Has your company sent out emails to clients only to be ignored? Feel like you don’t know what is making them ineffective

We have all opened our mail box and seen the long list of spam emails , which we then proceed to discard and never think about again. If you aren’t effectively grabbing the attention of your target audience then this post will help you to construct a successful email marketing campaign to flourish your customer database , and grab the attention of your existing contacts.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a cost effective technique of directly reaching a vast amount of specific consumers, in a time efficient manner, email has therefore become a major direct channel for marketers.(Cases et al, 2009). It is highly used by most businesses today in order to maintain contact with consumers and keep them informed of activities and promotions occurring.

Unlike the dreaded spam emails, your email marketing should be permission based, which according to Godin (1999) allows consumers to freely choose to give their consent to receive marketing information. The key aspect to getting permission marketing right is acknowledging your customers interests and knowing their information needs.(Sterne and Priore,2000).

It should be kept in mind that customers attitudes toward direct mail may vary to others in their segment, as it is very much dependent both on the characteristics of the receivers, such as their perceptions of privacy risk, and on the characteristics of the sender, for example the reputation of the sender.(De Wulf and Vergult, 1998)

6 Steps to creating a valuable email marketing campaign

Creating an effective email marketing campaign is not as easy as you may think; here are 6 tips to get you on your way.

• Planning is key

Plan your email campaign, consider who is your target audience, what are your objectives and how do you plan on measuring the effectiveness of your campaign.

• Write an enticing subject line

The subject line is the first details the consumer will see before deciding whether to delete or not! Keep it catchy and straight to the point.

• Be personalised and relevant

Use information you have obtained about your target audience and use this to make it relevant and attractive for them.

• Provide a landing page link

Provide a landing page to convert click throughs to leads and conversions.

• Keep it crisp

Keep the layout of the email simple with not an overwhelming amount of text embedded; use pictures to attract your audience’s attention.

• Test,Test,Test

Make sure before sending out your email it works properly on each platform such as mobile etc and that on each email provider it  appears the same.

Google Analytics is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign. The analytics to use are:

 Bounce Rate

Delivery Rate

Click Rate

Conversion Rate

Need some inspiration?

If you’re feeling stuck on where to start here are some examples of companies who are making us want to sign up to their email marketing campaigns!

American Apparel

American Apparel stood out to me when scrolling through my emails. They have innovatively created a promotional campaign around international women’s day, by offering 20% off on women’s range only on that day, this is where planning has worked out really well. They have made a great use of a selection of women’s portrait pictures in a selection of their clothing, highlighting the fact its women’s day and you could get yourself 20% off these great goodies! There is minimal text embedded, apart from the necessary which informs you that today and today only you can receive 20% off women’s wear in store and online, with a shop now button taking you through to the women’s wear landing page.

 Asos

What i loved about this was the element of personalisation. I frequently shop from the petite section on ASOS, so now they have started emailing me the ‘Petite Lowdown’ – a collection of all the latest petite trends from an ASOS stylist. Personalising emails to suit your customers needs will increase the chance of them going through to your website. That is why its also very important to provide landing page click links!!

Sorry about the poor quality of the email campaigns. Thanks for reading, i hope you are feeling more confident towards creating an enticing, valuable email campaign for your business!!

References 

Cases,A. Fournier,C.Dubois,P. (2010). Web Site spill over to email campaigns: The role of privacy, trust and shoppers’ attitudes. Journal of Business Research. 63 (14), 993-999.

DeWulf K, Vergult C. Antecedents and Consequences of Irritation and Attitude towards Direct Mail in Consumer Markets, Direct Mark Ed’ Conf, San Francisco; 1998.

Godin, S. (1999), Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends into Customers, Simon and Schuster Publishing Company,New York, N.Y

Sterne, J. and A. Priore (2000), Email Marketing: Using Email to Reach your Target Audience and Build Customer Relationship, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, New York, N.Y