Tips for Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

There are so many great reasons to implement an email marketing campaign. It’s very affordable. You get an immediate response. You can easily measure the results of your campaign. It’s flexible in terms of creating customized messages for different target audiences. And it can be highly effective in building and maintaining long-lasting relationships with your customers.

But if you’ve never reaped the benefits of email marketing, we have a few tips to help you get started.

Creating emails that get read

The last thing you want is for your audience to think of you as a spammer. Email marketing is based on getting permission from your recipients. This is easy enough to get by adding a feature on your website that allows people to sign up to receive email notifications, promotions or e-newsletters from you.

There are also some basic rules of thumb when it comes to your email creative:

• Have a benefit-oriented subject line or one that clearly conveys what your email is about. Avoid capital letters or words like “free”, “XX% off”, “subscribe” or “call now” that will most likely land you in a spam or junk folder.
• Make the body of your email scannable. Keep copy short and to the point.
• Don’t use images that are too large and take a long time to load.
• If you’re not much of a designer, there are a lot of industry-specific email templates out there that you can use and modify depending on your needs.

The most successful email campaigns are the ones that are personalized and contain information or offers that are most relevant to your target audience. It’s very easy to create targeted email campaigns using email lists of various target segments.

When to email and how often

This is a tricky one. Email too often and you’re going to end up annoying your recipients causing them to unsubscribe. Yet, if you don’t email them enough they might end up forgetting about you.

While there aren’t really any set rules as to how much or how little you should email, once a week or a couple of times a month would probably be acceptable to most of your subscriber base. It really depends on how interesting and relevant your content is — some customers may welcome hearing from you more often if they’re getting a lot out of them. You might actually want to take the guesswork out of it by asking people upfront when they sign up for emails how often they’d like to hear from you.

As far as what days are best to email and what time of day they’re most likely to get open, it’s best to analyze past campaign reports to determine exactly when most of your customers click on your emails.

Ready to do some email marketing for your business? pbSmartConnections can help. Find out more here.