds obvious doesn’t it? However, many e-mail marketers do not factor this in. All departments that are likely to handle inquiries should be briefed in good time and be able to deal with inquiries efficiently.

Answer all replies with 24 hours – e-mails are a quick and easy channel of communication and interested parties will want quick answers. Do not disappoint on the first and probably only time you will have to make a favourable impression.

The key to the success of any sales or marketing campaign is the calibre of the product or service you offer and whether your prospective clients are interested in purchasing it. 

Marketing planning is therefore the essential first key step in your campaign and the time invested here will pay dividends. Planning identifies the proposition (products / services), messaging and establishes the prospective client base that will give you the greatest chance of success. 

If the plan does not initially meet targets it will be easier assess any shortcomings and re-direct the marketing effort to a successful conclusion. Risks and pitfalls are often eliminated at this stage. 

Many of the best marketing campaigns utilise a number of different marketing channels such as e-mails, advertising and direct mail in combination. Integrating a campaign in this way, we have found, is often more effective. It reinforces the messages to your prospects and does not rely on one method of delivery. 

Differentiation is also a vital element of the best campaigns. What is it about your service that is better and more appealing than your competitors’ service? What is it about your campaign that will make your prospects take notice? When you are up against the campaigns of multiple competitors, the originality and creativity you display will come to the fore. 

Marketing should be about building and fostering relationships with your prospective clients. Marketing that builds understanding, trust and fondness for your company will produce results. And do not forget your current clients or those customers that you might have lost touch with; the basis for a relationship is already there. 

It is a lot of work to implement a marketing campaign well, but the rewards will justify the resource you invest.

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.

First of all it has to be said - you’re not on your own. Every mailing last has recipients that never click through, read or even open the email campaigns they’re sent. But why?

Here are some possible reasons:-

• They’ve left the company - their email address may or may not be disabled
• The email address has been abandoned - if it’s web mail the may have lost their password
• For any of a multitude of reasons, your campaigns have been getting blocked or filtered
• They simply never click a link in an email
• They have lost interest but have never bothered to unsubscribe

It might be time to segment your list and remove subscribers who have not responded for, say, three years. But before you give up on them completely, create a new list from these nonresponders and send a campaign with a message for them specifically, it’s possible you may get some who opt back in.