Email Marketing Tips

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.

Of course you are capturing the email addresses of your customers and prospects as a matter of priority but are you capturing enough information and are you putting it to good use?

Here are some ideas on useful information you can capture from your customers quite easlily that will help you build a picture of their requirements and better target your campaigns.

Contact Information

• Sort by post code to send offers in batches to different areas
• Multiple contact methods to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns (LiveWire Campaign, phone, DM)

Client Status

• Campaign targeting your least profitable customers to generate more sales from them
• Special “rewards” for your most profitable customers

Lead Source

• Identifying best ongoing promotional strategies
• Rewarding referrals

Demographic Information

• Campaigns targeting a male or female audience
• Family offers
• Targeting campaigns to different age groups

Personal & Relationship Information

• Notes to help you identify which campaign will be most relevant to each customer
• Notes to help you avoid unnecessarily overloading a customer with unnecessary information
• Contact history to track long term sales processes & relationship building

Purchase History

• Targeting users of a particular product from your range
• Targeting customers who have not bought a product from your range

At the start of another new year I thought it was an opportune moment for a timely reminder of why we should be using email for our marketing and, in particular, why LiveWire Campaign. 

• Cost effectiveness – when compared to pretty much any other form of marketing 

• Fast implementation of campaign – hours or even minutes instead of weeks 

• Ease of measurability – track opens, reads and click throughs 

• Very precise customer targeting 

• Easy, fast and cheap to test 

If you account for the fact that email is the most popular application on the internet, email marketing is probably even more important than your website. 

• branding/awareness? 

• customer acquisition? 

• customer retention? 

• new sales? 

• repeat sales? 

• customer feedback? 

LiveWire Campaign makes it very easy for you to create, deliver and analyse the results of a campaign but consider if your business is ready for a successful campaign? 

• Can you cope with a large number of queries? 

• Can you fulfil the orders? 

• Are your staff aware of your campaign? 

• Do you need to get extra staff in to help? 

If you are serious about your online business, you can not afford to miss out on the benefits of using LiveWire Campaign but be ready for the best case scenario!