Getting the best from e-mail marketing

E-mail marketing is a cost effective way of canvassing various elements of your prospective audience; headlining a message; developing the proposition; and calling them to a specific action.

In many ways, the approach is no different to planning a direct mail campaign; re-soliciting to your prospect or customer database (CRM); running an advertising campaign; planning a joint venture even.

·         You need to understand who you are talking to;

·         what message you want them to take on board;

·         how you are going to say it so that they understand the benefits in their terms;

·         how you are going to headline it;

·         how might you visualise it;

·         and what you want them to do as a result of reading it. 

 

The process of applying each of the above to the selected medium then varies medium by medium. You can’t just take the advert your agency designed and paste it into an e-mail – although many do … wrong.

The content and style of your e-mail should fit the purpose. If you are writing to existing customers to announce an event – a sale perhaps – your audience is already warm to you and the style can reflect your mutual awareness. If you are renting and mailing cold data on the other hand, you are intruding on already busy screens alongside other market intruders all vying for reader time (and money).

E-mail marketing is easy to implement, low cost, scalable, accountable and most certainly worth a bash. But, even for a low volume, low-key start or test, it’s important to set it up properly. There are many ways of setting it up to do yourselves which are perfectly fine particularly if you have the time and inclination.

Set up an account up with a reputable server to take on the data, set the mailings up and action them for you. They can deal with matters of compliance, manage your unsubscribes, handle the data, and provide the analytics to help you assess the next step.

Building, renting, sourcing, selecting the data to be mailed is the next big step. It is true that because of the lower mailing costs involved in e-direct mail, you can afford to canvass greater numbers. We strongly advocate fine tuning your targeting through careful pre-selection though. If every player in the market put the effort into pre-selection, messaging would be more relevant, responses would rise (on an industry level) and spam e-mail rejection would fall.

Good news all round.

The whole concept of building an efficient database is a massive subject in its own right and one we will be covering at a later stage. (If you want advice in this area sooner though – please just ask: intime@intimeprofit.com).

Setting up and sending your e-mail is the fun part. What are you going to say? How are you going to say it? There are no real rules but, as you might expect, plenty of opinions.

 

If you are mailing a hot customer base with a fabulous offer pre-selecting the data by what you know them to have purchased before, then you can make a big, visual, simple flash  - YOUR FAVOURITE JEANS HALF PRICE. SAVE £20: CLICK HERE. Or something like this:

 

This is fine in B2C marketing.

 

There is a school of thought that in B2B, particularly when selling a business service to a broad, colder database, the closer your e-mail resembles a normal e-mail from Jane in Accounts upstairs, the better will be your Open Rates. Open Rates in e-mail marketing are like possession in rugby – if they don’t open the e-mail (possess the ball) there’s no chance of them responding (no try, no score, no point).

 

So, we do everything we can to lift the open rate

 

·         Soft, ambiguous, friendly subject (don’t mention ‘sale’ ‘offer’ ‘free’ … spam’s favourites);

·         Explicit, benefits driven opening line(s);

·         Bold, relevant development paragraph;

·         3 bullet points – max;

·         Clear, single call to action.

 

If you are going to use logos, branding, images etc, minimise the number and insert them after (yes, after) the message and call to action. Remember, not everybody has the same browser, so design your message to the lowest common denominator, a browser that does not show the pics without specific instruction to do so. If your message relies on an opening image or you are leading with brand images, your reader opens to a number of empty boxes with an x in the corner – delete.

 

 

Testing copy against copy; offer by offer; format against format is easy and cost effective in e-mail marketing. As well as your response and conversion rate you can and should measure your open rates. Even measure your unsubscribes and bounce backs. Imagine being able to drive round to the 100,000 recipients of your last direct mail campaign, look in their dustbins and count how many envelopes there were opened and unopened.

With e-mail, the analytics tells it straight. The knowledge is power and the power delivers better results each time you mail.

To receive your own 26 page E-Mail Marketing Guide, please e-mail: intime@intimeprofit.com