4 Tips for a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
- Aug 8, 2013 11:36 AM
Email expert Laura Atkins provides great tips on how to ensure your email hits the inbox.
1. Know your Audience
If you know your audience you can create an engaging email marketing campaign filled with content tailored to that audience. Does your audience prefer playful or information dense emails? Finding out what works best for your audience is a worthwhile investment.
2. Email is Not Dead; it’s Evolving
Like most technologies, email is constantly evolving. It’s important to stay on top of the latest technology, filters, mail programs, and hardware & networking improvements in order to stay relevant and ensure your campaigns are a success.
3. It’s all About Delivery & Filtering
Google is leading the charge with priority mail and the new tabbed inbox. Less emphasis will be placed on IP reputation, while more emphasis will be placed on content to get to the inbox. Mail providers and clients will have more sophisticated filters that measure user interactions with mail and user preferences for content. Going back to Tip #1, this is why it’s so important to tailor content to your audience.
4. The Recipient is in Charge
Your email inbox is kind of like your living room, and marketers are coming in trying to sell you something. This is a privilege that should not be abused otherwise marketers will end up in the bulk folder, spam or blocked at the front door. Email is a unique channel in that the recipient actually has control of the marketing coming into their mailbox. Because of this control & ownership marketers have to focus more on meeting the individual needs of the recipient versus sending out as much email as possible.
Laura mentions tailoring content to fit your audience. Does anyone know of any good methods for testing what type of content your audience is looking for?
This guide provides practical advice for building effective email marketing campaigns.
3 Responses
One way to tailor content to the audience is look outside your list. Email marketing can become a circle that starts with the offer -- a ebook or report which the prospect downloads which unleashes a set of emails.The prospect sits in that circle till they become a customer or unsubscribe and fly away. What would improve the content is to look at the prospects' other social activity - follow them on Twitter, connect on Linked In or Google+. Learn more about their interests and motivations; group them with others sharing those interests and motivations and you can create more compelling content and persuasive emails.
Hi Clare - learning about your audience's social media habits sounds like a great strategy for tailoring email content - great tip!
Timing is very important as I have found. It's a good idea to divide up your E-mail addresses by 7 and send out E-mails on all days of a given week to discover which day gives your business the most response.