10 Steps to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

1 www.cobbdigital.com

10 steps to a successful email marketing campaign


Email marketing for 2015

In this white-paper we examine how every business can create more powerful email marketing campaigns. Employed correctly, email marketing will contribute significant ROI to any business.

Enjoy!

James Dempster

Managing Director of Cobb Digital


1. Start with your end game

The first thing you need to realise about your email marketing campaign is that it is a campaign. Just as the dictionary defines it, it is a series of military operations intended to achieve a goal. Without a clearly defined goal and a well-conceived strategy in place to reach it, you’re essentially firing blind. Your campaign doesn’t know where it’s going, who it’s targeting or what the end game is. Furthermore, it will be impossible to measure the success of your campaign when you don’t have targets to set against actual results.

So that’s the first part of planning your email marketing campaign; setting out a clear quantifiable goal. Say you want to acquire 500 magazine subscriptions. Having the goal in sight allows you to see the forest through the trees. So even if click through rates are falling below expectation, there is no need to worry. They are just trees. The total number of subscriptions you’ve attained- they’re your forest. They are your sole indicators of a successful email campaign.

The second part of planning your email marketing campaign is to integrate it into your wider strategy. Statistics show that an email campaign in conjunction with a direct mail campaign increases its effectiveness by up to 40%. Combining an email campaign with a sales call can make that email up to 70% more effective. An SMS campaign can further support your email marketing.


2. Optimise for mobile - it’s no longer optionalNearly half the people in the UK use a smartphone.

That’s around 30 million. And it’s estimated that around 51% use that smartphone to check their emails. If those emails are not designed for mobile consumption, they will be promptly deleted. By 80% of users, according to Litmus mobile open statistics.

So how do you ensure that your emails are not discarded quicker than spam? Mobile optimisation.

Not only is it increasingly vital to the success of your email campaign but 58% of email marketers are not designing for it, giving you an automatic advantage over your competitors. The brands who succeed are not just the ones who listen to what their consumer wants; they listen to what they do.


Mobile optimisation guidelines

1. Fonts should be larger so as to facilitate legibility; 14px minimum for body copy and an 18px minimum for headlines.

2. Use ‘safe’ fonts that will be available on all mobile devices such as Arial, Helvetica, Courier, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, Tahoma or Trebuchet MS.

3. Not all devices fix the screen to fit your email so it’s important that you adjust the width accordingly. 320px to 500px is recommended, although this should be tested on alternate smartphones to ensure the email is received coherently in both.

4. To avoid slow loading of emails, keep images to a minimum. All images that are used should be the smallest possible file size.

5. Use a single column layout for ease of reading.

6. Keep enough space between buttons and hyperlinks so that users won’t suffer the fate of ‘fat finger’ and click onto the wrong links.

7. The number of characters shown on the subject line of an email varies from 27 characters on an android to 41 on an iPhone and 42 on a windows phone so try to keep your subject line below 50 characters.

8. Keep email copy clear, concise and to the point.

9. Maximise the impact of your CTAs by using buttons rather than hyperlinks which are more user friendly for touchscreen devices. Bold text in white space will highlight them further.

10. Use your ESP to monitor and analyse the number of email opens from a mobile device. You should be able to see the percentage of email opens from a mobile, and the mobile devices which were used to open them; iPhone, Android, etc.


3. If At Once You Don’t Succeed…Resend to Non-Opens

In life, you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. But in the world of email marketing, you do. It’s called the resend to non-opens tool. And it can help you reach the goals you set out at the start of your campaign. If you didn’t hit your targets with the first round, all you need is a little persistence and the value of hindsight. There are myriad reasons as to why recipients failed to open your email.

Possible Reasons include:

• Bad timing: It stands to reason that emails sent between Friday-Sunday are the most likely to be ignored. But sending out an email on a Monday can be equally as damaging. People are already inundated with emails from the weekend and will likely be too busy to respond or even listen to what you have to offer them. Midweek days have the best open rates, as do daytime hours. • Lost in the mail: If your email has got hedged in between twenty others, there is every chance it will be missed. But it doesn’t mean the second one is destined for the same fate.• Unappealing subject line: Revise your subject line and ask yourself, is it clear? Is it concise? Does it offer something of value?


4. Copy- Short & Sweet

Email open rates mean next to nothing without click through rates to push conversions home. If you’re getting high open rates but aren’t succeeding in converting, the problem is likely in your email copy.

Consumers are not looking to be wined and dined in an email. They don’t have the time. They want to know how opening your email benefits them and they want it revealed after a brief scan, not a 200-word product description.

Say you want to promote bikinis for summer. You start an email campaign to boost sales.


‘Get a head start on summer with 20% off this season’s bikinis’ is likely to be much more effective than ‘We have a wide range of bikinis at 20% off in a variety of shapes, colours and sizes to suit all tastes and body shapes.’

The actionable ‘Get a head start’ in the first sentence creates a sense of urgency that’s missing in the second. Also, it implies benefit rather than blandly stating features. You’re saying by taking advantage of this early-bird offer, you are making a smart financial choice. You are saving on something you’re going to need soon anyway. Checking out these bikinis is worth your time. You can take the call to action further by installing a highlighted CTA button, especially effective for mobile recipients. The CTA button should be obvious on the page. Make it stand out by using a bright, contrasting colour. It should be large, but not garish.

Finally, give your email a personal touch. Talk to the recipient directly, in second person. ‘You’ is not only a powerfully persuasive word. It’s a humanising one. You won’t under-mine your professionalism by talking to recipients like real life human beings. On the contrary, this is how you earn their trust. Imagine you’re looking for positive customer feedback on an eBook. Beginning the email ‘Hi Mark, You recently bought our eBook series on Do’s and Don’ts of Content marketing. How was it?’ is significantly more inviting and engaging than one that reads

‘Dear Sir, We are aware of your recent eBook purchase of the six part series: The Do’s and Don’ts of Content Marketing. Please review your purchase by following the link below. ’


Relevancy is also important. The more relevant you can make your email to the recipient, the more likely you are to hold their attention. Email list segmentation targets specific brackets of your email list based on what you know about them. So an estate agency might send out an email about an open house in St Albans to only those who have expressed an interest in living there. Targeted emails had an impressive 39% open rate according to an emarketer performance review.

So to summarise:

• Clear, concise copy that gets to the point• Strong CTA• Personal, relevant copy


5. Subject Line- Get to the point!

Subject lines directly affect open rates, which affect click through rates, which affect conversions. So that small line of text, those 50 characters or less (if you’re doing it right) are equally as important as any other step on your campaign trail. But don’t pin all your hopes on one line. Try out a few different ones using the tools available to you, such as subject line selector and subject line tester. These tools will analyse open rates to gauge the most popular one. With regards to the copy itself, avoid using spammy words like ‘free’ ‘limited time’ ‘Act now’ words that sound like they come from an infomercial at 3 a.m. Overuse of Cap locks, symbols , emoticons and exclamation points have the same undesirable effect. Choose actionable words instead, words that indicate to the reader what they can expect to get from the email.

‘Make a full Sunday roast for under a tenner.’ ‘Show her you’re sorry with WINE. Lots of it.’ ‘Get a sneek peek of Kate Moss’s new Topshop collection.’

It’s clear from the above what you are getting from the email. Tricking your au-dience into opening an email with a misleading bait offer like offering 50% off footwear only to reveal later that it only applies to last season’s espadrilles will only convert into unsubscribes. Another mistake some marketers make is to try too hard to be witty or clever. If you can be witty without sacrificing clarity, test it out but if there is a shadow of doubt in your mind as to whether the message will be clear or not, the chances are it’s not clear enough.


6. Testing…1, 2, 3…

Tin openers work well. I mean, they serve their purpose. But there’s a reason why you pay a little more in the supermarket for a tin of beans with a pull tab. Because the pull tab works better than a tin opener. It outperforms the tin-opener in almost every respect. You know where I’m going with this, right? Without continually testing for alternative ways of optimising performance, we would spend our whole lives thinking tin-openers were the best solution to opening a can of beans.

If we conduct email marketing campaigns without testing different approaches, we assume, either out of arrogance or laziness, that the route we’ve taken is the best one. And more often than not, it will prove untrue. Testing plays a central role in creating the most effective email marketing campaigns; making the money spent on them more than worth it.


Means of testing

• Use the Inbox Preview tool as a preparation test to see how your email will look in every format before sending to recipients. By taking this step, you can rectify any mistakes until all emails look as intended.

• Create two messages, each with a different call to action and use your ESP’s A/B split content testing tool to gather information on which message is proving more successful.

• Never forget to use a Spam Checker before sending your email. This will warn you of any content in your email that could be construed as spam (an instant killer of your campaign if ever there was one.) Delay sending until all warnings have been heeded.

• Enable analytics to monitor your recipient’s actions once they’ve read your email, ultimately showing you where you went right and where you need to improve.


7. Expand your Social Circle

Social media and email needn’t be mutually exclusive marketing strategies. In fact, they work best as a team. Integrating your social media strategy into your email campaign can be an effective way of increasing subscriptions and building a strong social media presence. You can do better than installing social media icons on all your email headers. Offer your email list an incentive to like your page on Facebook. Airport transfer company Clicktransfers asked their email subscribers to like and share their Facebook page to be entered into a draw for a 3 day trip to Iceland. The winner would be announced once the page had reached 10,000 likes. It was such a success, they reopened the competition, this time announcing a winner when they reached 20, 000.

Facebook and twitter are traditionally the best channels for growing email subscriptions.

Share your newsletter with fans and followers and use Facebook’s data capture forms to collect data on your followers, data which can be fed into your ESP and used to grow your lists. Information is power in marketing and nowhere is it more readily available than on social media.


8. Alt Text

Text and imagery usually go hand in hand in advertising and marketing, but email is decidedly different. Because images are sometimes disabled, in some cases by default, marketers must always remember to include alt text. So even when the email recipient can’t see the image, they can read the message it is trying to convey. There is more you can do to optimise your alt text than blandly describing what is in the image.

• Persuade recipients that the images in your email are worth enabling e.g.‘Enable images to see what Vogue called ‘the IT dress of summer.’ • Use styled alt text for more captivating headlines• Use coloured boxes to break up images (or blank columns as the case will be.)• Avoid emails which solely depend on images to get the message across.


9. Reporting

It’s baffling that so many marketers are clueless when it comes to the results of their email marketing campaign. 42% couldn’t even tell you the return on investment achieved through their campaigns, according to a report carried out by Econsultancy. It’s like we were saying earlier about testing; unless we are willing to entertain the possibility that there may be a way we can improve upon our past performance, we’ll never execute the most successful campaigns. We’ll never learn from our mistakes or find new innovative ways to market better. Reports are your hindsight. They’re your 20/20. So look at them, and look at them often.

Reporting tools at your disposal:

• Heat Maps • Device Reporting• Google Analytics


10. Integrate your software

Integrating email marketing with all other software like your CRM system strengthens your campaign and gives it a better chance at success.

Compartmentalising serves an important purpose in any company, maintaining structure and organisation. But while departments are split between specialised roles, they are united by common ones. So when integration serves the common goal, all departments openly collaborate and share information.

This sharing of information in email marketing allows marketers to gather more data on their customers, thus providing the information necessary to create more relevant, personalised emails that recipients will be more likely to open and respond to.


Thank you!

Well that’s email marketing in a nutshell.

If you follow all of the advice in this white paper you should get some cracking results.

If you’d like to discuss this, or any online issue get in touch with me or the team by emailing [email protected] or calling 01273 208 913.

Thanks again

James

10 Steps to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Marketing

Transcript of 10 Steps to a Successful Email Marketing Campaign