subject: Advice on how to make your email marketing campaigns succeed [print this page] Advice on how to make your email marketing campaigns succeed
Numerous businesses are turning to email marketing campaigns because they have lower costs and better response rates when compared to other direct marketing methods.
There are some tips that will help to maximise the potential of email marketing campaigns, regardless of the content.
Firstly, the data you use is vitally important. A campaign can succeed or fail based on the quality of data you have, and using email addresses of people who have opted in can boost the response rate by up to 10 times. You can even separate the email addresses into categories, for example location or job title, in order to make your email marketing campaigns even more targeted.
You need to make sure that the timing of sending the email is right, because it seriously affects the response rate. For B2B campaigns, Tuesday to Thursday during work hours have proved to be the best times to send emails. If you send them overnight then the message will be deleted once the recipient is filtering through their emails first thing. For consumers, sending emails on a Friday afternoon has been proven to work best.
If your email has a good subject line then the recipient is more likely to open the message. If they decide to read your email, the content should be simple and encourage them to visit your website. Make the reason for emailing clear and at the forefront of the message. You should also make it easy for the recipient to respond with a clear and concise call to action.
The design should be simple, the message should be seen on one screen and graphics should be hosted so the file size remains as small as possible. HTML coding will keep the design simple, but make the text look more engaging. You can link words or images so that when the recipient clicks on them they are taken to a web link.
With email marketing campaigns you need to invest time into sending out communications regularly; research shows that response rates increase with frequency as people begin to recognise the brand and trust it.
The final piece of advice is to track everything: track your open rates, unsubscribes, bounces, click throughs, etc. By monitoring each campaign you can identify what does and doesn't work and tailor your future email marketing campaigns to be more successful.
