Best Practices for Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns can be a vital part of a successful marketing strategy, but to achieve the results you want, your message must attract and hold your customers’ attention. You should first determine who your primary audience is and the organizations that you will target. Create a look and feel for your content that will appeal to the needs and preferences of your audience instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach.
Ideally, you should keep your design simple with a compelling call to action. Use no more than two font styles, or three at the most, that are sized to be easily readable. The design should be proportional and sized to no more than 500 to 650 pixels wide so that recipients using smaller monitors are not required to scroll horizontally to view your message. Choose contrasting but coordinated colors to draw the eye, reinforce an element, and focus attention on the call to action. Keep the background color neutral.
Use images judiciously to direct and maintain focus on the written content. Large images should be kept towards the bottom of the message so that the most important content stays above the fold. Also, make sure to use HTML “alt text” to add an accurate description of the image in case the image doesn’t display properly.
Design the call to action button using a color that makes it stand out. Always test different calls to action and different text on the button to see what provides the greatest number of conversions for each of your email marketing campaigns.
Testing Your Email Message
Prior to sending your email to your list, send it to friends, family, and colleagues using as many different email applications as you can. Make sure all of the links and buttons work and that any tracking you’ve installed is also working. You should also check your content against multiple spam filters.
Most email cloud applications, such as ConstantContact and MailChimp, provide an A/B option that gives you the ability to send two emails, each with different content, subject lines, or calls to action. Once you send the emails, you can analyze the results to find out which subject line resulted in the largest open rate and which buttons and links were clicked the most. This will help you determine the most effective email messages and formats.
Use Behavioral Targeting
Broadcast email strategies generally produce an average open rate of about 20 percent and a conversion rate of about 1 percent. However, when marketers actively target their email campaigns to specific behavioral and demographic characteristics, they can produce more than 18 times the results that broadcast messages produce, according to Jupiter Research.
Behavioral targeting can also help build effective remarketing campaigns, such as sending follow-up emails to people who have engaged in specific actions with previous emails including opening an email, looking at specific pages, or clicking on specific links. Any combination of these actions can be used to dynamically generate and send future behaviorally targeted email.
Respect your Recipients’ Privacy and Time
Comply with the laws that relate to email marketing, such as the CAN-SPAM laws and always obtain people’s permission before you email them. It’s best to build your own mailing list to be sure that everyone on the list actually wants to hear from you. Your response rate will be considerably higher, and since the list is typically smaller, the cost of delivery will be lower. Make sure to keep your list updated to remove invalid addresses and addresses for those who have unsubscribed. Remind recipients that they are receiving email from you because they subscribed by including an unobtrusive and brief message. You should also always include an unsubscribe or opt out option.
Create a plan to dictate frequency and content. Don’t send too often and make sure your message is relevant to your audience. One of the biggest reasons why people unsubscribe from a mailing list is because they receive emails too frequently, followed by receiving emails with content that they don’t need to value.
