Email Marketing Tips

There is a classic formula used by marketers called AIDA. Though it was initially implemented in print advertising it is just as valid for your email marketing campaigns.

Attention
Interest
Desire
Action

If you follow this formula in every email marketing campaign that you send, you will greatly increase your chances of success.

Attention – the first thing your ad needs to do is grab the reader’s attention. You achieve this with your headline.

Interest – once you’ve got their attention, you need to create an interest in your product or service.

Desire – There is a big difference between being interested in a product or service and desiring it. You need to convert the reader’s interest into a strong desire for what you are offering.

Action - Even if someone desires what you have, it is not enough until they take action. At the end of the ad you need a call to action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow through and make it easy for them to do so. This is where many people go wrong. Even if you have a good ad, you still need to tell people precisely what to do - how to take action.

Effective email marketing normally does not involve just email alone. Usually it includes directing email readers through to a web site after they have clicked on your call to action. This click through may give you great CTR statistics, but is pointless if you are intending for the reader to move through your site and reach a final conversion goal i.e. a sale. Therefore is vitally important that you pay close attention to your readers landing page.

Below are a few tips to help you achieve more effective landing pages.

Don’t just point all links and calls to action to your home page.
Yes, this is what’s easiest to do. But in most instances, it’s not best. Especially when the product or service you’re promoting in the email doesn’t appear on the home page. Don’t make people search for what you’ve told them is there. Take them straight to it.

Move your readers to the next step

Don’t repeat your email content and offers on the website landing page, always ensure that you move your readers through to the next step in your process to conversion.

Match your landing page to your call to action

A good email engages readers by telling them about something, then setting an expectation for what they’ll find when they click through. If you’re promoting a new product with a link to “learn more,” readers expect to land on a page with more information. If it’s “order now,” they expect to land on a page to begin the order process. Be sure you deliver on the call to action’s promise.

Use a look and feel that consistent with your email

Make your landing page design, consistent with your email design. This will reassure your recipients that they have landed on the correct page and to continue to follow your call to action.

Minimize distractions
Maintain your clear path through to your next call to action. Stay with a simple clean design with a strong call to action. This minimalist approach will help readers reach your end conversion goal and give you the return on investment you are looking for.

It’s easy to read these tips and agree; it’s much harder to implement them. But it’s worth the effort. Making the extended effort with your landing pages is a great way to increase the effectiveness of your LiveWire Campaign email marketing.

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!

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.

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.