Email marketing can realise a very favourable ROI. Below are five tips that are sure to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and, subsequently, the ROI.
Get Your Message in Front of Subscribers
Surely if we send an email campaign, our subscribers will receive our message? Unfortunately there are many reasons that your subscribers may not even see your campaign. In fact, if one out of three contacts open your email, in most industries that will be a very good result. A spam filter is a common reason that your message may not be seen by the recipient. Even if you’re an ethical sender your content may still be identified as spam.
There is a once-off task you can perform to increase the number of your email campaigns that are assumed spam messages. Authenticating your domain is highly recommended and will increase your deliverability.
Can Your Recipients Read Your Content?
All too often I get asked by people as to why their email campaigns have a good open rate but the conversion rate is low. When I view the email message it is immediately obvious as to the cause; almost the entire message is composed of an image (or multiple images).
Although images can add alot to an email campaign you should always test what your campaign looks like if you don’t load images. Many email readers and email services don’t load images automatically for viewers; this is a setting that we, as the sender, cannot override. In my Mailchimp classes I show participants some of the email campaigns sent by major Australian retailers; I open the campaigns in Microsoft Outlook with the display of images turned-off. In most cases it is very difficult to even see who sent the campaign because almost all content is composed of images.
Your Content Is a Teaser
Please don’t include long essays and masses of information in a single campaign. Nowadays email campaigns get the best open and click rates when they are short and sweet with a single (or just a few) ‘stories’. In fact, if you have too much information in a single email campaign some email services (e.g. Gmail) will clip your content. You may view best-practice for an email campaign layout that I’ve previously described.
Subject Lines Matter
Your subject line has a direct relationship with the number of people that will open (and read) your campaign. Successful subject lines are usually to the point and describe the benefit of the recipient reading the email message. If there isn’t a relationship between your subject line and your content then people will unsubscribe from your communication.
Send Relevant Information
There are times that you may want to send a message to your entire list of contacts. Oftentimes it may be better to segment your list; send your specific message to those that will be mostly interested in the message. For example, if you have an offer for people in Sydney alone, there is no point in sending that offer to people in Melbourne, Brisbane and so on. Sending content that doesn’t relate to contacts is a sure way to have people unsubscribe.
The tips above will get you better results from your email marketing. I hope that they help your marketing.
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