10 Simple Tips That Instantly Boost Email Marketing
Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 in Blog, E-mail, Social Media
If you could have endless free TV advertising, many people would blast out their commercials on every channel as often as possible, right? While this is hypothetical, it’s similar to what has happened with email marketing, which is effectively free, and many companies have bought email lists and pushed out messages without any regard for the recipient.
Unlike the era of television, where aggravating the audience with repeated one-way messaging has few consequences, in the new era of the social web, this is one of the worst things you can do. Contrary to many reports, email marketing still has the best ROI of any online advertising and will be an incredibly valuable tool for a long time to come. So here are ten simple tips to help avoid offending your audience and boosting those ever-important click-through rates:
1. Sanity-check the recipient list.
In addition to handling bounce-backs and incorrect data, check that the list of recipients is appropriate for your message. While it’s common practice to load every business card into an email database, it’s a good idea to tag each entry with the person’s area of expertise. This helps avoid sending industrial HVAC proposals to a potential client’s office manager, but making sure the office manager gets the holiday party email. Apart from instantly improving the CTR, the recipients will come to learn that your emails are relevant and worth opening.
Put another way – and this ranks as my number one tip: you can send a simple email to a well-chosen list and get a great response, or a beautifully crafted work of art to a random audience and get nothing back.
2. Ensure the sender is a real person.
Here’s a sticky one: people used to open emails from ABC Bank or Mastercard – now they tend to look at emails from their Branch Manager or Account Representative. In the email whiteout and growth of the social side of the web, we starting to listen to people rather than organizations. In your “Sent from” field:
- Don’t use names such as donotreply, info or noreply. (And if you do, make sure you’re monitoring the mailbox.)
- Avoid the generic such as marketing@mycompany.com.
- Use a person the recipient will be familiar with (from: Steve Jobs at Apple).
When filtering mail, we scan the sender first and then we move onto point number three.
3. Work on the subject line.
Marketing departments often spend 95% of their time on building the email and about 5% on the subject title, which is a shame since 95% of their audience will use the subject line to decide to open the email – or not.
Almost every email client presents messages as a pile of subject lines – especially on mobile devices – and because we’re accustomed to getting deluged with email, with time to scan maybe one or two words per line, make sure those few words really matter.
4. Work even harder on the subject line.
There are several schools of thought on whether the subject line should be direct (“One Uproar: April Newsletter”), verbose (“Newsletter”) or “salesy” (“Are clients ignoring your email?”). This depends on your product, business and audience and you should test different approaches to get the best CTR.
Whichever method you choose, avoid spam words that will send your email careening into the blackhole of the spam filter. These are words such as Free, Debt, $, Cash, Stop, etc. – there’s a long list of these. “Free Cash $ to Stop Debt” would clearly be a bad choice. For more creative subject lines, one of the best books on this subject is “Web Copy That Sells“.
5. Don’t rely exclusively on images.
By default, you should assume that your recipients cannot see the images in your email, either because:
- Their IT policy disables images from third party senders.
- Their email client defaults to disabling images.
- They use a mobile device that conserves bandwidth by disabling images.
Marketers love graphics but text is still king in email, so make sure both will work.
6. Use a dedicated email service.
Services such as Constant Constant can do much of the laborious legwork for you. Apart from the template libraries and email database management tools, they protect your web-server IP address from being blacklisted for spam. Most importantly, you’ll never accidentally CC instead of BCC, which is worth the subscription fee by itself.
7. Be CAN-SPAM compliant.
Apart from the legal requirement, users want to know the physical location of the sender, and they want an easy way to get off your email list. Additionally, “unsubscribe” should be a one-click removal process rather than an excuse for an additional survey.
8. Test your email in every major mail client.
There are many more email clients that Microsoft Outlook – actually, there are 15 major ones, all of which render email slightly differently. There’s no guarantee that a perfectly-rendered email in Gmail will look the same in Hotmail, yet you have no knowledge or control over which clients your audience is using. The simple solution is to use a testing service such as Email on Acid, which will simulate your email on all 15 clients at once.
9. Use links rather than attachments.
You may be proud of your 20Mb free e-book but your audience won’t thank you for filling their inbox. If you have any type of media to send with your email, always ensure it’s linked rather than attached. The secondary benefit is that you can track how many readers click on the links.
10. Use A/B testing.
Mentioning A/B or multivariate testing often scares people, but it’s one of the best tools a marketer has. Given a list of 10,000 email subscribers, it’s easy to try 10 different subject lines on 10% of the list and see which has the best open and click-through rates. Over time, this provides an enormous amount of information about what style your audience prefers. Experimentation is at the heart of online marketing since rule books are hard to find, so try everything and see what works.