Introduction to email marketing

Understand the basics of email marketing

April 2013

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Aim of email

1 email = 1 goal!!!• Informative email

• Generate brand awareness

• Generate leads

• Generate sales

• Tracking, tracking, tracking

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Tracking your results with Google URL builderhttp://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578

Production should insert a tracking code so that every email is tracked and clients can measure success of campaigns

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Best Practices

Sender name must be easily identified

Optimize your subject line

A good subject line = lots of opens

http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/best-practices-in-writing-email-subject-lines

Avoid “spam” words (e.g. Free, Win, Special offer) and capital letters

Make it short and to the point

Maximum of 45 characters

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Best Practices

Do not use only pictures as they are likely to be blocked by most mailers as they cannot scan what the email contains

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Best Practices

It is recommended to use text and pictures

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Have a clear call to action

Best Practices

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Use bullets points

Users scan emails in less than 3 seconds before deciding if they read the content or not, so be short, concise and highlight the important keywords

Emails don’t generate conversions, they first need to generate clicks before generating conversion

Best Practices

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Best Practices

Good examples (of FRIENDly emails):

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/02/15/email-newsletters-guidelines-and-examples/

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Best Practices

The future? Responsive design

http://blog.lyris.com/us/email-inspiration-six-great-responsive-email-designs/

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Target your audience

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Segment your target list

Why?

Whenever possible it is recommended to segment your list, the more targeted you are the better your response rate

Don’t worry about the total number of recipients, worry about the possible number of conversions

You can segment: By demographics (geographical area, job title, company name, etc.) By behaviour (opened a previous email but did not take action, etc.)

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Segmenting with Neolane

You can segment (include or exclude) by:

Job title, department, industry, company name

Country, postcode

Users that have clicked, opened, not clicked or not opened previous emails

Mix several subscriptions and de-duplicate users

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Be extra careful with sending frequency

Why? Every industry reacts differently to emails, but they all have one thing in common: they already receive too many emails. Commercial pressure should be taken into account when booking a slot for a client

When? Time of the day and day of the week have an importance on the responsiveness. NEVER SEND TWO EMAILS THE SAME DAY.

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Analyse and measure your results

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Delivered emails, opens, clicks, conversions

Classic metrics (bad ones):

• Unique open rate = unique opens / emails delivered

• Unique click rate = unique clicks / emails delivered

New metrics (good ones):

• Delivery rate = emails delivered / emails sent

• Click to open rate = unique clicks / unique opens

• Conversion rate = total number of conversions / emails delivered

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Email sent to 20,500 users

Delivered to 20,000 users

Delivery rate = 97.5%

Open rate = 15%

Click rate = 5%

C2OR = 33%

Conversion rate = 0.1%

3,000 unique opens

1,000 unique clicks

20 conversions

Delivered emails, opens, clicks, conversions