Useful Email Marketing Tips

If you sign up a new subscriber, you should establish communication with them as soon as possible. If you wait too long, the subscriber may forget about you and treat your eventual email campaign as spam.

Here’s a key statistic from Marketing Sherpa (found via Constant Contact):

“Not communicating within the first 60 days of signup increases your chances of being labeled as SPAM by over 50%.”

Sending a welcome message is a good way to avoid this problem.

Jeanniey Mullen of ClickZ put together an excellent list of email marketing tips broken down by four common problems that many email marketers face. Her tips are summarized below.

Problem 1: The results of email marketing campaigns aren’t justifying the cost of running them.

• Pare down your list so that you’re only sending to your most active subscribers.
• Change your copy from hard-sell to soft-sell, or vice-versa. Switch it up.
• Make your emails more social and track the results.

Problem 2: A large percentage of your list is unresponsive.

• Send a simple text-only email that asks your subscribers for feedback.
• Use your website to entice people to read and/or subscribe to your email list.
• Install retargeting campaigns around Yahoo inboxes.

Problem 3: You’re in ecommerce and your customers are not placing enough products in their shopping carts.

• Add a promotional link at the bottom of customer service emails.
• Add a coupon code or opt-in link to your confirmation emails.
• Send a short survey to remind subscribers that you exist.

Problem 4: You’re having trouble growing your email list.

• Add in opt-in link to any print campaigns that you’re running.
• Partner with another company to run a giveaway or contest.
• Enlist your most active subscribers to spread the word.

While most people use email programs that allow for HTML, some people are restricted to receiving emails in plain-text format. Also, some email services default to the plain-text version of an email.

Email Transit put together nine tips on how to design effective plain text emails and they’re included below:

1. Space out the sections of your message roughly equivalent to the html-based design. If there are logical breaks in your html email, make those same breaks in the plain text version.
2. Use underscores to divide sections of an email into logical pieces. Also use underscores to denote section titles or headlines.
3. Keep headlines to 50 characters or less per line.
4. Keep body copy to 70 characters or less per line. If your sentence is too long, make logical breaks to force a new line and avoid potential left to right scrolling issues.
5. If you have an ‘In this Issue’ section in your HTML message, put the title of the email at the top of the plain text version, followed by the ‘In this Issue’ content and finally, your message.
6. Add a leading http:// to all web addresses that don’t already feature it. This will oftentimes make the link clickable in a plain text message in many email clients.
7. Replace HTML-based characters with plain text replacements (I.E. ® with (R), ™ with TM) .
8. Replace bullets with asterisks or other symbols.
9. Replace any hex codes for punctuation with their plain text equivalent. (I.E. & #8220; & #8221; would become “”).

If you have a blog or website that supplements your email marketing campaigns, you can use it to your advantage by reusing older content as new content for your email newsletter subscribers.

It’s important to figure out how much the readership of your blog and email newsletter overlaps, because people often don’t want to read articles more than once. You can avoid this problem by reconfiguring the blog article for your email newsletter and by adding in some new material around the old blog post.

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Relevance is a key part of any email marketing campaign — some would even say it’s the key part of any campaign. Loren McDonald at MediaPost’s Email Insider, using feedback from others in the email industry, made a list of what makes an email campaign relevant. Here’s the summary:

Send your email at the right time. It has to be:

• Wanted.
• Trusted and recognized.
• Expected.
• Delivered.
• Timely.
• Surprising.

Use the right message in your campaigns. The message should be:

• Usable.
• Personalized.
• Differentiated.
• Valued.
• Humanized.

Read more on each of the points above at the Email Insider website.

If your emails don’t get delivered, it doesn’t matter what your emails say — no one will read them anyway — so focusing on deliverability is key. Blue Sky Factory developed a list of six steps to improve your deliverability. Here’s a quick summary:

1) Hire a professional email service provider and work with them to get your emails delivered.
2) To optimize your IP address, send regular emails to a group of active subscribers.
3) Create content that is useful to subscribers and isn’t “spammy.”
4) Use consistent headers and subject lines.
5) Use all the deliverability tools that your email service provider offers.
6) Evaluate the results of your campaign and continue to test.

Using countdowns (ex: only 14 days until awesome product launch) in your email campaign can be a good way to create urgency to take action. It also informs your subscribers and in some cases can even create a sense of anticipation.

They’re frequently used in retail email campaigns, but with a little creativity they can work in other campaigns as well.

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Integrating social media and email marketing can be difficult, but it’s worth the effort. In a recent article, Stephanie Miller at Return Path offered seven tips for improving your deliverability and response rate by using social media.

Here’s a quick summary:

1) Match the content to the medium.
Content doesn’t work equally well across all mediums, choose your medium wisely.

2) Make it easy to share.
Include prominent share with your network links that are well-integrated.

3) Host your own social community.
Invite conversation among subscribers and use the content to fuel future discussions.

4) Tie it back to email.
Put opt-in forms for your email list on all your social media accounts.

5) Offer choice.
Let people mix and match your social media and email offerings as much as possible.

6) Celebrate your listening skills.
Listen to your subscribers and let them know that you’re committed to doing it.

7) Participate.
Engage people on all your social accounts and participate in the community that you’re building.

Social media is a powerful way to amplify your message across the internet and it’s only going to become more important in the future. SimplyCast put together a list of four things to consider when combining email marketing with social media.

Here’s a quick summary:

1) Decide if your email is shareable.
Some email is interesting enough to share, but it’s possible that some emails that you send will only be of interest to your subscribers. Don’t waste your efforts on those kind of emails.

2) Decide how you want to encourage your subscribers to share.
Simply adding sharing links to your email won’t be enough. Come up with ways to encourage your subscribers to click and share. You may want to consider adding incentives into the mix.

3) Which social sites should you have your subscribers share your content on?
You should figure out which social networks your subscribers use most and then try to highlight those options in your share with your network section. A long list of options can be counterproductive because the most popular networks may get lost in the shuffle.

4) Never stop testing.
Keep testing your emails to see what methods work best for increasing the amount of sharing that your subscribers do.

Email marketing as an industry definitely has its problems with credibility. This is thanks in large part to the efforts of spammers across the globe.

The Retail Email Blog has a good tip to counteract this and boost your campaign’s credibility with your subscribers.

They point out that magazines are a more trusted medium than email and so your campaign credibility will get a boost if you can bring in a magazine brand. The example given was an email sent by Ann Taylor with a testimonial from Oprah magazine.

This strategy will work with any medium that people trust more than email marketing.