Marketing

10 Step Plan to Successful Email Marketing

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If you are new to email marketing, you may wish to read our earlier introduction into email marketing and its benefits.

Every marketing initiative needs a plan, and email marketing is no different. The following is a 10 step plan that will give you the best possible chance of creating a successful campaign.

1. Plan your email campaign strategy:
It’s important to plan your email campaign properly and give yourself time to make sure your email campaign is as effective as it can be.
When planning your email campaign, consider the following;

• Who is your target audience? To make your email relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs. This will allow you to design an email in terms of creative design and content that will engage them and encourage them to respond. You may identify more than one target audience and they may have different requirements, so you may need to factor this in.
• What are your objectives? Identify what the main aim of your email campaign is. Do you want to raise awareness of your products and services, promote an offer, invite people to an event, generate leads and sales or improve customer retention?
• What is your budget? It’s important to set a realistic budget and stick to it so you can prevent costs escalating. Work out your campaign budget by considering the return you expect to get from it by undertaking return on investment (ROI) analysis. This may be difficult if you have no historic data, but there is sector performance data and your email partner should be able to help.
• How are you going to implement and track your campaign? You might need to engage a third party to help with your campaign strategy, design and build your email for you, or to send and track your campaign. We can conduct all aspects of your email campaign for you – from list building, email address selection, to building the creative, writing the copy, sending the emails and tracking response.

2. Personalise and be relevant
Use the information you have identified about your customers to send them targeted, relevant messages that are interesting and worth reading. Segment your customer list and if possible develop specific offers for each target audience. The better your relevance and targeting the more successful your campaign will be – 80% of an emails success is down to the email being relevant – getting the right message to the right people at the right time; 20% the creative and content. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask yourself what is relevant to them? What type of information would attract their attention and get people to open, read and act on your email campaigns. Do you need to include special offers, coupons or promotions? Would they respond better to valuable information and practical tips they can use? Often the best e-newsletters include a mix of opinions, advice and sales messages or offers.

3. The subject line
An email inbox is a busy place, you won’t get much attention so subject lines are very important and keep your mail relatively short. In order to get the optimum email open rate you need to write a good, compelling subject line for your email – it’s the first thing your customer will see when they are deciding which emails to read and which to delete. Keep your subject line simple, to the point and tell the reader what to expect inside. Don’t use words like “free” which might trigger spam filters, so that you email doesn’t even arrive in the Inbox. Personalising the subject line to the recipient and including your company name works well to encourage high open rates. Remember, your audience will be ‘time-poor’ and you need to grab their instant ‘Attention’.

4. Campaign design
It is very important when designing your email campaign creative that you design a strong wire-frame template and consider these tips. You also need to be aware of issues with some email clients such as Outlook 7 which now ignores some accepted HTML coding. If you need help with your email design, we can design email creatives and templates for you. We have a variety of different email packages available to suit businesses and budgets of all sizes.

• Give readers the choice of both HTML and text versions of your email. Also include a web version.
• Logo in the upper left corner is always a strong placement.
• Make good use of the top 2 to 4 inches of your email design which is prime reading space.
• Keep your message short – keep scrolling to a minimum; and don’t use lots of different fonts and colours.
• Make your call to action prominent and clear so that your audience knows what to do.
• Make both images and text clickable and make sure you use Alt tags for your images as image blocking is common and many mail clients and mobiles will not display images as default.
• Don’t use one big giant image as this may be mistaken for spam – always include some text.
• Make sure copy is easily scannable – web readers won’t read every word.
• 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.
• Include an unsubscribe or opt-out link in the footer of every email campaign you design.

5. Channel customers through to an Action
The first hurdle is to get your customers to open and read your email – and this is the first important metric you get in your campaign reporting. Now you need to keep their interest and drive them to an action such as sending them to your home page or a basic product listing page, or whatever action you wish them to take. Tips for designing your email landing page include:

• Usually, every email campaign should have its own specific landing page or microsite designed to convert click throughs into leads and sales.
• Only use content on the landing page which is relevant to your email campaign – try not to expand to other services or include too much generic company information – you would include a link on your landing page for people to access that if they wish.
• Mirror the landing page headline copy to your email campaign so that customers can quickly see the page is relevant and make the mental connection between the email and landing page.
• Make sure the most important information is displayed where it is likely to be read (at the top and/or to the left).
• Make sure your copy is easily scannable.
• Make your call to action prominent and clear so that your audience knows what to do next and are directed to the end goal.
• Make your call to action clickable. Clickable calls to action is a very important metric in your campaign reporting, and you can drill down to see which individual click on which call to action link allowing you to follow up.

6. Test before you send
It is vital that you test your email campaign before you send it out to potential customers. First impressions count and your credibility is at risk if anything goes wrong. You should send at least 5 test emails to yourself, and to various test email accounts, before you send your email campaign out to your customer list. You should You should create a formal QA test plan that tests:

• What the email will look like in the most popular email readers (Outlook 2003 AND Outlook 7, Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Apple Mail) – set up as many test accounts with free email providers as possible and leave them in their default settings.
• That your images aren’t broken.
• That you are not using words in the subject line that would be considered spam.
• That your unsubscribe link works.
• A way 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 – there are lots available to choose from.

7. Measure campaign success
Industry research shows that 42% of organisations did not know what their return on investment (ROI) was from their email campaigns. But for those that did, 61% said that email delivers ROI of 300% or more, while 30% reported that their ROI was more than 500%, an increase on last year’s figure of 24%. So you can see, it is very important to make sure that you are monitoring key email marketing metrics such as;

• The number of emails delivered (delivery rate).
• Spam complaint and unsubscribe rates.
• The number of emails opened (open rate).
• The number of click-throughs generated (click-through rate).
• Where possible integrate with your web analytics to assess converstion rates.

Ideally, each time you send an email, you want to increase the number of people who open and act on it. Analysing your campaign results will help you do this. Email clients such as Outlook won’t help you track email results, manage unsubscribes, or process and remove bounce-backs from your list so you shouldn’t send your emails out using these. We can provide a sophisticated, fully featured yet simple platform solution to send and track all your email campaigns for you.

8. Keep testing and improving
There is no such thing as a one-size fits all step-by-step programme for optimal success, so it’s important to use your campaign results to modify and re-test your campaign – perhaps your subject line could be stronger or your landing page could be improved. Remember to only change one part of your campaign at a time so you can clearly see the effect that change has had on your results the next time you send your email. Other techniques include using A/B testing, where you run pilots with 2 different creative/content emails and assess the response rates for both of them.

9. Keep your email data lists accurate and up to date
However targeted your message and attractive your creative, your email can only be successful if you have an up to date, accurate opt-in data list to send your campaign to. A high bounce-back rate indicates your data list is out of date and a high unsubscribe rate means you aren’t sending relevant emails to customers who want to hear from you. We can help build and manage your email lists for optimum results.

10. Transaction and Integrate cross-channel and media
Transaction email is the basis of using automation in your online marketing. After the click, you start a dialogue with your client or prospect for after-sales or up sell activities. This is a highly effective form of email marketing because it truly is one-to-one based on the relationship between you and the subscriber. To be successful, you need to define your business rules, set frequency limits, and remember the importance of how lag time. When developing the business rules, create a positive experience that reinforces your brand by looking at the process through the eyes of the customer. This technique can be used for the following:

• Welcome Programs
  Create an automated, (and personalized) welcome message when someone performs an action such as a download, purchase, sales enquiry, or registration.
• Cross-Sell/Up-Sell Programs
  “Only 40% of retailers send a follow up marketing email within ten days of purchase, and very few of these are personalized”
  . You can create effective cross-sell and up-sell email campaigns using trigger-based actions based on your customers purchase profiles.
• Lead Nurture Programs
  Create action-based automated triggers for your prospects that sends mail messages about their interests based upon their website behavior.
• Customer Satisfaction Programs
  Create an automated message that is sent when a customer makes a purchase to elicit their satisfaction with the process/experience.
• Abandonment Programs
  “66% of companies in the UK fail to send emails to customers who have abandoned their shopping baskets.”
  Send an automated email when a customer abandons their shopping transaction, to establish why and offer an incentive to complete the purchase.
• Win-Back Programs If you haven’t had a customer return to your site or make a purchase in six months or more, integrate a win-back email that entices the customer

Finally, numerous studies have shown that an integrated multi-channel approach, combining email with other marketing channels, such as social media or direct mail, increases overall campaign response rates and generates higher return on investment.

Email marketing with Heart New Media is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get the right message, to the right people at the right time. We will create high-impact, professional-looking emails—that get through spam filters and render correctly in email clients. And, most importantly, you’ll build strong connections with your customers or members that lead to referrals, repeat business and enhanced loyalty.

• We can create highly visual, professional-looking email newsletters and promotions that drive more traffic to your website, landing pages or other calls to action with focused, targeted email communications
• We can help build and manage your email list: import existing customer lists, add names individually, capture contact information from website visitors or social networks, and source genuine opt-in prospects.
• With deliverability rates of 97%, we use our experience to get your message in your customer’s in-box and not in the junk-mail or spam folder.
• We use analytics to measure your email campaign results such as open-rates, click-through rates, review new subscribers, opt-out subscribers and see who opened and clicked on each link so you can tailor your follow-up communications.
• Your own dashboard to track campaigns. See how effective the campaign is with your own real-time tracking dashboard.
• Send automated or triggered personalized communications to new sign-ups or people who acted upon your campaign, via autoresponder tools.
• We help you stay connected with your customers with confidence, knowing that Heart New Media will take care of getting your email delivered and keep you CAN-SPAM compliant.

Discover how the power of Email Marketing with Heart New Media as a partner can help you better connect with your customers and strengthen your relationships with them.

If you prefer to manage your email marketing in-house, we would recommend taking advantage of Constant Contacts free 60 day trial. Founded in 1995 and with more than 300,000 customers Constant Contact, is a business channel partner of Heart New Media and a leading provider of email marketing and online survey tools for businesses, non-profits, and member associations.

 

Jim Webster
Jim Webster is founder and Managing Director of Heart New Media and a founding Director at fhios, an international customer experience research and design consultancy. His credentials include over 25 years of business success in management, digital strategy, research and design