Effective Email Campaign

Email marketing is one of the best ways to generate a quick buzz for your business.  

1. Target your audience / Mailing list:

If you really want to generate a response from your email campaign, you need to have a solid email list. Your goal is to get your email into the inbox of your target audience.

• Make sure the list includes contacts that are in your target market.

• If you haven't developed an email list of your customers, now is a good time to start. Add a link to your website, where visitors can sign up for "special notices" or a newsletter.

• The better your targeting the more likely your campaign will be a success - 80% of an emails success is down to the targeted list; 20% the creative.

• Create custom messages for different lists of email addresses.

2. Decide on what you’re offering:

When someone signs up to an email list or newsletter, they do so in the expectation of receiving something that you offer of great value or useful to read or use.

• Find out what your target market wants.

• You need to deliver the required content that others want to read.

3. The subject line:

You need to come up with a creative subject line that will inspire customers to click on the email and open it up. "Email recipients were significantly more likely to open messages that used short subject lines (24% opens for 35 or fewer characters) compared to 17% for longer subjects.

• Using the words "you" and "your" in the subject line actually help to inspire customers to open the email.

• Approach asking a question, so that the reader opens the email to find out the answer.

• It can be a problem statement that refers to them directly and they will be more inclined to open the mail.

• Don’t use words like “free” which might trigger spam filters.

4. Get right to the point:

Time is valuable to your customers. You need to give them extra time by keeping your email marketing campaign short and sweet.

• Provide them with a link to your web site where they can get more information.

• Offer a phone number or email ID so they can get in contact with you.

• A quick “marketing slogan” will work the best for an email campaign.

5. Design of your email:

You want them to open your email and say "wow" once they are looking at your marketing piece.

• Keep your marketing piece clean.

• Keep the image size small so it doesn't take much time to download it.

• Offer more than one way for the recipients to enter your website.

• Make both images and text click-able.

• Use white space.

• Keep scrolling to a minimum.

• Use a font that is large and easy to read.

• Don’t use lots of different colors.

• Put the most important information (headline, hook, or logo) in the upper left-hand part of the page, our eyes naturally go there first.

• Give readers the choice of both HTML and text versions of your email.

• Make good use of the top 2 to 4 inches of your email design which is prime reading space.

• Don’t try to make your emails too fancy with Flash as it can be removed by anti-virus programs trying to protect email programs getting infected.

• Many email programs block pictures to help prevent the sender from identifying the recipient's computer. The email should still be comprehensible if some of the pictures are blocked.

6. Design of your landing page:

• Always make sure the email and landing page is designed to reach your target audience and to talk to them on their level.

• Every email campaign should have its own specific landing page.

• Mirror the landing page headline copy to your email campaign so that customers can quickly see the page is relevant.

• Make sure the most important information is displayed where it is likely to be read (at the top and/or to the left).

7. Make your audience feel safe:

People can spot SPAM from a mile away and know the dangers of it.

• All of your emails should have a familiar look with your logo and be identifiable by the subject line.

• Send your emails the same time each month, week or day, and be consistent so your customers know when to expect the message.

• Never ask for personal information via an email.

• Use an identifiable sender name; customer may not want to open mail from "customer care" or "special offer" use your company name, for example "SenDesignz, Admin".

• Make it very clear in your privacy policy that you will not share your customer's personal information.

• Encourage them to ask questions freely and reply them to have good impact on their minds.

• Always ensure there is an unsubscribe button or hyperlink in the content so that your mail is perceived as more professional and law abiding.

• The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 states that marketing emails must include the sender's physical address, opt-out instructions and it must be clearly labeled. Deceptive subject lines and false headers are prohibited.

8. Test before you send:

First impressions count and you don’t want anything to go wrong.

• You should send at least 5 test emails to yourself, and to all your test email accounts.

• Test as what the email will look like in the most popular email readers (Outlook, Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Apple Mail).

• Test that your images aren’t broken.

• Test that your email won’t be considered spam.

• Test to ensure that your email doesn’t have any of the obvious words or phrases that mean it is likely to get automatically sent to the junk mail folder is to use a free spam checker.

9. Measure campaign results:

Ideally, each time you send an email, you want to increase the number of people who open and act on it. Analyzing your campaign results will help you do this.

• Measure the number of emails delivered (delivery rate).

• Measure The number of emails opened (open rate).

• Measure the number of click-through generated (click-through rate).