Posted by Frances Laing on Thursday 2 July 2009
Email Marketing - part 2
Once you have a decent email contact list, sending emails can be an art form in itself!
In our last blog, I explained about gathering data, and ensuring that you were maximising every opportunity to ensure you had a contact point for your clients and prospects. Today I'm having a VERY brief look at how to ensure that people actually read and engage with your emails. I cannot really sum everything up in only a couple of lines, but this hopefully will give you a couple of pointers!
In terms of actually sending out emails, be really clear as to the purpose of the email to ensure you get the response you want. If you are simply sending out an update, do you still want to encourage site traffic? Are you really pushing for a purchase? Or are you after more information? Whatever the reason, keep the text of the email as simple as possible. Too many words, just as for a website, are often a turn-off. People will skim-read on a screen no matter what the format, and quite often will not get beyond the subject line of your email, let alone read the body copy. Ensure you are engaging, but be realistic about the level of interest of your subject matter - it may be the most important thing in the world to you, but your readers have many distractions and priorities, so if your email doesn't grab their attention immediately, then you need to revisit your plans and creative approach.
Your email should still work on similar principles to good practice for web pages - once a reader has an email open, they will see only what fits onto their screen, and you can't control their screen resolution. Attractive design and layout will still win the day, providing the reader has an actual interest in the subject matter. Keep your call to action clear, and ideally towards the top of the email if possible, but don't ramble on the way to getting there. Make sure the links in your email are working too - keep testing until you are actually sure.
If you have the ability, it is a really good idea to investigate AB testing - sending out different emails to the audience to assess which one gets the best reaction. Many of the email providers have the ability to monitor this, and switch to the more successful (based on open and click-through rates) during the send itself. It may delay the send slightly, as you want to watch what happens, but the benefits become self-evident.
There are of course all the standard no-nos for an email, such as the mention of free in the subject line, which are well-documented on the web, so I won't go into them here, but pretty much every software provider will have information for you - take advantage of it, and their knowledge!
And just a final note - ensure people can opt-out of your email activity, but also make sure you can tell recipients how you got hold of their email address.
If you need help kick-starting your email activity, then by all means get in touch. I'm working on a white paper at the moment, and will let you all know when it is available.