12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing

Contents

12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing 2

Introduction 3

Set Objectives 4

Have a plan, but be flexible 4

Build a good database 5

Should I buy data? 5

Personalise 6

Nail your subject line 6

Use buttons, not inline links 7

Calls to action 7

Make it easy to read 8

Educate, don’t sell 9

Ok, sell a bit 9

Test, Test, Test 10

Summary 11

Glossary 12

About Digital Glue 13

Introduction

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We are all aware of email marketing; it comes in all manner of shapes and sizes and depending on a whole range of factors, you may either love it or hate it. If you’re a shopaholic, then getting the latest deals is fantastic and if you’re passionate about specific subjects, you can register for all manner of business’ emails. On the flip side, constantly receiving emails from companies you don’t want to hear from, not being able to

unsubscribe, and even too many emails from a company we do like can be immensely frustrating.

So when we’re doing it for our own business, what should we be thinking about, and how do we go about creating email marketing which works for us and is good for our customers as well?

Set objectives

Have a plan, but be flexible

12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing 4

The most common issue with email marketing campaigns is a lack of knowledge of what’s being achieved. Where this always starts is definition of what the goals are. People will often say they have an open rate of xx% and a Click through Rate of xx%, but they can’t tell you how many sales they generate from it or how many leads it creates, or how much website traffic it brings in.

It can be easy to be distracted by some numbers which are in fact meaningless. Your email campaigns could have worse open rates than another business, but if you have a large list and those that do open it buy from you, you may not be worried.

Knowing from the outset what the objectives of the email campaign are, and importantly, exactly how they will be measured, means you can judge success accurately and with metrics that mean something to your business.

Once you’ve got your objectives in place, and you know the metrics you’re going to judge success on, you can then create a plan.

How often will you communicate? What will the subjects of your communication be? What segments of your audience will you communicate to?

A clear and detailed plan of exactly what will be happening and when, will help to ensure you deliver regular communications and well.

At the same time, accept the fact that things will change, opportunities will arise, and you want to be agile enough to adapt and change the plan. If you need to do something different, promote a different product or service, or do an extra email then you should.

Create a plan, but make sure you’re willing to adjust if that’s the best thing.

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12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing 5

To be honest, however good your email is, however well your subject line is created, and however you personalise your emails, if your data is poor, then you’re going to struggle.

Very often a business will have an existing database, and you’ll have something to work with, but it’s sensible to know what you’d like your database to look like. If you create an ideal scenario for your data, this shapes your data collection strategy and helps you to improve your existing data.

Beyond people’s names and email addresses, you should be thinking about which specific products and services they are likely to be interested in so you can target specific emails to them.

In addition, knowing date of birth, and other personal details can allow you to take personal emails to another level. Sending a message saying happy birthday can just be a nice touch, but could also be a way to drive business through a birthday promotion.

The quality of purchased data is almost always awful! There may be some exceptions to this, such as industry exhibitions where you can acquire data, however purchasing bulk data is usually a very low return game.

If you want to build a good database, consider running competitions, business card draws, asking people to sign up directly, creating content which people may be interested enough in to give you their email address for…

There are a myriad of strategies, but in short, you want genuinely interested subscribers on your list as this will ensure you have a chance of engaging with them.

Build a good database

Should I buy data?3 4

12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing 6

Research from Aberdeen suggests that personalised email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. In short, adding people’s first name to an email improves engagement with your email. It’s a small thing, but can make a big difference, and the key thing is building your database to allow this.

Data from our chosen marketing tool, Campaign Monitor, also suggest that emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

You can take personalisation further of course, by tracking customer behaviors and building automation campaigns based on how they are engaging with your brand. But if you do nothing else adding people’s names to the email and personalising subject lines can make a significant difference.

Getting people to open your email is obviously key. Marketers obsess about open rates and different email marketing tools produce reports on all sorts of factors which influence open rates, based on sector, time of day, day of the week and many more factors.

It’s worth checking out a couple of those reports. I’m not that interested in you clicking through to them though, so I’ll just use inline links to the Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor websites which discuss this.

The truth is, the only way you can nail your subject line is by testing, and we’ll get to that. However, there are a few things you probably want to avoid:

The last thing you want is for your email to be blocked in the Spam folder. Once this happens your email is history and your results will be poor. Including words like ‘free’ or ‘offer’ is probably a good way of finding yourself in the spam folder quickly, as of course are some more obvious examples such as ‘sex’ or ‘viagra’.

The other thing which is a big no-no, is having a subject line which is nothing to do with the content of the email, just to get an ‘open’. You might well get the open, but you’ll soon get deleted or unsubscribed by most users, and there is nothing more important than your database.

PersonaliseNail yoursubject line5 6

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This one is so simple, it’s staring us in the face, literally. I can tell you that adding a button rather than an inline link, increased click through rates on our client’s campaigns by anything from 15-30%. It was that dramatic.

It’s a simple step, and makes it straightforward for readers to know what to press. Inline links are mistrusted because they are used by Google on some websites to take people to irrelevant sites, and quite simply they are less obvious.

There’s also no real excuse for it. You don’t need to design a button (although you can). All good email marketing tools will have a choice of button style you can choose from. They will let you choose how to style the button, the wording in the button, and the link destination.

While I’m on the use of inline links, if you still want to use them, then please avoid the other massive linking sin, the use of click here.

A link, wherever it’s placed, on your website or in an email, is a good SEO indicator. [Click here] means nothing, Download your guide to email marketing is clear and a good SEO reference.

This might sound obvious, but the links in your email need to go through to content which is relevant to your email. Nothing will get unsubscribes quicker than linking through to irrelevant content.

Have some! Put simply, you need to make it obvious what action you want your readers to take, and you need to make it easy for them to do it. If you’re reviewing an email, and you can’t see a clear call to action, then you need to refine it until there is.

Use buttons not inline links

Calls to action

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Get your email template designed! It doesn’t have to be a work of art, but it needs to be easy to read, and have a good balance between text and images. You need to consider that your readers will have different ways of engaging with content, whether that’s images, copy, video or all the above, having a clean and simple way for these elements to be included in your email is important, and having a designer lay it out is very valuable. It will cost a bit extra, but will make such a difference to the way your company is perceived and how well read your email is, that it’s bound to be worth that difference in cost and time.

Make it Easy to Read, with a Balance between image and text

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If you’re a pure ecommerce provider, then sending through your offers may well be exactly what people are looking for and as we’ll come to, there’s definitely a place for this.

But if you’re promoting to other businesses, then using your email to educate your customers is vital. It’s important to keep people engaged. If you can use your email to give away valuable expertise, then your audience are more likely to engage with your emails on a regular basis. Additionally, educating your audience is a great policy. The more your potential customers know, the more you can help them. You can approach giving this content away in a couple of ways; you can either build this into the main body of the email itself, or alternatively you can lead with the content and then direct people to your site. It’s our experience that a balance here is best. Don’t overload your email with content, but do give enough to keep people interested.

Educate don’t sell (!)10

As discussed, one part of receiving emails for some customers is to get offers and deals. If that’s your audience, then get selling.

If you’re operating in a B2B environment, then you might be giving advice or tips as described above, or you may be promoting an event, but don’t forget to include something your database can act on. Remind them of what you do and how you help your customers. In short, don’t send an email without having tried to sell.

OK sell a bit11

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You need to test your email marketing campaigns to judge their effectiveness. Open rate and subject line are crucial within this. People are often put off testing by thinking that it delays the process of marketing to your customers. There’s no need for it to. Use testing as part of your email marketing.

To illustrate, if you have a database of 1,000 customers and you have two subject lines you think could work, 1. Take 100 of your database and send them

subject line 1.

2. Then take 100 more and send them subject line 2.

Those 200 customers have still received your email marketing, but now you will have a steer on which subject line will get you a better result with the rest of your audience.

3. So, you can then send the most efficient subject line to the remaining 800.

90% of your audience have received the best subject line and you’ve learnt for next time.

In addition, you can test sending days. Why not send to 200 people per working day of your 1,000 strong database and see which gets the best open rate.

Test, Test, Test…12

You can even build in subject line testing by splitting the 200 on the first day between two subject lines, and then sending the remaining 4 days with the optimal subject line.

You can then test time of day, by1. Splitting Tuesday’s email by AM and

PM sends.

2. Once you’ve got a steer on AM and PM, you could then split Wednesday’s sends by 10am and 11am or 2pm and 3pm.

3. By Wednesday of your first campaign, with a structured testing procedure, you could have established a subject line style, and a time of day, and by the end of the week, you will have a preferred day of the week.

I’d advocate doing the same test again for the second and third campaigns, and then you’ll have a validated set of data which is unique to your business and database.

Summary

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A good email marketing campaign is made up of a wide number of things, and what makes it successful or otherwise can be any number of these things. By working through these steps methodically you can ensure that you have your email marketing campaign in the best shape possible.

If you need help delivering email marketing campaigns which work, get in touch with the Digital Glue team:

0121 399 00665 hello@digitalglue.eu

Basic Email Marketing Glossary

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Open Rate This is the number of people who open your email. This is usually expressed as a percentage. Definition of what a ‘good’ open rate is will vary between list size, sector and even where the list has come from.

It is important to understand that the open rate is not a 100% accurate measure. Recording an ‘open’ can only happen if the reader’s email client can display HTML with images, and that option is turned on. Another issue is that your readers may have a preview pane in their email client. That preview pane might be displaying your email automatically (and therefore downloading the images) without the reader ever having to click on it or read it.

So, you should never take your open rate as a hard and fast number, because you can never know the true figure. It is much better used as general guide, and as a way of measuring the trends on your email campaigns.

Click through Rate This is the number of people who have clicked a link on your email. This is usually expressed as a percentage, based upon the number of people who have opened the email vs. the number of clicks.

Subject line This is the subject which will appear in your recipients email client.

Bounce Rate This is the number of emails which couldn’t be delivered. Again usually expressed as a percentage. These are often divided by ‘soft bounces’ – i.e. a recipient is on holiday, or a ‘hard bounce’ where no recipient was found.

Segmentation This is dividing your database into different segments or interests. This could be based on demographics such as age or location, or the kind of products or service they are interested in.

Unsubscribe This is when a user asks to no longer receive your email marketing. When this starts to get a high number, you know you either have bad data or are doing something wrong.

About Digital Glue

About the Author

12 Key Steps to Successful Email Marketing 13

Get in touch 0121 399 0065hello@digitalglue.euwww.digitalglue.eu

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Digital Glue is an independent marketing and design agency founded in 2013. We provide a range of marketing services including email marketing, website design, social media, branding, print design, public relations, and much more. Digital Glue’s clients cross a range of industries; from web & print design for small charities and public relations for large app developers, to marketing management for local restaurants and social media marketing for nationwide printers. Digital Glue are guided by our values – so much so, we made them part of our office.

Javan is the Founder and Managing Director of Digital Glue, having started the business in 2013 after almost 12 years of experience in marketing and PR roles. As an experienced marketing professional, Javan believes that the best form of marketing is the one that works for your business. Javan’s philosophy to successful marketing starts with listening first, and seeking to understand the strengths, weaknesses, objectives, and goals of the businesses he works with. Javan has been delivering email marketing for nearly ten years, starting by delivering email marketing for an ecommerce business. This expertise has transfered to B2B and B2C environments and Javan now helps and advises clients on email marketing best practice and campaigns.