Beginners Guide to Email Marketing ….

I know how daunting it can be to walk into a new subject and try to get to grips with it all straight away. It always seems like the more you read up on it, the more you realise you know absolutely nothing and end up with your head spinning from so much information. And in all honesty a lot of it you don’t really need to know straight away. What you need is to get the basics without being swamped with a load of information that’ll sidetrack you from your primary objectives.

Luckily for you I’ve decided to compose a no-nonsense start up guide to help you along the way.

What kind of email campaign are you trying to construct?

This is probably the best starting point for your campaign. Will it be a sales campaign? A brand building campaign? An informative newsletter? By stating what you intend to do at the beginning will help you to keep track of how the campaign should be designed.

Subscribers

The success of your campaign depends on the quality of recipients you have. If you are a company that has bought your mailing list from a company then you can’t expect high open rates.

I always recommend that if you want high open rates and high returns from your campaign, one of the best ways to do this is to have your own self-built, double opt-in recipient list. If you have the latter, then you are more likely to get a far greater ROI from your campaign. This though can’t be taken lightly, your self-built list will be a lot less effective if you are not regular with your emails immediately afterwards.

People need to start being contacted as soon as they sign up. If this doesn’t happen and you leave it a month or so before contacting them, you run the risk of people forgetting about signing up to you and not opening your emails (or worse, marking you as spam).

Email Content

Make sure the content of your email is legitimate sounding. As the email filters advance in stopping spammers, so do the spammers evolve in getting round the problems. What has started to happen now is that perfectly normal words are being brought up as spam by the filters. This means you have to be inventive in the wording you use and work around these filters. As a legitimate company though, this shouldn’t be a problem as long as you stick to these golden rules.

Avoid Spammy words such as free, click here, free shipping, Bonus, Discount, Saving…. There are many more words but you get the idea. If you want a guide on what not to put in, just check your personal bulk folder and have a look!

DON’T SHOUT in your emails. Using excessive amounts of capital letters in a newsletter is bad news. This will trigger the filters straight away and people are getting wise to this and will consider your email to be trying to sell them things instead of letting them know that you have products available which may interest them.

Don’t get too excited!!!!! Don’t start throwing exclamation marks all over the shop. This is very much like the last point with shouting. Spam filters will pick this up straight away and people are once again wise to it and will turn off as soon as they see anything spammy like that.

Email Design

A well designed email campaign will do wonders for your open rates and revenue returned. A poorly designed campaign will reflect badly upon the image of a company and can cheapen the brand itself, causing a lot of harm to the image of your company. This is where you have to be really careful because no matter how good the message is inside, people will judge the design of your email as it is the first thing they will notice.

This is put into better perspective if you think that there will be many other companies doing exactly the same as you; and if your email branding is inferior to theirs, you will be losing out on custom just because of peoples perception of your company.

Another really good tip is to create an email template using good HTML coding. By this I mean don’t use programs such as Word to create your campaign. When you copy and paste text from word it attaches a lot of hidden script behind it that gets embedded into the HTML coding. Spam filters don’t like this and will trash your email straight away as a lot of spammers use this process.

If you are to construct a HTML email for your campaign, you need to make sure that you have a good balance between image and text. This also means that you can’t just create a pdf file and paste that into the email. You need there to be a higher ratio of text to image. If you’re not sure how much is acceptable, then keep trialing your email through online filters. Set yourself up a hotmail, yahoo and gmail account and send your email through to it. If it’s getting in the spam folders, you have some work to do.

I’ll give you an example of what a good email campaign should look like. The example is a newsletter from St George’s Bristol (a concert venue). This newsletter is easily identifiable to the brand of St George’s, which helps the recipient to recognise the email and will be more inclined to open it. On top of that, the quality of the email is high. The general layout is simple and not overcrowded, whilst also looking fresh and modern.

The content has been written with the original principle of the campaign in mind. It has informed the recipients of upcoming events and news from the venue, and in turn offered a non-aggressive sales campaign that will not have subscribers reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Tel: 01604 790007
email: info@mailingmanager.co.uk