Email marketing is proven to be one of the most cost-effective approaches to attract and retain consumers, which helps maintaining a healthy business. Outbound email marketing is the way to promote any business online by sending emails to current or potential customers (Chaffey et al., 2009). A reason for that would be the high level of approach given to an individual, which supports the one-to-one connection, generating higher response rates in the long run. Also, email marketing provides a completely controllable content platform to monitor when and who opens the email, and their followed actions once the message was received.
Guide on how to create the right Email Marketing Campaign
According to (Yapp, 2015) email campaigns are most successful when they are permission based, well-timed and present offers that customers truly want. An email campaign should be done well following these simple guidelines
Permission based
This would indicate that users have given their ‘green light’ in the form of permission to be approached by your email. To get their permission it’s important to be clear about product offerings, and being specific about your request to add them to the email list, as we don’t want unhappy and unsubscribed customers.
According to Godin (1999), permission-based marketing has three main features: anticipating (consumers expect to hear about brand), individuality (marketing messages directly addressed and customized to each target client) and relevance (the client receives information that interests him that are relevant to himself)
*Quick risk note to consider in relation:
- Buying marketers’ email lists could potentially hurt the business and put it at risk;
- If many customers report for unwanted/spam mail, the business may face challenges to send future email marketing campaigns, which would impact the whole franchise.
Well-timed
Think about your audiences’ lifestyle, previous response levels of campaigns and the frequency of sent emails. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and see through their eyes. Think about how your business fits to their lifestyle in order to appropriately set email timings when releasing the campaign.
This triggers the next step: to do some analytics. Check past email results for identifying time slots, and certain buyer behavior as to when users open the message.
Quick frequency tip: don’t appear in their inbox more than once a week, and consider letting users know when to expect hearing from you. Through this approach, they will have the exciting time to lookout for your email!
Give people what they want
Do more of what works by keeping track of your receipts and email analytics to determine the best offers. Keep the less effective campaigns away, and focus on the productive side of learning and educating yourself about your customers buying pattern – always try to meet their needs and wants through promotion, providing engaged content.
Risks to consider when doing an Email Campaign
Spamming
Sending emails to consumers who aren’t subscribed to the email list is against the CAN-SPAM Act. This could result in spamming reports, getting black-listed and banned, which is why starting your mail list from scratch is the best option.
Reputation
The business reputation is on the line every time an email campaign is sent out, which is the reason a company should always be genuine with their content.
These points would help to consider your email campaign adopted by the CAN-SPAM Act:
-Don’t use misleading or false header information
-Don’t use a deceptive subject line
-Messages must include a valid physical address
-Providing an opt-out/unsubscribe button
Read more here on ‘5 Tips to Get Your Email Marketing Campaign Started’: https://www.hostpapa.co.uk/blog/marketing/email-101-benefits-risks-email-marketing-selection-small-businesses/
Why is it important to consider those risks?
In many countries, companies must obtain permission from consumers before sending an email, otherwise they will be categorized as spam (Morimoto&Chang, 2006)
Risks with reputation
Budac (2016) suggests checking the bounce rate when doing analytics as the percentage of unshipped emails (due to the existence of email addresses which are not correct or existing) is highly important. They should be quickly removed from the email lists to not lose credibility and to not damage the reputation of the brand.
Risks regarding optimization, content and clear call-to-action
According to the study Consumer Views of Email Marketing (BlueHornet, 2015), 42.3% of respondents assessed they would delete and 4.2% would unsubscribe from an email received on a mobile device if it does not look good on display. Mobile optimization is important to retain customers and avoid unresponsive content. This risk could be avoided with a/b testing on subject lines, mobile content optimization, and evaluation of user experience through design and testing. You might check some evaluating tools such as: InVision, Balsamiq or Pidoco.
More on evaluating user experience here: https://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/business/14-best-tools-for-evaluating-user-experience
In other words, the content of the email can be very good but if the user had other expectations (there is a mismatch between the two: the subject line and the content of the email or the subject line was too vague), this leads to a negative attitude towards the content and therefore to taking the necessary measures.
This is why using Content Marketing Matrix would be useful to create relevant content and use customer data across channels to help increase the relevance of your messages through personalisation (see figure 1)
Figure 1. Source: Smart Insights
According to Budac, (2016) the content should be engaging and show what is expected of people to do in the next 4-5 seconds: buy, learn more, to sign in etc. otherwise they would lose interest. The rate of content withdrawn is very high and this is as much important as the mobile phone is the primary device for accessing emails as shown on figure 2.
Figure 2. Source: litmus.com
To conclude, even the best digital strategies can fail if the execution is poor – search, social and email marketing. This is why measuring conversions, visits or renunciation in marketing campaign is extremely important – because it represents the feedback from subscribers and their analysis enables further optimization and improvement of email marketing.
Sources:
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Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012). Digital Marketing: Strategy. Implementation and Practice: Pearson
Godin, S. (1999). Permission marketing. New York, NY: Simon&Schuster
HostPapa Blog. (2018). Benefits & Risks to Email Marketing Selection. [online] Available at: https://www.hostpapa.co.uk/blog/marketing/email-101-benefits-risks-email-marketing-selection-small-businesses/ [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]
Indian Advertising Media & Marketing News – exchange4media. (2018). Guest Column: 10 tips for a successful email marketing campaign: Kunal Tomar. [online] Available at: http://www.exchange4media.com/Digital/Guest-Column10-tips-for-a-successful-email-marketing-campaignKunal-Tomar_63691.html [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018]
Morimoto M., & Chang S. (2006). Consumers’ attitudes toward unsolicited commercial email and postal direct mail marketing methods: Intrusiveness, perceived loss of control, and irritation, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 7(1), 1-11
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