subject: Four Great Tips for Improving Your Email Marketing Campaign [print this page] Four Great Tips for Improving Your Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing tip sheets and how-to articles usually focus on one common theme: Improving delivery, increasing open rates, crafting good subject lines. There are other aspects to your email marketing campaign that are rarely discussed but have been proven to dramatically improve the success rates of email campaigns.
Use Google Analytics for More Accurate Data
Most of us have heard of Google Analytics but the name and the concept seem so intimidating that you just don't think it could be applied to your campaigns. You are wrong. Google Analytics were designed for the email marketer who wants the most accurate picture of what's happening to the emails sent out. Google Analytics allow you to see what happens after your email is opened. It tells you what pages your subscriber visited, what purchases were made, whether they left their shopping carts part way through or if there are pages that cause dead-ends. Email click-through rates are always good information to have, but many clients view their emails through preview panes which count as openings. Google Analytics allow you to go an extra step to see what click-through rates actually result in.
Frequently Check Send Address
There is a lot to do running up to the sending out of an email campaign. Once you create it, set it up, get it out and start analyzing the resulting data, it is easy to forget that recipients can actually still be interacting with your campaign. Recipients often bounce back a request for more information to your send address. They may bounce an unsubscribe request back. You need to check the in-box of your campaign send address to make sure you're not missing anything. You don't want to miss a potential client or an unsubscribe request that could earn you a spam complaint.
Segment Emails Based on Customer Activity
By using Google Analytics in conjunction with your campaign, you can develop whole new segments in your send list. You can cater a whole new secondary campaign for your most active recipients. Customers who spend time on a particular page, whether they purchase or not, can become a part of a new list that up-sells to a different but related product in the next campaign you send out. It is important to remember that unsubscribe rates are driven by the recipients sense that the emails are not relevant to them. With segmented lists, each new email is more and more relevant to the active recipient.
Archive Sent Emails
Email archives on your website serve more than as a place to read old emails. This is a static page that is accessible through search engines. This fact can be taken advantage of in a couple of ways:Put every sent email campaign message here so a good representation of your company is easily accessible. Reading your past email campaigns can make a very strong impression on a potential client.Add a newsletter or email sign up form to the main archive page. This is a great way to collect new email subscribers from a chance encounter from a search engine.
