subject: Ten High Performance Email Marketing Tips That Will Grow Your Business [print this page] Ten High Performance Email Marketing tips that will Grow Your Business
Whether your business is in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, London or Livermore, Email Marketing can give your company nationwide clout!
By Brent Silveria March 2010
Like traditional direct mail campaigns, creating and deploying a successful email campaign has many facets that can mean the difference between success and failure.
This guide is intended to help you improve your performance and avoid some of the pitfalls of mailing practices. The process of building your list to make sure it"s effective will take time, but whether you have a list of 50 or 50,000,these are all marketing tips you can apply immediately to increase your sales.
1 - Make Your Greeting Count Remember that most customers will need to respond to the first impression that your email makes, your subject line and who the email is from. Your subject line should be focused on what the most important thing you believe your customer needs to hear from you or your organization. Using gimmicky words such as free or $$ will almost guarantee that your message will go to the spam folder or be filtered by company spam detectors long before anyone ever sees it.
One great way to see what other small businesses email marketing looks like is to create a spam catcher account for yourself and study what triggers you to open the email, what doesn"t, and what subject lines cause email to automatically move to your spam folder. Using a free email client such Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail will work great for this, just use one or all three email addresses to sign up for contests and newsletters from major corporations or small businesses and watch the learning materials roll into your in-box. Learning how the effective email marketing professionals get their message into your hands is a great way to see how significant your business can look, how you can grow it, and how clearly you can separate yourself from the spammers.
"Example of Email Subject and From Fields in
Performance Desk from Resilient Labs"
Who your email is From is important. If you"re doing business to business sales you need to decide if it"s more important to your customer to recognize your company name (i.e. Resilient Labs, Inc.) or to feel that they are receiving personal attention (i.e. Brent Silveria). If you are assigning an account manager to leads, then it is logical that correspondence from the company should be coming from that person. Never trick the customer into opening your email with a fake name or fake company, or someone elses brand like Microsoft or Apple, you will be guaranteed to end up being resented by the customer and may even be "blacklisted" by the company.
2 - Test your mailing There is a lot that can be learned from traditional direct mail when performing email marketing, but the most important thing is to test your message. This may be as simple as trying something different in each mail you do to your list, a new subject line or a new offer or try adding a city such as New York, London or San Francisco. Watch what works and doesn"t closely and adapt for the next mailing. If you have the luxury of a very large list perform a few segmented tests of two different subject lines to a group of about 100 customers each or test an even group from two large cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. Study the results carefully and repeat the more successful mailing to the opposite list a week later to see if you can match your results. For example you may find that not using a city name but saying something like "Important new for California Business", may trigger the best open rate. Use the most successful mailing with the biggest response, to your entire list, to grow your business.
"Tool for sending email campaigns to a test address in
Performance Desk by Resilient Labs"
Don"t expect miracles. You are very excited about your product and offer, but don"t assume that busy people will have the time to get as involved as you are in the message. High response rates to email marketing take time & it takes time to develop in your list, the more familiar people from Orlando to Seattle become with your brand and name, through multiple impressions, the more polarized the list between good and bad leads will become. This isn"t a bad thing but it is a method of qualifying your leads through the process.
On a cold direct mailing you can consider an open rate of around 2% of your list a success. This number may feel a bit discouraging but keep the work up. You will find that in repeat mailings you will see a additional 2% performance or more in opening the message, and your impressions will grow with time. Be very careful of over mailing the same people while testing, make sure that you suppress the emails that have received too many mailings from your overall mailing.
3 - Develop an effective and focused message and a clean layout Know exactly what you want your email customer to do when they get the email, and clearly ask them to do it. Fight your instincts to use every marketing vehicle to say everything you want to say to a customer, you will only give them too many options to make a choice of what to do.
Do not include multiple ideas or calls to action in a single email you will never get anywhere with it. You are better off providing a clear, short focused call to action that brings the reader to a landing page that provides them with the broader message. customers do not have the time or patience to figure out what you want them to do. Even if your mailing is a newsletter, remain consistant about the call to action.
"Keep your call to action simple & use bold instead of exclamation points"
Use bold text to emphasize your point instead of exclamation points. Your message will be easier to read, focus their eyes on the key words you want them to remember and not look as amateurish as dozens of explamation points!!! If you are sending a primarily text-based email, make your call to action or significant bullet points in blue, bold text just as you would in a direct marketing letter such as "grow your business with customer database software - learn more".
Brand your email with graphics and colors that support your company image and leverage other impressions your marketing efforts may be putting forth. If you can use an html template, so that your email looks very clean. You don"t have to do something incredibly complex, remember clean and clear will always win, especially if you are doing business to business sales.
4 "" Place links and message strategically When designing your email place your call to action and links high in the email because many business customers will have their preview pane open and you will want to get what is important right in front of them. Pay off your subject line quickly with additional information or an answer to your promised information. For example if your subject line is "Learn The Secret to how San Diego Small Business Grow" then your link should say "hundreds of small businesses grow 18% a month with email marketing click to learn more".
Experiment with the placement of your links and call to action on the email to make sure that you"re getting the greatest growth. This is another aspect that is a great thing to test to two small sets of customers such as "small business" and "midsize business" to see what works best.
5 - Personalize your message We all love to be addressed by name and feel better when someone speaking to us understands what we do and are interested in. Use an email marketing application that will leverage your customer database to customize and personalize each email that you send out.
At a minimum you should personalize their greeting so that it is addressed to them, a Dear Mary will make your customer feel more connected than a Dear Buyer. Depending on the capabilities of your email marketing software you can pepper in personal references into the entire email such as "hope the weather is good this week in Tucson", "how about those San Francisco Giants", Thank you for buying the "Blue T-Shirt", "Have you checked out the Apple iPad yet in Pleasanton?". The more that you can make each email feel like you sent it to the customer directly instead of an impersonal mass mailing, the more likely they will click through your mail to learn more.
6 "" Triple test everything related to your campaign View the layout of your newsletter in various email clients. Your layout may look different in Microsoft Outlook, Google Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc. Make adjustments to your template or layout to minimize differences and make sure that the message is still as effective no mater what your customer is using as an email client. If possible also view it in different browsers and operating systems, don"t discount that your customers maybe viewing your email on a smart phone.
Test the Links in Your Email Marketing Messages. Seems to be a very obvious thing, but how many times have you received an email message that sent you to a page that delivers a 404 error or redirects to the company home page. Make sure you are using fully qualified web site addresses such as https://secure.performancedesk.com/signup.asp. Most of us get so accustom to typing www.website.com or even less in our browsers that it"s easy to forget that any link in an email needs to contain the fully qualified URL. Make sure that you always use the full, absolute URLs in emails (html or plain text) such as http://www.website.com/landing.html.
Some systems will allow you to automatically assign the same URL to all of your graphics so that you can be assured that any click on the email will take the customer to the correct landing page. Take a close look at your list and make sure that it is exactly who you want to be mailing to. It never hurts to double-check that your list has filtered out the customers who you want to suppress and that the list is actually what you believe it to be. Remember that once your campaign has been deployed you can"t call it back and the bad impression is a done deal.
7 "" Use a landing page that builds on the message of your email and closes the customer The link you use in your email for your call to action should drive customers to a landing page not your home page. Let me repeat that, The link you use in your email should drive customers to a specific offer or "landing page" that further emphasizes your message, reinforces your brand and closes your offer.
Keep the focus of your message and offer strong, do not delude it with tons of options and information about your organization. If you simply lead people to your home page and hope that the customer will decide to search around learn about your offering, you will be disappointed. Be direct to your customer database when mailing them, and just like any other marketing effort, always be closing.
It"s a good idea to give customers the option from the landing page, to let them learn more about your organization by visiting your web page or contacting you by phone or email with a question, but unless that"s the entire purpose of your email effort, be very direct and upfront about what you hope that they will do. If you have offered a free item such as a white paper or other educational device in your email, then give them an easy way to obtain it even if there are other up-sells or cross sells that you hope they will be interested in.
8 "" The timing of your email matter. Unless your email is specifically related to a Holiday offer there is little reason to send a campaign out during holidays. The last thing that you want is for your email to be lost in an over loaded inbox the day following a holiday and people just frankly have other priorities when returning to work. The odds are pretty good that someone will toss out everything but the most important emails simply to get a grip on their workload for the day.
For business to business email you may find that mid-week emails will be opened more often because the crunch of Monday morning has passed and the chances of someone leaving early or having a Friday full of last-minute tasks won"t effect the time they have to soak in your message. How often can you mail the same list? Unless you have customers who have specifically requested daily or weekly emails a good rule of thumb is that two months is to long and anything more than once a week is too often. One way or another you will get people who will unsubscribe for a number of different reasons. Never be discouraged by this, you are simply qualifying your leads before spending a lot of time marketing to people who are not your customer.
9 - Include an easy to use link to let them opt-out of your mailings. This article assumes that you are mailing to a list that has requested to be on your mailing list or opted in to another party who asked if they would like to receive offers such as yours. Email customers sometimes forget that they have done this or may have even been spoofed by someone else. Sometimes the email may even be a typo that you are mailing to and the customer has no idea who you are or why they are on your list.
Mistakes can happen but the most honest and straight forward method to ease that pain is to place a clear and obvious link at the bottom of each email to allow them to opt out of your list. It is very important that you honor this request quickly and prevent any further emails from reaching that customer. Disregarding this can quickly build ill will for your brand and will definitely get your organization recognized as a spammer, possibly even blacklisted by major internet providers.
10 - Reply to requests within 24 hours Email marketing is a 1 to 1 marketing vehicle, your fast response by email or phone is crucial to its effectiveness. If someone responds to your email or sends you a question of their own they are interested in your products or services, even if they may not feel they are ready to buy. If you do not respond as soon as possible, even with an automated email response, you will not only miss the opportunity to grow your business but you may lose that customer and all of their possible referrals for life.
Your response further solidifies the image of your company as service oriented and a good partner in their efforts. When possible carry through the same themes and images of your email through your landing page and responses, each is a reinforcement of your brand and creates a new impression of your message and company brand. If somebody sends you an email it means they have investigated and have an interest in your products or services.
If you do not reply promptly, you will not only miss the opportunity but you will probably lose a customer for life. Email marketing is a skill that you will develop greater fineness with over time. Following these basic tips will give you a good head start towards success and grow your business. Remember, use a tool that provides you with enough flexibility to get the most out of each mailing and never fail to follow-up on a response.
copyright 2010 Resilient Labs, Inc. All Rights Reserved
For more information about Performance Desk visit http://www.performancedesk.com
Brent Silveria is CEO of Resilient Labs, Inc.
by: Brent Silveria
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