In part one of this series, we discussed some of the basic steps required to build a successful email marketing campaign. With so many purposes and possibilities, email marketing cannot be mastered in just a few simple steps. Everything from personalization to analysis must be understood before email marketing campaigns can reach peak performance.
Step 5: Keep the Design Clean
Much like website design, keeping the overall structure and content of an email message simple and easily digestible is a proven success strategy. Although it can be tempting to cram in links, images, and paragraphs of text, a simple, straightforward message is almost always more successful. Consider using design elements to draw readers towards a single call to action. A messy email that contains ten links, seven images, and long textual elements is likely to be discarded.
Step 6: Pay for Great Content
Cutting corners is a bad idea in any business decision, and the same holds true for email marketing. A well timed, well researched email marketing campaign is still only as good as its content. Email marketing writers, both freelance and salaried, spend their time on writing email content. In fact, quality email content writers change their entire style, structure, and word usage when crafting an email marketing campaign.
Content writers focus on their craft. They know that email readers are a tough crowd. The subject heading and the first line of content is all that the writer has to catch the attention of the email recipient. Instead of forcing yourself to write your own content for an email marketing campaign, consider hiring a professional content writer.
Step 7: First Line Poetry
A perfected subject line in an email means the differences between a converted customer and a lost subscriber. Yes, the content within an email is vitally important, but that content is never seen without the right subject line. Think of a subject line as poetry. You have very few words to make a significant impact. Make them count.
Step 8: Consider Tracking
Maximizing the ROI of an email marketing campaign requires research, and setting up tracking within an email marketing campaign is one of the most powerful ways to do so. Determining the open rate of the emails and even the deliverability of the campaign in question can be studied through proper tracking. Website analytics tools such as Google Analytics and others often offer ways to track varying statistics of email marketing campaigns.
Remember to take advantage of any type of tracking available. Open rates and deliverability are both important, but so are click through rates and conversion rates. Understanding what a marketing campaign is succeeding at can lead to a replication of such success.
Step 9: Read Results Properly
An email that turns a reader into a visitor is great, but an email marketing campaign that turns a reader into a customer is even better. When tracking results, make sure to consider how many readers turn into actual customers. Also, consider the time and effort of such marketing campaigns and whether or not their success is as great as other email marketing attempts.
Step 10: The Human Element
Step ten in this series will be detailed in part three of Essential Steps to Better Email Marketing: The Human Element.