Email Marketing isn’t dead 20 ways to make your campaigns successful

Why is Email Marketing still effective today?

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Email marketing continues to provide a direct avenue to prospect. The number of worldwide email users will be close to 3 billion in a couple years and the number of emails sent per day will soon be over 246 billion. The numbers are there, but what makes email marketing the right choice today?

o Cost effectiveness: For literally pennies a day, marketers increase their reach.

o Versatility: Everyone has a smartphone these days. And 91% of them use their mobile device to check their email daily.

o Action Oriented: Emails invite a response that potentially converts prospects to customers or invites customers to make an additional purchase.

o Measurable: Emails are trackable. You can see who has opened, read, shared, and unsubscribed.

o Personal: Emails can target your customers as directly as possible. You can include names and preferences.

A digital marketing strategy of sending email is good, but it’s not enough. There are best practices that are required to bring positive results.

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Mobile FriendlyMost Americans own a cell phone with smartphone ownership increasing. With a 24/7 resource for obtaining information in the palm of their hand, consumers regularly access the internet via mobile devices. Some even use smartphones as their primary means of online access. Mobile email will even account for 15 to 70% of email opens. Ensure your email campaigns are responsive to mobile users.

ExperimentExperiment with A/B split testing to learn which messaging resonates with consumers. A very simple test involves changing the subject line for half of your recipients and see if that changes the response rate to your CTA.

Stay on subjectThe subject line of an email often determines whether the recipient opens it or not. Marketing firm Chadwick Martin Bailey has calculated that 64 percent of readers will open an email due to the subject line so a subject line that evokes curiosity is a must. Wordstream also offers helpful tips for creating a great subject line. In the body of the message, keep it consistent with what was promised in the subject line. Break up blocks of texts with bullet points and subheadings so readers can quickly skim it.

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Use personalizationWith merge fields, you can address the recipient by their name in your opening message or even in your subject line. Throughout the body, use the word “you” and write in a way that speaks directly to readers rather than “we”. Remember, customers want to know what’s in it for them. Also use your name or company name as a clearly identified sender.

Make it time-sensitivePresent a clear deadline for purchasing the item or service, along with a time sensitive CTA at the beginning and end of the email. Robert Cialdini has done research on the principle of scarcity. If people believe something is available in limited quantities or only available for a short period of time, they see it as more valuable.

Use appropriate landing pagesA relevant landing page lets you keep email copy to a minimum with more information about making a purchase, booking a service or other action on the actual page. When a user clicks on this action, they should be taken to a specific landing page that highlights the offering, rather than sending them to the home page.

And be wary of offering too many things on your landing page. When a user clicks to see an offer, learn more about a product, make a purchase,

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or complete another desired action, the landing page should keep them focused on that specific task with minimal distractions. Don’t overload your landing page with too much text or images.

For example, if the goal is for subscribers to sign up for a free trial period, highlight the benefits of the offer such as being able to cancel before the trial period expires if they choose to and address any potential questions.

Segment your listThere are numerous approaches to segmenting your list, depending on the makeup of your audience. If you have an eCommerce site, you may send one offer to people who spent more than $500 and a different one to people who spent much less than that. Use different price points. You may also send different messages to people based on their open rates. People who read your email the most often may respond to a more aggressive offer than those who rarely open your messages.

Links to social mediaHave share buttons so your readers can easily share content from your email newsletter to their Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media accounts. Also, include icons to the social channels where you have a presence so readers can interact with you online in other ways.

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Include an unsubscribe linkIt is a requirement by law to allow recipients to easily unsubscribe and it’s helpful to know when readers are not interested in what you are sending. If unsubscribes happen a lot, you may want to revisit your strategy for content and frequency of messages. Also, remind people why they are receiving your email, with a line such as “You are receiving this message because you signed up for notices about our training”. Since we’re all bombarded by email messages, you will want to include this reminder, especially if your messages are sent out infrequently. People may simply forget they subscribed.

Use good designThe overall look and feel of the email newsletter should match your brand by including the logo and using the same colors and fonts people expect to see on your site. You want recipients to immediately know the communication is coming from a brand they know. Include the call-to-action in more than one place and make sure it is at least noted at the top of the message so people who do not scroll down will not miss your message.

Decide what to measureAlthough using an email newsletter provider is inexpensive, the staff time spent designing and creating content does cost money which is why measuring and quantifying return on investment is vital for making

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decisions about future email campaigns. Not surprisingly, revenue growth is a key metric for any business.

Other soft metrics include open-rate, click through rate (CTR), bounce rate (both hard and soft bounces), sharing/forwarding, and delivery rate. Although you may not see a purchase immediately after sending a message, your email campaign can still be a success if you see some of these soft metrics. It at least brings people into your sales funnel.

Sending only to people who opt-inYour email newsletters should only contain email addresses from people who want to receive your email. Since people may mark unwanted emails as spam, this can impact your ability to even send emails in the future if you are flagged frequently as a spammer. (We’ll talk more about the CAN-SPAM act at the end of this guide).

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Building an email list does take time to do it ethically. If you are just getting started with building your list, you may want to partner with other businesses to launch a cross-promotion, which can enable each participant to reach the customers of the other participants, who would be unreachable under normal circumstances. You may also collect email addresses at conferences, trade shows, and other events.

Don’t remove people who are inactive

Many email newsletter providers charge additional fees when a certain number of email addresses are added to a list. While it may be tempting to remove people who do not read your email newsletter, it’s still a good idea to leave them on there as long as it’s not too costly. You may send email to recipients for six months who never open it, but one day they receive a message that has a subject line that draws them in.

Test EmailsWe have probably all received an email newsletter from a company with a follow up later in the day noting a correction - whether it’s an incorrect event date or a broken link. This is why it is so important to not overlook the step testing your message. When you think your message is ready to send, send it to yourself and several people in your office to proofread and test the links so you don’t have to send a correction after the first batch goes out.

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Include a strong call-to-actionUse buttons as your primary CTAs and use text links to re-enforce them. Buttons such as “Don’t Click Here” will entice most people to click or “Claim Your Free Trial”.

Use an email previewShow your readers the most important of your email with the email preview which is a short summary that follows the subject line when recipients see the email in their inbox. This can grab a reader’s attention and may entice them to open the message.

Include compelling imagesThese images help you sell your product or service as long as they don’t detract from your core message. You don’t want to have only images in your email newsletter and ensure you include an alt tag and title tag for your image.

Include a P.S. SectionFinish your email with a quick post-script which drives home the message. This serial position effect is the tendency of people to recall the first and last items of what they read

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Do the “Squint Test”Squint at your screen while reviewing the email newsletter as a recipient would. Can you see your CTA button clearly? If not, make the button bigger, clearer or more colorful. The Squint Test chrome extension can help you with this quality check.

Before we wrap up this guide, we want to stress the importance of understanding the The CAN-Spam Act which sets the rules for email and ensures recipients have the right to easily unsubscribe from any email they receive. Senders that do not follow those guidelines and are marked as spammers by the recipients may find all their messages going directly to the spam folder. Spam is not only detrimental to conversions; it provides a negative view of your business and can be subject to severe penalties. A single spam message can incur up to $16,000 in fines under the CAN-SPAM Act. And just because a company contracts its email marketing to an outside provider, it does not protect the company against a violation. Both the originating company and the third party provider can be held liable.

Compliance with CAN-SPAM comes down to a few simple requirements

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1. Eliminate deception in the subject line and header information. An email sent for the purpose of commercial use must identify itself clearly. This needs to include identifying information and ensure the subject line accurately represents the contents of the message.

2. Make your opt-out method clearly visible and simple. It is unlawful for a user to have to navigate more than one page past your email to opt-out of further emails. Furthermore, you have 10 days to comply with the request and no customer information can be sold, even to mailing lists after the request is made.

For more information on the CAN-SPAM Act, visit Compliance Guide for Businesses.

Conclusion

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Email marketing is a powerful tool for reaching engaged users with personalized messages. Use a good email newsletter tool, decide what to measure, be strategic about content and make it clear what you want from users to find success. The goal of all marketing efforts is to get your target audience to convert, which makes a call to action one of the most important parts of your message.

And here at Pronto, we can help you with your email marketing strategy, taking the burden off your team.