Jun 24

Top 5 tips for email marketing campaigns

Email Marketing, Web Marketing No Comments »

Successful marketing on the web involves a whole mix of tactics and tools. Get the right ones for your business - and get them right - and you can expect to see outstanding results. One of the most important tool for marketing is still email.

If you are implementing email campaigns in your organization, there are 5 best practices to keep in mind:

#1 Sign-up must be easy

It might sound obvious, but make it as easy as possible for your user to sign-up to receive your email communications. Only use as many fields as necessary in your registration form. While it is useful to gather as much information as possible, remember that asking people to fill in too many fields can act as a serious barrier. What’s the minimum you need? Email address.

#2 Email Marketing is a Strategy

Any email distribution you perform should be a part of a larger email marketing strategy. What’s the purpose of your email campaign? What are you hoping to achieve? And how does the campaign integrate into all of your other marketing activity? Integration of messaging across marketing channels is always the best approach to get the biggest bang for your buck. An email campaign should not act in isolation and you should always consider the reaction that your prospects are having to each email you distribute. Don’t send an email for the sake of it. If you want a response from your distribution list, don’t spam them, make sure you’re sending good quality communications that offer value.

#3 Call-to-action is key

Believe it or not, many companies are still sending emails without a clear call-to-action. Emails are sent for a reason, you want the user to respond to your content. If you don’t include very clear calls-to-action within the email, you are seriously impacting the performance of the campaign. Calls-to-action can vary in their level of intended impact; I like to call them passive and active. Passive calls-to-action are subtle text links that drive the user to your website, for example. Active calls-to-action are more overt and use bold messaging that asks the user to take a specific action such as filling out a form or calling a number.

#4 Offer Opt-Out Alternatives

So, you have to give your user the option of opting-out, but you can also reduce your opt-out rate by providing other alternatives to the full opt-out. For example, perhaps the user would respond better to less frequent communications or emails only relating to a specific topic. Remember, the best way to prevent your users from opting out is to provide relevant valuable content.

#5 Leverage Targeted Communications

Effective email marketing is not about spamming your distribution lists as often as possible. It’s about reaching the user at the optimal point of relevancy. Understanding who your prospects are, what they’re looking for and when they have specific needs will take you a long way in delivering targeted emails that provide true value.

Jun 08

Top 10 mistakes creating HTML email newsletters

Email Marketing, Web Marketing 1 Comment »

Here is the summary of the most common mistakes people make when designing HTML emails:

  • Not coding “absolute paths” to the images. Remember, attaching graphics and using “relative paths” won’t work. You need to specify a full path to the image on the disk. Or, host the images on your server, then link to them in your code.
  • Using JavaScript, or ActiveX, or embedding movies. That stuff doesn’t work in HTML email. You can’t have CSS-positioning, DIVs, DHTML, and complex embedded tables in the HTML message either.
  • Using free image hosting services. They don’t like it when they get lots of outside hits (such as from email campaigns). So they’ll sometimes start blocking your images.
  • Linking to an external CSS file. Insert your CSS below the <BODY> tag because web-based email applications (like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail) strip <HEAD> and <BODY> tags from HTML email.
  • Using a WYSIWYG to “code” your HTML email. WYSIWYGs are known to generate absolutely horrible HTML. They insert so much junk code, it’s unbelievable. To code HTML email properly, you need to learn a little HTML.
  • Not including an opt-out link. It’s rather roughly and unprofessional not to allow the recipients to unsubscribe from your list.
  • Letting your permission “grow cold”. If you’ve been collecting the email addresses for years, and you’re only just now sending your first email to everyone, a little remind of how you got the recipient’s email address is nice. If you didn’t email your subscribers for a long time, people can forget what email lists they subscribed to. You can include a string like “You are receiving this email because you subscribed to our mailing list at www.yourwebsite.com” at the bottom or at the top (if appropriate) of your email.
  • Sending to a list without permission. This is the worst offense. Like a good marketer you should have a subscription form on a web site to collect the recipients’ email addresses.
  • Not removing people who unsubscribed. It’s an important thing if you don’t want to pass for a spammer.
  • Forgetting to test. Make it a rule to test your HTML email in as many email applications you can. You should always send at least a few campaigns to yourself before sending it out to your entire list.