Emailing marketing has been around for a while. Why? Because it works. Despite the popularity of other types of communication, email marketing is still a dominating force for any successful business. Not only does it offer a cost effective way to target specific audiences and personalize marketing efforts, but the return on investment on those efforts can be easily measured and analyzed.
While reaching out to your internal contacts and lists are extremely important, this article specifically focuses on helping your business build a new and unique list through external outreach and lead generation through an agency, like Compulse.
Before starting your next email marketing campaign, here are five common questions that you should be asking experts, but don’t.
Q. How often should I be sending emails?
A. It depends. Email frequency is contingent on the industry you’re in, your audience and what you’re trying to achieve. You should think about why you want to send the email in the first place and what you hope it brings to your customer’s experience. In retail, for example, it’s common to email more frequently to promote sales, whereas in many other business sectors, this may be considered too much. You’ll find out what is successful and what doesn’t work by running tests to help you determine how much is too much.
It’s most effective to send emails more than once to reach your intended audience. Once you’ve already deployed an email, you have multiple options. You can: 1) send future email deployments to people who opened previous emails, 2) send to a completely new target audience or new list, or 3) send to people who opened your previous emails AND to new target audiences.
Q. What types of audiences should I reach out to?
A. Before you start your campaign, you’ll need to make sure you truly understand the audience you’re trying to reach and target. You can learn a lot about your audience by looking at past email reports and analytics.
When thinking about starting an email marketing campaign, a good rule of thumb is to start broad and narrow your search. Maybe you’ll want to start with geography and then pinpoint people in that specific area by household income, age, gender, interests, home ownership, etc.
Q. How do I make sure my emails don’t land in the spam folders?
A. As there is not always a guarantee that an email will not end up in the spam folders, there are ways to prevent it. Here are a few pointers to help you out:
- Make sure you’re being compliant with the CAN-SPAM Act. Using our services at Compulse will ensure that you are following these requirements.
- Avoid spam trigger words and phishing phrases that are common in commercial advertisements and promotions. These can include words such as “prize,” “free,” “bonus” and “buy.”
- Balance the image-to-text ratio. If there are more images than text, the email could move to a spam folder. It is best to never send an email with only an image, as this is pretty much guaranteed to end up in the spam folder.
- Keep the subject line relevant, concise and short.
Q. How do I know what subject lines perform better than others?
A. Subject lines are one of the first impressions you have on your audience and recipients, therefore, choosing a well thought-out one is key. While there may not be a single answer as to what subject line will work best for your email, there are some things to consider when crafting one.
- What platform is your customer or prospect using to open your email? This helps determine how many characters you should be using; however, a best practice is to stay within 50 characters.
- Look at past subject line performances. Which ones had high open rates? High open rates can occur because of deals you were offering, the time of day, or the verbiage used in the subject itself. Look at similar trends and feed off of ones that were successful.
- Create something unique and catchy. Nowadays, everyone is sending emails. How will you make your subject and email stick out against everyone else’s?
Q. What types of analytics will measure the effectiveness of my campaigns?
A. The two most important statistics that you can pull from an email marketing campaign are click-through rates and open rates. A click-through rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked at least one link in the email. An open rate is the number of recipients who opened or viewed the email. Other vital metrics include click and open percentages, as well as link details. Analytics will show you how your email deployments performed and possibly what you could change moving forward for your next email marketing campaign.
If you haven’t considered email marketing, now is your chance to start strong. Compulse’s experts can help you with crafting, targeting and sending your email using best practices to achieve the best possible ROI. We’ll help you create engaging, branded and focused content to help drive traffic for your business. Contact us today.