Tips to successful email campaign

The times have completely changed comparing to those when email marketing was initiated and only started to institutionalize its old-school. Nowadays email marketers have to deal with different kind of issues that take place in every day changing world of expectations, technology laws, etc. We did spend our time to present you the compilation of tips and hint, most of them you might already have used during your practice, but still it would not be a bad idea to pay your attention on it once again.

1. Permission is required. While sending unsolicited email messages you irritate your subscribers. This may lead to decrease of appreciation of your brand name, which will be considered less trustworthy or not trustworthy at all. Collecting the email addresses with already pre-checked boxes is not a quite fear way of building your email marketing list. This method presupposes you make the chose that should be done by your subscriber, but isn’t done because he or she is too lazy to uncheck the box, if the real desire is not to subscribe. Use a double opt-in option, so that your list would be free of future spam complaints.
2. Sender reputation. Never send too many email messages, too often and to too many bad addresses, you may be blocked by as ISP. The same problem may arise if you produce too many spam complaints.
3. List “hygiene”. Keep your list clean of bad email addresses, which are likely to harm the campaign’s performance and reputation.
4. Enter a “whitelisting”. Usually some ISP’s distinguish common senders from spammers. Thus it would be a good preventive action to contact your ISP and request to be included in its “whitelisting”. Such measures can guarantee your email message will reach your receiver, but not will be forwarded to his or her junk or bulk mail.
5. Delivery test. Before the message would be sent to your subscribers it should be carefully tested. It often happens that HTML emails full of pictures and graphics may not be viewed properly in all email clients and ISP-based email services. Also pay attention to your HTML code, so that you won’t be blocked because of mistakes in it.
6. Tend to trust. Establishing truthful subscriber/customer – email marketer relationship is a one of the crucial moments in the whole email campaign building. A huge part of success depends completely on subscribers’ trust, the same as without trust you will never get the estimated feedback. Without trust you will also feel the lack of permanent subscribers who would be more likely to leave your emailing.
7. Recipient’s privacy. Always pay much attention on subscribers’ privacy, make them feel protected and confident in your actions. Your every email should contain a brief description of your privacy policy and a link on its full version.
8. Satisfy the needs of your subscribers. You should email only relevant email messages, and send them with right frequency and in right format. If your subscribers doesn’t get what they want, they will start find it somewhere else, as a result leaving your list.
9. Recipient’s data managing. Your subscribers always should have access to their subscriptions. They also should be able to contact you and have the possibility to forward the message to others, the same as get extra information if needed. The best way to let subscribers do all it is to include a special section at the end of each email.
10. Testing again. Never forget to test. You should test everything you want people to do or you want it to work correct. You should make identify of what attributes work the best in emails.
11. Email Value Proposition (EVP). Your recipient may get a lot of emails every day, so you have to make everything the subscriber would know the message worth to be read.
12. Consider list segmentation. Use the personal data you’ve collected on sign-up to segment your list so that your email marketing campaign would be more targeted. You also will be able to monitor demographical tendencies.
13. Consider personalization. The data provided by your subscribers should be used to make email messages you send more relevant and each subscriber oriented.
14. Design & Format of message. Bad format and improper design makes it very difficult to navigate your email message, which leads to sing-outs or spam complaints. It is very important to test your messages on different email programs and Web services.
15. Inbox design. The subscriber should be able to distinguish your email in his/her full inbox. Write your company name in the “from” line and design a catchy “subject” line. Prepare your email message for preview panes.
16. Maintaining deliver value. People are likely to change their preferences from time to time. so to make your email messages up-to-date try to survey your subscribers about their likes and create your messages, so that they satisfy their needs.
17. List quality. It is more important to have the list of good quality rather to have a big list, but full of bad mails and emails that will bounce.
18. Other marketing channels. To increase the impact of your email marketing campaign try to use other marketing means, such as TV, direct mail, etc.
19. Goals. Instead of concentrating efforts on getting good metrics, you should focus on goals.
20. Use email marketing software. It will help you create highly personalized email messages, segment your list and send specific emails to subscribers based on their email actions.
21. Never save on resources. Some marketers chose to use email marketing because it is cheaper than usual means of advertising and proportion. Still this way demands quite high investments to be really effective.
22. The laws. Such countries as US, most European countries, Asian countries and Australia have their own acts that regulate email marketers activity and protect subscribers from insulting actions from the side of unconscientious email marketers and spammers.

Try to follow these hints to create your email marketing campaign and you will definitely be surprised by noticeable positive effect.

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 : Email Marketing : No Comments