Email marketing today is one of the primary ways businesses
keep in touch with partners and customers. However, managing your email
marketing can be time consuming and stressful. Trying to stay up to date with
the constant changes in your email marketing list can be very daunting. Also, there
are the challenges involved in creating and sending effective email messages.
How do you make sure that people will read it? How do you get them to reply?
How do you know how many recipients have replied? The good thing is that you
don't have to do all this on your own. A cloud-based company that specializes
in b2b communications can make your work a lot simpler — and your
campaigns more effective.
Components of a successful email:
Subject line: Though it may seem like just a small part of
your email marketing campaign, it is actually one of the most important ones.
About 40% of the decision of a recipient to open an email depends on the
subject and sending address. It won't do you much good if they do not open the email. Therefore, it is
imperative to spend some time discussing the subject line and making sure that
it is accurate and effective.
Call to Action: How compelling and interesting recipients
find your call to action will determine the other 40% of reply to your marketing
campaign. A call to action is an offer you make to the recipient to make them
respond. It could be a technical document or an opportunity to sign up for a
free webinar. Or it could be “Please email me at….” Or “Please contact me at…”
or “Register for the event at….”
The best call to action in marketing via email is that which contains links in the email. This allows you to track the response to the email automatically and see how well your call to action is doing.
ALSO READ: Creating Your First Email Marketing Campaign
Content: The images and text in your email should be useful
and informative to recipients. Email marketing texts should be concise and well
written. While recipients anticipate that an email newsletter should be fairly
lengthy, they expect other types of email to get to the point as quickly as
possible. If your email is very lengthy, the reader will just stop reading -
perhaps before they get to the important information.
Visual appeal: Any images you include in your email may seem
like a no-brainer, but they are important to make your email visually
appealing. Comments on photos are one of the first things your subscribers will
read in an email, so they contain a lot of call to action. You also want your
emails to be well-organized, attractive, and visually appealing. You should be
able to draft nice looking emails for your clients in either plain text or html
- because some subscribers will only read emails in just one format. Good email
marketing firms will have tools and templates to help you create attractive
email messages.
Avoid Spam: If your emails are flagged as spam, they will not
reach your recipient. Worse still, it could be a CAN-SPAM records violation. To
avoid getting caught in a spam filter or being sent to a spam folder, make sure
the title and subject line are accurate. Include a valid unsubscribe link.
Certain words are more likely to trigger spam filters; you must know what they
are so you can avoid them. Spam labels can harm the reputation of your business
and the acceptance rate of campaigns in the future.
Features of a successful email marketing campaign:
You've created a fun, engaging, and visually effective email that you want to send to your email marketing list via your email marketing software. What now? You can take the time and effort to send it yourself. You can also hire a company to do it for you. Such companies greatly simplify the process. They will maintain your subscriber list, and delete unsubscribe requests and invalid addresses. They will provide easy-to-use templates that will help you create attractive emails. They will keep track of responses to your email campaign. They will also record recipients who opened emails. They can monitor your campaign results so you can have more effective email marketing campaign the next time.
ALSO READ: Do you Really Need Email Marketing?
Subscriber management: If you always send emails to invalid
addresses and you don't honor your unsubscribe requests, the deliverability of
your emails and your reputation could be damaged. Your email marketing tool
should automatically delete unsubscribed emails and invalid addresses - along
with any contacts that should be blocked globally. But you also need email
marketing software that examines the emails that bounce and finds out the
reason for such. Sometimes technical issues can be addressed so that the email
can be successfully resent.
Targeting recipients: If you send a reminder email, usually
you will send it to everyone who subscribed to the first list. What if you
could send it to the subscribers who didn't reply to the first email? This way
you don't have to bother the people who have responded already! Or what if you
could only send emails to subscribers who recently visited your website? Anyone
would want an email marketing tool that can provide that level of targeting? By
monitoring the behavior of your recipients and designing your email marketing
campaign accordingly, your chances of success will be greatly increased.
Saving emails - Since you likely already have a list of email
addresses, you'll need an email marketing tool that allows you to easily import
your list into their service. The email marketing service should also have the
ability to create a database with information about these addresses. They
should provide simple ways for interested persons to add their email to your
list of subscribers, for example by using an optin form on your website.
Reporting - Every campaign is an opportunity to learn more
about your customer base. But if you don't collect the information you won't
learn. Find an email marketing solution that will generates a detailed report
for you. You need to know how many subscribers responded to the call to action
in your email, how many people read your email, how many bounced back, how many
unsubscribed, and if any were caught in the spam filter. You need reports that
have the flexibility to show you data for days, weeks, months, years, etc. This
information is invaluable in helping you plan your marketing strategy and
mastering your next email marketing campaign.
Spam - You need a service that complies with all regulations
of CAN-SPAM and adheres to best practices. Go for a service that tests all
elements of your email (title, html markup, tags, links) for spam triggers. You
need a service that can detect the likelihood of a spam flag and suggest
necessary changes that need to be made. A good email marketing tool can also
log the number of messages that have been held in spam filters and help you
avoid that occurrence in the future.
Design: You need an email marketing software that will help
you design effective and engaging messages. Look for one that has templates for
newsletters and other types of email that you can customize for your business. If you need to design in another
program, you need an email marketing tool that will allow you easily paste
emails created in MS Frontpage, Word, or other html editors.
Find a service that is intuitive, easy to use and offers WYSIWYG editor. So you
know that whatever you see on the screen is exactly what your recipients will
get.
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