Back to the Basics of Email Marketing

I was thinking the other day that often times even the best direct marketers forget the basics of doing really great marketing and all it takes is a little reminder. So today I'm going to take it upon myself to remind us all (I need it too!) of a few basics. With the holiday season fast approaching all of us email marketers have to be on our A game.

So here it is, three things to consider when creating your email marketing campaigns. It's simple. Offer-List-Creative.

Offer

Your "offer" is very important to your response so the bottom line here is that you need to make it crystal clear what you want your recipient to do. Do you have a compelling call-to-action for your audience? How do you know, have you developed a baseline offer to test against? You don't always have to be selling in your emails but more often than not you want your recipient to DO something. Whether it's attending a webinar, buying a product, or reading an article, you need to make it so that your recipient wants to do more. If you are offering a savings, you'll want to highlight that, especially in this economy! And make sure that if there is an expiration date you highlight it.

Don't forget the subject line! Many people I talk to wait until they've created their work-of-art email and then decide what the subject line should be. Why wait? If you put your hottest piece of info "above the fold" in your email, lead with that as the subject line.

A few things to remember:

1. You have about 40-50 characters to make a first impression so make it good.
2. You need to really think about what part of your email is going to be the most compelling. Then include that in the subject line.
3. You need to be careful not to get caught up in spam filters.

List

I posted about what data to capture on your opt-in form. But after you capture that info are you using your customer list to the fullest extent? Can you target your list better? If you know people who buy product A also buy product C, then segment your list and offer them product C. You won't believe how much of an increase you'll have on your open & click rate. BUT: See above, Subject Line.

Creative

Try to avoid using one image as the sole content of your email campaign, images in your recipient's email reader could be turned off by default so your content won't be seen. If you do use one image (or a series of images) take a hint from a savvy VerticalResponse customer: he includes the text from the email (i.e. what's on sale) right underneath the image so that when the image isn't shown at least the text is.

You'll also want to have a hosted web version of the email in case it cannot be seen in your reader's inbox and don't forget to include that forward to a friend link, it's a great way to have your recipients build your list for you.

Link often! Make sure all of your images are linked and include multiple links in your copy, even if they go to the same place.

We all need a little Back to Basics training, now let's put it to work!

Comments

[Email Marketing Perth]

I certainly agree with much of your article - thanks for the reminders. I would suggest adding that all campaigns should go out as html + plaintext version for the not insignificant proportion of recipients who can only access / prefer just text.

[William Doby]

Thanks for the excellent reminders.

[MANOJ]

These are really important
Email Basics.thanks for update