My best practice for doing E-Mail marketing
By Pedro Engberg, January 2009
During the past couple of years i have dealt with a numerous of e-mail marketing campaigns, some with great success and others that failed totally.
In this post i will share some of the tips, tricks and tweaks that i have used or seen used with success. Just to clarify, this does not mean that you can just copy the things and your e-mail marketing is guaranteed to work. My best advice will always be to test, test and test. It is often the little things that make the big difference. Also the tips & tricks here are my thoughts and opinion on the subject, you might find that you disagree or want to add something, which is perfectly ok – post a comment and maybe i can change my take on the matter…
1. Creative
Before starting an email campaign, make sure your creative is working. DO NOT use too big creative’s (this goes for both physical size as weight in MB) remember that it has impact on the time you use to send out, plus the download time for the recipient. Further more its unlikely to look good in a mail program if you use a way too big template (i.e. 1024×1680 pixel, in fact that’s just stupid, don’t do that…). If you are using a 3rd party host for your creative, make sure it loads all right.
DO NOT make your creative as one big picture (*.gif, *.png or other) as you can be sure that many e-mail clients and recipients will block you.
DO NOT put your company logo or newsletter head in the top corner of your email – This can, in some cases, be the only viewable area in the reading pane. Use the room for a great call to action or something that will motivate the user to open the email.
DO NOT for any second think that just because you are good at designing web pages, you can use the same experience when designing email. Many email clients blocks images, leaving your nifty design empty and worthless. So think TEXT and DO NOT use CSS, when making your creative. Make sure you go through all paragraphs and cells in your Html and hand code colour, font etc.
2. “Live” Components
DO NOT use: *.swf, Videos, animated gif´s etc. – Not only do you risk that the e-mail clients will block your campaign, many clients do not show animated *.gif´s or send the mails directly to the junk folder. Remember that many hosted email clients (Like hotmail, g-mail etc.) actually tracks if your email is being sent to the Junk Folder – the more recipient that sends it there, the more like it is that your domain and all your campaigns gets blocked. So make sure you use a validation programme that can tell you how your campaign look (and more important if it come through) in those email clients.
3. Subject line
If you want the recipient to open your email, DO NOT chose a lame irrelevant subject. I have seen many examples on really bad subject lines and i have tried some of them my self.
Remember that the subject line is the first thing your recipients see. – Lets take Mr. average guy/ girl who has an average job. How many emails with offers and spam do he/ she receive every day? A Lot! – In order for your campaign to stand out and be interesting you need to come up with an interesting subject line. You can compare it to a headline of a newspaper, its purpose is clear: Make the recipient want more! Motivate, create suspense and urge the recipient to open up your mail! – Important, do this without loosing track of what you are offering! (Some very good campaigns reuse the subject line in the landing pages and in the call to action…).
4. Increasing open rate
By using the recipients name in the subject line you can sometimes increase open rate. Again conduct and A/ B test (”A” with name in subject line and “B” without name) to see what works the best.
Using what i will define as “Value” words in the subject line also helps on OR (Open Rate). “Value” words can be (but not limited to) “Selected”, “Chosen”, “Win”, “Free”, “Help”. Example: ” Dear [name] you have been selected to receive x” had for a long time the biggest OR in the campaigns i was running. Try to think creative and use your own criteria’s as for what you would open, and test, test, test.
5. Increasing Click Through Rate (CTR)
Now lets assume that your recipients have opened your email. Now you want them to click on the advertising in it. DO NOT for one second think, that just because you got them to open up you email, that they will click in it… Studies shows that you now have between 2 & 4 seconds to make your recipients genuinely interested in what you are offering. So how do you do that? In my experience we are now down to some of the really important things. – Keep it simple and CALL TO ACTION! - Strip your message from unnecessary fluff and have a STRONG call to action. (In some cases i have seen that very “flashy” and really ugly emails designs worked the best, they somehow became more trustworthy than the nicely designed ones)…
DO NOT use a CALL TO ACTION without making sure that it is short and can be decoded (read: understood) in matter of milliseconds! – Some times it works to emphasize the call to action with time limitations or limited items in stock. And please, please, please DO NOT fall into the pit of just putting a “BUY NOW!” as call to action, you can do so much better than that. – Do i need to say it? TEST, run an A/B test where you use different call to actions, see which one that gets the most clicks, then use this as your “A” and start testing other call to actions against it. Soon enough you will have an arsenal of action words and phrases you can use.
6. Increasing Conversion Rate (CR)
Now we have come to point (finally). Conversion Rate or CR, this is where you really show what your are made of. It doesn’t really matter if your king of clicks or (king of traffic in SEO) or king of open rates and subject lines if your landing page is destroying all the good work. So before i start stating my opinion about CR, let me make one thing clear: DO NOT for one second thing that just because you have a great website, that your email traffic (or any other traffic for that matter) automatically will convert in to paying customers.
I have learned (the hard way) that there is one thing you can do to increase the conversion from visit/impression/ traffic to actually paying customers and that is – UNIQUE TARGETED LANDING PAGES. Example: You want to sell a USB stick in titanium that can hold 15 GB and comes with name engraving, light and a nifty bag. You do a great email campaign and you get a lot of clicks. All the recipient, who showed interested and actually wanted to buy, lands on the front page of your website. Here they have to search for the product before they can actually order it. Can you see what happens? – You will get a lot who loose interest and goes elsewhere… Let’s combine the example with a strong call to action where you have made a time limited offer: “Buy before [internal time + 2 hrs.] And get 2 for the price of one!” (What happens in this mail is that you get the time of the recipients computer and add 2 hours, giving the recipient 2 hours to react in order get a better offer).
Now if i were the recipient in this example i would think that the whole campaign was a scam. Not only do you urge me to hurry up, when i do i can find the offer, meaning that i will not get the better offer either.
So in my eyes, the landing page is where you really get the heavy artillery out. The landing page, in my opinion, has to be recognizable and in line with the rest of the creative in the campaign. You can reuse the subject line, make it personal (So it takes the First name of the recipient and puts it in the headline) etc. etc. You can show pictures of the product. You can even run A/B test on the landing page. For products it could be: Original Product for €19,95 Verses 2 Original Products + Free Shipping for €39,95. There is a lot of ways to increase your CR. Keep your Strong Call to Action, intensives the client to buy, ad refer a friend and MAKE IT EASY TO BUY!
DO NOT think for one second that just because you have a lot of products lined up on the landing page, it will increase your conversion rate. Recipients click on your email, because they find the offer good, appealing, interesting, existing – if the landing page does not correspond to this, they get disappointed and goes away – KEEP IT SIMPLE, ONE LANDING PAGE PER CAMPAIGN/ PRODUCT…. However that does not mean that you cannot up-sell and cross-sell, ones they are in your order pipe line…
7. Up-sell and Cross-sell
Just a quick note on up-sell and cross selling. I have experienced working with websites/ direct marketers’ who managed to have an order pipeline that was full with extra offers, add-on offers and “people who liked x, also like y” offers, and they were still able to get a very, very high conversion rate. Why is that? – Well in my honest opinion it’s easier to sell more to some one who already decided to buy from you. This is also why they keep these extra offers well away from the landing page. When the user clicks on the “buy” button on the landing page they move on to the next step of the buying process. This can be where the user writes his or hers personal data (age, gender etc. to be used for future retention) on the same pages there are always room for additional offers. This can actually continue all the way to check out and beyond. Often you will get a confirmation email to confirm your order. I have used the confirmation email with very good results, placing an extra final offer or “Welcome offer”. In fact we managed to increase our acquisition revenue (new clients only) with a stunning 25% just by using the confirmation email as selling space. Now just imagine what that can do to your overall revenue in a year…
I hope i could inspire you to improve your email marketing with this post, the subject is huge and i would not be able to cover everything in details here, but if you have questions feel free to email me on post@pedroengberg.dk. Good luck with your e-mail marketing.
If you want even more tips and tricks on how to improve your email marketing – i found a great ressource here.
