Email Marketing Best Practice
There is no guarantee that people will read your newsletter or email. In fact, if you get the key points wrong you may as well not bother sending the email in the first place.
We have put together a few pointers to bear in mind when developing an email newsletter. Most people receive tens, if not hundreds of emails each day, so the most important factor when generating promotional emails is that it must be easy to receive and easy to read.
Easy to read
Potential customers do not spend hours mulling over their inbox, putting things to one side to read later. Your email will be deemed read-worthy or deleted almost instantly. It should therefore give the user access to the information swiftly and succinctly allowing them to make a positive decision without having to trawl through an essay.
Don’t overcrowd
If your eNewsletter is crammed full of third party links, advertising and information that is irrelevant to the main focus of the email, apart from causing long lasting damage to your subscribers eyesight, you will seriously undermine the integrity of your promotion.
Don’t push your luck
Bombarding your subscribers with masses of email too frequently will damage the campaign, reduce the effectiveness of the information and before long the only click t roughs you’ll receive will be to opt-out. In general it is advisable to keep promotional mailings down to less than two per week.
Testing campaign
Do not be impatient and cobble together the first thing that comes into your head. Many companies, having decided to produce an eNewsletter, dive in head first and flood their market with a deluge of special offers and promotions. If this is your organisation. Stop!
Understandably, you want high impact with hard hitting promotions. But this approach can seriously damage your efforts. A more effective approach is to sample the market with smaller mailings designed to judge effectiveness. email recipients are fickle.
Put the wrong information in the From and the Subject lines and you may have the recipient reaching for the delete key without even seeing your beautifully crafted special offer. By sending smaller quantities as test campaigns, you can refine the approach, so that an eventual larger mailing hits the nail on the head.
Give the recipient something to do
Giving the recipient a reason to take action should be at the heart of your newsletter or email. You cannot simply come up with some interesting facts and expect sales. Having grabbed their
attention by being informative you need to build on that attention and use it to your advantage, harnessing it with a link to the full story contained on your website.
This means that you have not only got them to visit your website exposing them to all of the products and services you offer, but also by tracking which items they have clicked, you are building a profile which can be used in further targeted marketing.