Email marketing tips

January 2009

It’s hardly surprising that email marketing has become so popular. It’s much cheaper than direct mail, offers unbeatable ROI, reinforces your online marketing, PR and advertising campaigns and makes things easier for your sales force.

Here are some top tips to help you take full advantage of email marketing...

1. Give subscribers what they want

Once you have done some simple research to find out what your subscribers want (e.g. information, special offers, advice, industry news updates), you will be in a better position to give it to them. Make sure every email you send contains something they find interesting, useful or relevant.

2. Personalise your emails

Relevant content helps to build relationships; irrelevant content does the opposite. If you use targeted email marketing software, you can choose which bits of content (modules) to send to each of your audiences. And addressing each subscriber by name can help you improve your response rate.

3. Plan your content

Put an editorial calendar together to make sure you have enough content for the months ahead. And remember that cramming everything you have into a regular monthly email isn’t always the best approach: email is flexible and instantaneous, which means you can respond quickly to events and timely opportunities in more frequent bite-size chunks.

4. Think about copy and design

Well-written compelling copy is essential if you want to engage your audience. And it’s a good idea to have your templates designed professionally: images can be good at grabbing attention (as long as they aren’t blocked), but make sure they don’t push your important written content below the fold in your reader’s email preview pane.

5. Get your subject lines right

Subscribers who don’t use a preview pane will delete your email unless your subject line convinces them it’s worth their time. So pick five or six tasty words that are actually relevant to them. And use a sender name that your subscribers recognise and trust: your own name if you’ve met them in person, and/or your company’s name if you haven’t.

6. Make it easy to take action

Email is interactive, so if your content gets subscribers all excited, don’t leave them hanging. Include obvious calls to action: “call us”, “email us”, “find out more”, “pass it on”, “subscribe”, “download me”, “print me out and take me to the shops”... And make it easy for people to unsubscribe if that’s what they want to do: focus your energy on your other stakeholders.

7. Make sure they can see it

Before you send an email, make sure that it will get through spam filters and that your HTML version looks the way it should across all of the most popular email platforms (our software does all of this automatically). And always offer your subscribers a well-presented text version: some people – especially mobile phone users – can’t receive pretty HTML emails, or choose not to.

8. Test and measure

Are subscribers doing what you want them to do when they receive your email? Our software lets you measure campaigns in real time: you can see if each subscriber opens your email and which articles they look at. This means you can identify exactly what content they like, so make sure you test different ideas, offers and sending days/times to see what works best and put your email marketing on the right track.

9. Feed your database

Collect email addresses... and other data if you want to get clever and customise your emails. Collect business cards, sign up your existing customers, and then go to work on everyone else: online, on the phone, at meetings, at events... Use competitions if appropriate.

10. Sit back and relax

Life is too short to worry about sending out emails and managing subscriptions and bounces, so good software takes care of all that automatically. And if you’re too busy to do all the planning, managing, copywriting, implementing, measuring and problem solving yourself, you should consider leaving it in the capable hands of email marketing specialists (like us!).


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