Article
What we've learnt about email marketing
by Andy Hinder
Andy Hinder shares valuable insights to help you achieve great results from your email marketing.
We’ve been planning and executing successful email campaigns for over a decade. Highlights include:
- 32% year-on-year increase in conversions for Debenhams
- Return on investment of over 150% for Audi
- Over 11% response to Mark Warner offers
- 45% clickthrough rate for our very first email for Liberty
You could be achieving great results from your email campaigns. Here’s how...
Deliver relevant engagement
building long-term relationships with prospects and customers that will maximise their value
Email marketing is about much more than generating instant sales. Its real strength lies in building long-term relationships with prospects and customers that will maximise their value. To build any relationship takes time, which is why it is essential to always tailor the content of your emails to deliver relevant material to each customer segment. Content that satisfies a need, stimulates and engages.
Build a quality database
You want to communicate with people who are interested in your product or service and get them to opt-in to receive your email communication. But how? First you need to demonstrate the benefits they’ll enjoy by signing-up.
Consider showing them what they’ll be receiving by providing a link to a recent email. And tell them how often they can expect to hear from you. While you’re at it, make sure the sign-up form is uber-simple and really easy to spot. Of course, if you’ve got an offline presence like a store, make sure you use it to give customers an opportunity to join your email database.
Communicate powerfully
focus on relevance, frequency and the creative. In that order.
To run a successful email program you should focus on relevance, frequency and the creative. In that order. Firstly, to ensure relevance, segment your audience according to their areas of interest. The best way to find out what will appeal? Ask them.
Secondly, to gain valuable insight into the optimum sending frequency for your audience, you could ask each individual how often they’d like to hear from you and then segment appropriately. Another method is to test different frequencies to see which delivers the best ROI.
Thirdly comes the thorny issue of effective creative. There are no hard and fast rules for this - just a few areas that you must pay special attention to. The subject line must be sufficiently interesting for the recipient to open the email. The recipient must easily understand the email’s content even if no images appear. After all, 50% of email systems don’t display images automatically.
Your emails must be highly usable so that the recipient can find their way around without thought. Confuse people and they’ll quickly lose interest. The key is to constantly test different creative executions to discover what works best.
Develop robust analytics
integrate your email distribution system with your website analytics tool.
Tracking your email activity is critical to measuring success. But how should you do it? Clearly you need to track the basics: the deliverability rate, the open rate, the click-through rate, the unsubscribe rate and spam complaints. However, a vital area that is commonly overlooked is the so-called ‘multi-channel’ analytics. This involves observing what email recipients actually do when they arrive on your website. Do they visit the places you want them to? Do they convert? Without tracking this, it’s impossible to get a real sense of how effective your emails actually are. To observe this multi-channel behaviour, you must integrate your email distribution system with your website analytics tool.
Discover more
In this article, I’ve barely scratched the surface. To discover more of what we’ve learnt about effective email marketing, please email me or give me a ring on 020 8871 2656.
