Top 5 things to remember in a good email campaign

How important is having a solid emarketing plan for your business to reach it's goals?  Do you use email marketing to build closer relationships with your customers? Having a good email marketing plan will help you to get to your marketing goals while reducing the level of investment that you needed to make on traditional marketing mechanisms.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools available to the small businesses and a recent study indicated 54% of small businesses rated email as the top online promotions mechanism to drive customers to their websites.
Here are the top 5 things that you need to know about developing an awesome emarketing campaign...

Step1 - Understand the Language

99% of the email marketers use HTML as a medium to deliver their feature rich content to their customers. An HTML message is built like a web page and as a result you will have a rich, colourful experience with stylish fonts and images. HTML marketing campaigns normally gets a higher response rate than the more standard ones.
Getting through SPAM filters - I'm not going to elaborate on what SPAM is on this article. However if your emails gets picked up by the recipient's server as spam, your email message may never get read. As a part of your smart email marketing plan, you should ask your customers to add your default email (info@abc.com) to their address boxes. This will prevent your message from getting lost in the space.

Step2 - Creating the content

The design and the content on your email is the most important segment of an effective email campaign. Poor designs and bad formatting can lead to your customers 'unsubscribing' from your mailing list or deleting your emails without reading them.

Here are some points to consider....

• Developing a simple layout with the effective use of images, text and styles.
• Promote your brand - Incorporate your logo and the colour palate where ever possible
• Drive action - Often referred to as CTA (Call to action)
• Keeping the file size to a minimum
• Consider getting help from a professional where ever necessary.

Step3 - Choosing an email service provider

Email Service Providers (ESP) are companies that can facilitate you to use web based email marketing software to create and send email marketing messages to your customers. There offer a variety of HTML based email templates to support your content and all you have to do is to come up with the content.
Going through an ESP is a cost effective method to get your message to a larger target market and you can do your own email marketing with minimum technical knowledge.

Step4 - Optimizing your campaigns

There are 2 key elements to consider in optimizing your message - Open rate and click through rate. Both these variables are equally important in effective email marketing campaigns.
How to improve your open rates?

• Having a properly qualified database with the correct contact names
• Test your campaigns thoroughly before sending them out
• Test your campaigns across a number of platforms (Yahoo / Google / yourdomain.com)
• Customise your 'From' field (i.e - Maytech Web Solutions <info@maytechweb.com.au.)

Creating an effective subject line

The subject line is critical for achieving good open rates.
When writing a effective subject line:

• Keep it short
• Make it personal
• Add sense of urgency
• Avoid using terms like 'Free' ,'Win' ,'Specials' - Spam filters categorically hates these words
• Test for success

Step5 - Measuring Success

Ok, you have all the above steps completed and you finally sent out that much awaited email marketing campaign. How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?
To start with make sure that you clearly map out the expected outcomes of each campaign (Which should normally align with your 'call to action' statement(s)).
Use of reporting tools or software is a very handly tool to monitor / measure and fine tune the effectiveness of your campaigns and most email vendors provide basis data analysis software as a part of your subscription to get you up and running.
These tools will help you to gauge:

• The best day of the week / hour of the day to send emails
• Use of design elements (HTML / Plain Text)
• Ideal screen sizes
• Your best CTA's

The above steps has greatly helped me to run hundreds of successful email campaigns for my clients over the years. The effective use of these campaigns have increased their cash-flow / exposure in the market place as well as saving a lot of marketing dollars they would have had to spend otherwise.
Need more info on how to run a successful email marketing campaign? Visit http://www.maytechweb.com.au/