15 February 2010

Tips for more effective Email Marketing

Submitted by: Carla
{pp}Email Marketing should form an integral part of your marketing strategy, as it’s a great tool for establishing relationships, loyalty and ongoing communication with customers.
Every brand, no matter how big or small, can benefit from Email Marketing. Below we have listed a few tips to help you make the most of your Email Marketing campaign.

Below we have listed a few tips to help you make the most of your Email Marketing campaign.

Ask for permission
Never send an email message or newsletter to recipients who did not opt to receive your marketing communication. Having a large but disinterested subscriber base is of no use to anybody. Spammy messages are quickly ignored, deleted or filtered out by spam filters, and spammers are not well regarded in any industry. Sending unsolicited marketing emails harms your brand’s reputation and potential customers’ perceptions of your brand. Thus, always make sure recipients want to receive your newsletter and make it easy for them to unsubscribe if they wish to.

Keep your subscriber list up-to-date and targeted
Ensure your subscriber list is up to date by checking which emails bounce, or which addresses are no longer in use. To boost ROI, divide your subscriber list up and target your newsletter recipients based on their interests and preferences. By offering your readers content they are interested in, you will not only increase your mailers’ opening rates, but also your customers’ trust.

Increase opening rate
The newsletter’s subject line influences the open–rate. Hence it is important to make sure the subject line is catchy and relevant to the newsletter’s content. Keep the subject line short and try different approaches to see which returns the best results.

Newsletter timing and content
Experiment by sending newsletters on different days of the week and at different times of the day to see which combination receives the best opening and response rates. Furthermore, provide your readers with informative, good quality content and make sure that calls to action are clearly visible. Keep the newsletter short and sweet and proof-read your content a few times to make sure that there are no errors.

It’s in the (contact) details
This may sound obvious, but many businesses don’t take this aspect of email marketing into consideration. You need to make it easy for your readers to contact you through your newsletter. Include your telephone number, website URL and physical address as well as links to your brand’s social media profiles. The email address you use to send the newsletter should be checked regularly so that you can respond quickly to queries.

Monitor and tweak
Measure the overall response rate per email campaign and track what people are doing with your newsletter. In your email management dashboard you should be able to see how many people have opened the newsletter, how many have clicked on links in the newsletter, how many times it’s been forwarded and so forth. Use this information to determine what your readers like and dislike and use this information strategically.

The above list is not all-inclusive but should provide a good starting point for making your Email Marketing campaigns more effective. If you think your Email Marketing campaigns needs sprucing up, contact the AlterSage team. Whether you are looking for an email software solution, a fully-managed solution or simply newsletter content creation, we will gladly assist.

About AlterSage
AlterSage offers tailored online marketing solutions that achieve targeted exposure for your website. Goal focussed and driven by return on investment, services include search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, web design and development, persuasive web copywriting, brand building, conversion analysis and many more.
AlterSage
18 Roeland Street
First Floor
Cape Town
8001

[0ffice] (+27 21] 462 0036
[Email] This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
[Website] www.altersage.com