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Top Tips for email marketing success

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Most marketers measure the success of their email newsletters in terms of the amount of emails opened and the clicks they generate. As a general rule, these statistics tell us how well an email newsletter is performing.

If your email newsletter marketing isn't going as well as you'd planned, here are some suggestions to help you to improve your email marketing efforts and the success of your email newsletters

Frequency of emails

Are you bombarding your customers with too many emails? This is a common problem where you have seen open rates and clicks drop over a period of time.

Content of email marketing messages

Are your offers and articles appealing enough? How does your content compare to the competition? Regular good quality content will help to keep your readers interested and your open rates up.

Relevancy of your email newsletters

This is the biggest problem with most email newsletters and another reason why you may see results drop over time. If the emails you send through have nothing relevant for a recipient why would they click-through?

Relevancy can be resolved in a number of ways including: sending to segments of your database each time rather than the whole list, using past email behaviour to determine interest and using tailored content blocks or dynamic content by using a solution such as Maxemail.

Email deliverability

Quite simply if your emails are not getting into the inbox or being labelled as junk it does not take a genius to work out that fewer people will open the email and even fewer will click-through.

Take proactive steps by ensuring your email provider is white listed and not blacklisted and that your email has been scored in a spam checking tool. If you are sending from an in-house system you may find that an outsourced email newsletter software solution will improve your deliverability.

Rendering of email messages

Many email newsletters land in our web-based email clients inbox looking mangled. Not only does it look unprofessional it is also difficult to read and hence less likely for the reader to be able to find something worth clicking on. Make sure you are not having these issues by regularly reviewing your marketing emails in different email browsers.

Data collection

How 'opted-in' are members of your list? Those that might have subscribed while entering a competition will probably be less responsive than those that pro-actively requested your information. If members have 'bought-in' before subscribing to your email newsletter you will see this come through in improved responsiveness.

Email creative

In particular what you should look at here would include:

• Call-to-actions - are they obvious?
• Does you message take into account the preview pane and the fact that the top 300 pixels are the most important
• What does your HTML email look like with image blocking enabled?

Covering all of the above will help you identify where you can improve your email newsletter. Of course other brainstorming activities such as looking at what your competitors are doing is also a good place to start.

About the Author
Article provided by EmailCentreUK - offering Email Marketing Software in the UK.

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Posted February 15, 2007

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