By Stephanie Phillips
Whether you’re an email marketing novice or a seasoned professional, there are several aspects to your campaign that you will want to give extra focus to help ensure success. Here are five tips you can employ to help seal the success for your next email marketing campaign.
1. Spend time on the offer
Even the most creative subject lines, beautiful graphics and snappy copy aren’t going to make your email successful if your offer isn’t attractive to your recipients.
Be sure to spend time considering your email offer. Think about what drives your customers to make their purchases. Are they motivated by price, experience or benefits? Is there more than one way to present your offer? If so, which will be the most attractive to your clientele?
One of the best ways to determine which offer is most effective for your email campaign is to perform a test. Break down your email list into four parts: three 5 percent segments to test three separate offers and one 85 percent segment to send the winning offer.
If you are worried about the time it will take to test your offer, don’t be too concerned. Email campaigns have quick results, so you will know which offer is the winning offer within a couple of days.
2. Balance your graphics and text
Be careful when creating your email. You don’t want to be too graphic heavy. This is for several reasons. First, you want to ensure that your email will load quickly. Nowadays, people have a lot of email to sift through each day. They don’t devote a great deal of time to each email, so if it takes several seconds to load, they will pass up your email to get on to the next one in their box.
Second, many people now read their emails on their phones. If they are subscribed to receive the HTML version of your email, they may be unable to see the graphics that you have included. If it is graphic heavy, they may miss the text portion of your message, making it an ineffective email.
3. Personalize the message
Whether it’s adding their name to the subject line or geographic location to the text, you want to make the email as personal as possible.
People sign up for quite a bit of newsletters and promotional emails so they can get good deals. But, with all of the spam that is in circulation, they sometimes forget which emails they requested. Using names and other personal information will help demonstrate that your email is a trusted email.
4. Don’t forget to “Forward to a Friend”
You will want to make it easy for your email recipients to forward your messages to their friends and family members. This will help increase the revenue brought in from your email campaign, and, more importantly, grow your customer base.
Just about every email marketing platform provides its users the ability to include a “forward to a friend” link. By incorporating this in an easy-to-see area of the email, you will help boost the number of times your email is forwarded. These features also provide you with tracking ability to see how many times the email is sent on.
With the growing popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, it is also a great idea to include sharing and “like” buttons for your recipients to use. This is another component that is being incorporated into many of the popular email marketing platforms.
5. Test thoroughly
Always, always, always send test emails to yourself and a couple of other trusted individuals before sending your campaign. It is critical that you test every link and button to make sure they go to the correct location.
Also, you will want to check spelling and grammar, as well as how the email loads in various email platforms. Be sure to send test emails to several email services, including gmail, yahoo and hotmail. Check your list to see if there are other high ranking providers on your list.
Stephanie is a business blogger at CreditDonkey. She helps entrepreneurs find business credit cards for new businesses and growing ones.
