Email Marketing Best Practises

We've been talking a lot about Email Marketing this month on the AlterSage blog.

We've covered a diverse number of topics including using Email Marketing as an effective customer relationship management tool, how to drive ROI from Email Marketing and the importance of segmenting subscribers.

Now to round off this series of blog posts we thought it'd be a good idea to get back to basics and talk a little more generally about Email Marketing best practises and etiquette. Here are a few pointers:

- Always get permission. Permission-based email is the best way to drive proper engagement with your customers or potential customers through this channel. Sending unsolicited email can be regarded as spammy by recipients and can do serious damage to your brands credibility.

- Make it personal. A personalised greeting or subject line significantly boosts responses and open rates. Emails which contain these personalised elements are regarded as more credible by recipients. Its possible to personalise emails using a database which contains entries for readers names.

- Keep it snappy. Your newsletter content should be scannable. Keep it short and sweet and make use of headings and bolding to create visually distinct areas on the mailer. Dont email entire articles or stories rather include an excerpt or teaser with a link to the full piece on your website.

- Make sure it looks good. Check that your email will pass spam tests and that it will render properly in your readers mail clients. Ensure that mailers are built in light-weight HTML without too many images these slow down the emails loading time and may be removed by some email clients.

- Timing is everything. Test for the best time to send your email and stick to it. A consistent delivery time or day can increase open-rates as readers are anticipating the emails arrival and its less likely to be binned as spam.

- Let them go. Its important to include an unsubscribe link in all emails. This isnt just a courtesy, it is mandatory on commercial emails. Allowing your readers to unsubscribe also enables you to keep a clean list of subscribers who want to receive correspondence from you. Similarly, if you find youre getting several hard bounces from a certain email address, remove it to keep your database as clean as possible. Remember that while its great to grow your subscriber list, its important to realise that a smaller more targeted database is probably more useful than a large and unfocussed one.

- Run reports and analyse your results. As with all online marketing elements, Email Marketing is completely measurable. Ensure that you monitor the successes of each campaign and analyse the results to find areas where you could improve. Testing is an important part of getting it right.

by: AlterSage Consultants

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