Whilst a fantastic and low cost medium, one great challenge with e-mail campaigns is that if you run too many and importantly too many bad ones, you run an even greater risk of more and more people just dumping your mail – true it happens anyway, but well researched and well targeted mail campaigns can still show a good return.
Before I progress, remember the (perhaps painfully) obvious, that there are a plethora ways to present your campaign – images, different type faces, flashing bits and bobs and more, so here are a few sensible, practical ideas for success…
- Bear in mind what end result you want to achieve… sell something, get sales enquiries etc.
- Adopt the state of mind that “if I had the God given right to give my customer exactly what they need from me, what would it be?” THAT, should be your core sales message.
- Consider that the sales message of your mail should appear a bit less than one third of the way down the page/screen.
- Remember that the easiest font to read is lower case and if anyone in your marketing dept argues (and they will) ask them why paperback books and newspapers are lower case?
- Justified text looks good in print, but disrupts the spacing, hence flow of your message – try reading it!
- A mixture of lower case and upper case will again, only make your message more difficult to read.
- Times New Roman font is often a default and thus people rush to use it, but it is not easy to read because it was developed for the very narrow columns of a broadsheet newspaper
- Create a range of e-mails with different layout etc and send them to a small selection of your mailing list… say 100 or 500, then carefully monitor the proportion of mails that are opened and responded to.
- Following testing (as above), the format of the most successful campaign should then be followed and sent to your whole mailing list.
- Carefully monitor the results, bounce rate, opening rate and calculate your return and success – which will be notably higher if you’ve remembered these tips.
Oh! And good luck, please lets us know if this helped you!
