Effective Email Campaigns: What You Can Learn From The Experts

Email marketing can be one of the most effective marketing platforms for your business. Consumers prefer receiving advertising via their email inboxes and more online sales are made via email marketing content than by social media or other digital marketing efforts. Additionally, you can create content that is only relevant to your audience.

Unfortunately, spamming has tarnished the reputation of email marketing and as spamming is easier than more complex campaigns, its lure is often too much to avoid. However, spamming your audience will never generate long lasting, financially viable relationships. More effective best practices and tactics must be found.

There are many organisations and individuals who are using email marketing content to generate the majority of their sales. Their tactics are an important lesson for all small businesses. So what lessons can be learnt and how can you implement them in your campaigns?

1. Effective Database Maintenance

If you want a successful and cost effective email marketing campaign, you have to ensure that the contact database you are using is maintained. You should remove contacts that aren’t going to spend any money and update those on your list so it is properly segregated.

Maintenance of your list needs to happen after every email has been sent out. The first step is to remove any contacts that have opted out, then any contacts which have bounced back before finally removing contacts that haven’t opened an email for the last 10 reports.

Then you need to move contacts depending on what actions they have taken. If for instance they have made a purchase, move them to a current customer list.

2. Target Your Campaigns

With a segregated contacts list you can create content that is highly targeted towards different types of contacts. This has several advantages, firstly it means that content can be better received and have a higher chance of being acted upon by the receiver. In addition, it allows you to reduce costs of your email marketing campaigns by only sending content to those who are likely to respond to it.

How do you target your campaigns? Each segregation must have a unique but unifying marketable quality about it. For instance, you could have marketing material for those who are only close to certain geographical areas or those who have bought other products that you offer.

Segregation doesn’t have to be based on just one element. It can have two cross referenced elements, for instance, those close to a geographical area who are also a past customer.

3. Keeping It Simple

One of the best tips for email marketing campaigns is to keep your emails simple. The idea of the message is to display your one key message: whether that is to buy a specific product or to get the contact to perform an action. Therefore, that message must take precedence in the email, not its design or a pretty picture.

Keeping it simple can also help you increase the deliverability of your messages to inboxes and not promotional or spam boxes. Many large email providers (Gmail, Yahoo!, etc) have filters that lock out messages that have lots of images, links or fancy designs. Also, too much design can be very distracting to your audience.

Consider using simple designs with at most one picture. If you need to include more information, use one link to send the reader to a page on your site to convey it.

Conclusion

Email marketing is an effective marketing platform for your small business. To get the best results you should take some of the key tactics from the best email marketers out there. The above three tips are some of the best to help you refine your campaigns and achieve financially rewarding results.

What tips do you have for running a successful email marketing campaign? What have been your best results?

Let us know in the comments below.

Take action:

• Start maintaining your email contacts list.
• Segregate your contacts.
• Re-design your emails so they are simpler.

Tagged in: email design, email list, email marketing, Email Newsletters, Email Strategy