Best Practices For Email Marketing

Digital Marketing Published on

The use of e-mail in the business world has increased dramatically in the past two years, with many employees constantly checking e-mail throughout the day. Research by the Gartner Group shows that 42% of users check their business email even on vacation, and 23% do so on weekends. During the work week, 32% of people regularly check email throughout the day, and 53% check six or more emails a day. This is good news.

The bad news is that in 2005, an average email recipient was expected to receive 1,600 business emails and another 4,000 emails in their inbox. How do marketers deal with this problem?
success factors:

Get permission

Licensing can increase response rates. Customers should remember that they have control over the messages they receive.

Track your message.

Not only will you generate better responses to your first email, but you and your subscribers will also be more likely to read subsequent emails. The point is to avoid email fatigue. Create value

Even if you send a news or promotional message, don't send irrelevant messages. Make sure your copy is well-written.

Use personalization

If possible, segment and customize your listings based on customer profiles to add personalization beyond just thanking them by name. For example, if you have five types of clients, use motivational personalization to customize features and benefits for your clients (such as legal librarians and legal secretaries). Monitor and limit email volume and frequency.

A general guideline for frequency is one email per month to keep your customers engaged, and at most every two weeks. These guidelines only apply to marketing emails and do not include customer service or other confirmation emails you send. Other factors influence customer loyalty, such as their relationship with you and the number of other marketing messages they receive via email, advertisements, etc. If you can't handle more messages, you need to be aware of the risk of email fatigue and keep things relevant!

Enter the email into your marketing suite.

The speed, ease of response, and low production costs of email make it ideal for:

Communicate with customers (for example, by advertising).
Test Delivery
Relationship-Building Customer Service Emails
Product/service innovation
Response times can also be improved when combined with other communication tools such as PR, advertising, direct mail, or telemarketing. Email is better at providing a higher level of personalization and differentiation, although it comes at a higher cost. Email vs. direct mail

Email is good.

Speed of response: see how your marketing campaign works in hours, not weeks.
Reduce production time.
Improved testing capabilities
Personal opportunities
It may be cheaper than printing.
Ability to track and tie all activity to a single user.
Ability to expand the campaign by sending emails (tell a friend or do viral marketing).
It is possible to create a conversation with your customers.
It's the easiest and fastest way to get customers to visit your website and fill out your database (compared to collecting paper forms and business reply cards).

Weaknesses or differences:

Up to 50–80% of responses occur within 48 hours, and up to 90% of responses occur within a week. Compare that to a postal campaign, which can take up to two months to get 85% of responses, with response peaks occurring in weeks three and four. However, some marketers find that subscribers to their emails, especially newsletters, generate up to 20% more responses after two to four months.

As with postal mail, it's important to respond to incoming calls, but even more so with email. While it can be said that the importance of lists, offers, and creativity is equal for postal marketing campaigns, for email, it is always about your list and your delivery. As spam increases, your subscribers will need to be more creative to cut through the noise. Bad innovation kills reactions. Read on to learn more.

Plan your email campaign.

While email and uploading are important, you should plan for the following:

login page

Where do you want recipients to go after receiving your email? Need to design a landing page?
If you are designing a campaign, yes, you want to create a landing page for that campaign to reinforce the offer and encourage them to complete the appointment. Combine your landing page with your email, i.e., use the same design, wording, etc. Continue with the copy you started with in your email. Repeat promotions and calls to action.

pay

Where will the response be sent? Who will answer? What questions can be answered by email instead of asking customers for information?
Forward the message.

Is there information in the email that cannot be sent to the recipient, such as a special offer only for this group of customers? If so, all information must be included in the email.

Returns and exclusions

All email programs generate undeliverable messages. A soft bounce means the address is normal, but the email was skipped because the recipient's email server is busy or the email is full. If you use a service provider to send email messages, they allow four attempts within 48 hours before the email is considered unable to be sent.

A strong account occurs when the recipient's email server responds that the user is no longer at that address or is not known in that domain. The service provider will mark these addresses as undeliverable and not deliver (so you don't have to pay shipping costs). These addresses must be retrieved to update the internal database. If customers agree to pay the fee, they can send an application or postcard that asks for a current email address.

exam

Don't miss the opportunity to test campaign options to see how subscribers react to your emails. Don't base your results solely on click-through rate (unless it's just a campaign). Your results are based on the last action, usually a sale.

Here are some things you can try:

checklist
offer
subject line
Creativity: tone, content, length of copy, format
HTML and text
Landing Page: Layout, Copy
Time of Day/Week: For B2B, this is available between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Sundays and Wednesdays. For customers, if you send emails on Fridays or weekends, you may see an increase in the evening.
Email comparison test Print, email, and print together.
Email should be part of the initial sales cycle, not phone or text. Find out when customers need to talk to someone.

Email format: text

Text emails must be in ASCII format, with a minimum of 65 characters per line. This means no confidence, no understatement, etc. This is quite a bit of a layout, but with a little thought, you can create a layout that's easy to scan and read.

A URL in a text email must be on its own line to function as a hot link. Don't forget to add "http" to the full URL, for example: http://www.abccompany.com/landing_page, to ensure that all email programs will display your URL as a clickable hot link.

What you need to know about HTML

Depending on your audience, 50–90% of consumers today can read HTML. As businesses work to reduce bandwidth requirements and virus exposure, consumers are more likely to read HTML than business customers. HTML can increase response rates by up to 50%. HTML for B2B used to be frowned upon but is now generally favored. The only way to find out is to let your customers choose formats and/or test them.

The main question is:

Not everyone can read HTML, so if you want to send HTML, you have to create a text message as well. Most email marketing software programs can send multi-part messages that contain certain tags that "sniff" the email program they are using and provide the correct output (text or HTML). Messages should be small in size, under 35k, to load quickly. The graphic is actually stored on the merchant's server, so the message sent is only HTML code. However, excessive use of color, formatting, and graphics can add to the code and increase the size of the message. Some companies restrict messages by size.

Sometimes, customers prefer text, even if they can read HTML. I am happy to offer options if possible.

Creative elements for email campaigns

The following aspects are part of the email marketing campaign design and should be considered in the creative planning and production process:

subject line

Not only will your subject line increase or decrease your response rate, but it can also be used to define the tone of your email and ask for the desired action. For example, a simple relationship-building message from an online retailer to consumers before the holiday shopping season has the same content but with two subject lines. Each generates click-through rates, but look at the differences in conversion rates:

"Thank you,"June"—almost no sales

"June, if you want, we will open it." Buy two

Why? The former creates a passive environment in which the recipient does not do anything, while the latter conveys an invitation to visit the store, encouraging the "internal customer" to come check it out.

Return address:

the actual email address to which your marketing campaigns will be sent. If you use a third-party email marketing provider (also known as an ASP application provider) that does not have a specific subdomain to use, you will see their domain.

For example, if you use a vendor or service provider, the sender and return address will appear:

ABC Company [[email protected]]

If your budget allows, set up your own domain to strengthen your brand and the trust it will build, like this:

ABC Company [[email protected]]

"Sender" address display.

In your email program, this is the email sender that the recipient found. You can choose to display the official name, e.g., Company ABC, Inc., or just an email address. It is better to use a name that is real and relevant to the recipient, such as your company name, and your branding will continue: ABC Spring Offers, for example. Or try using real people's names. Be careful when using the name "sender" to avoid confusing information about spammers.

"Reply to" address: same as your return address above. It is better to have an internal opportunity to provide answers. For tracking purposes, you may need to set up a private address, but please send a reply to your customer service department. Report the offer.

For readers, you can take the time to talk about the features and benefits of your letter before you start promoting it. For email promotions, you must include the main features and benefits, offer, and call to action with the URL in the first 10 lines or two parts of the email. You want the clickable link to appear above the folder (in the preview pane) of the recipient's email program. This means it only takes a few seconds to grab the reader's attention with your email.

Subscribe/unsubscribe messages

All emails must include unsubscribe information. This is standard practice and what customers expect from a reputable company. This will remind them that you respect their privacy and increase their control over the emails they receive. As marketers, we want to be able to make sure they read our emails!

It should be easy for subscribers to unsubscribe themselves, but remember, someone will always be there to answer emails, so make sure someone is there to handle those responses.

Long copy or short copy?
There is a debate among email marketers; many say that shorter emails are better, but both have been proven to be effective, both in terms of audience and delivery. My own testing shows that longer copy increases average sales but lowers response rates.

If the copy takes longer to sell the product, use it. The more sales you complete via email, the higher your conversion rate will be. The advantage of email is that you can test your copy before switching to your entire list.

Link to your landing page

For promotional emails, add the link above the envelope; 50% of respondents read the first link. Remember to repeat the link at the end of the email; 25% of respondents click on the last link. Click the middle link for the rest.

login page

If possible, you should create a specific landing page that guides users to the actions you want them to take. There is nothing worse than a call to action in an email and a link to your website.

Why? This can be confusing for users; they only have one message in their email, and then they see another message on your home page. They will be confused by what you want to do.

If you sell a product, use a link in the email to take them to a page that only contains that product. Continue with the redesign and copy the language from the email to the landing page. Repeat the main parts of the transmission, but don't let it go again. Think of emailing a website as a passive activity.