Emailing Strategies
The ultimate aim of email marketing is to deliver a relevant message to a subscriber at an appropriate time, resulting in clicks to your web site and an increase in sales.
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It’s more or less impossible to get it right first time. You’ll find countless blogs telling you one way or another is best, but every audience is different.
You need to get to know your audience, their buying patterns, their preferences.
How they react over email may be completely unlike how they act over any other channel.
So you make your best guess, send out some initial mailings and from the results, tune the content to match the recipients better next time.
Focus your efforts
There is no substitute for paying attention to the numbers (which we will give you, in abundance!).
For example it’s common for messages to be viewed with images off (it’s the default setting for nearly all email programs).
Those recipients will not see an image-heavy design as you intended, and it’s not possible to know if they have even viewed your messages (unless they click, which we report on), yet they probably account for at least 70% of an average list.
Keep it simple
A danger is to overstrategise and overdesign, putting in too much time and effort for the return on investment.
It’s important to retain perspective and strike the right balance, otherwise you’re wasting the low-cost and high-ROI that email marketing delivers.
- Keep your messages simple.
- Avoid graphics-heavy layouts.
- Use a straightforward subject.
- Have a clear call to action.
- Keep at it – don’t let your list go stale
Get Creative
Of course there are some clever approaches which will improve results because people are curious. A/B testing has its place, but the difference between, for example, two similar carefully-worded subject lines is usually not as great as some might hope – and the same mix of subjects on a different day might produce different results. There’s little point in chasing a 0.1% difference between subject lines when 70% of a list is not responding at all.
Sometimes audience reaction is very difficult to predict – We once had a customer accidentally send out a mailshot with ‘test’ as the subject; they were very upset about this until we pointed out that their open and clickthrough rates had more than doubled relative to all the previous subject lines they’d agonised over!
Sometimes doing something unexpected can reap dividends.
Use Smartmessages for:
- Sending newsletters
- Building brand loyalty (product launches, announcements, competitions, news updates)
- Notifications of important changes in a site or service
- Creating, cleaning and strengthening your customer data
- Sales promotions and special offers
- Data collection (expanding customer information)
- List building, generating more target customers from existing databases
- Instant response emails following sales (confirmation, cross selling, after sales)