Email Marketing: The basics for a successful campaign

The rise of marketing automation strategies has fuelled the growth in digital marketing. With email marketing being the primary medium used, it’s vital to get this right. 66% of people that receive marketing emails make purchases as a direct result of the email that they have received. However, 62% of recipients won’t even receive the email due to aggressive spam filters. With this in mind, email marketing can be a very effective way of reaching your potential audience if you stick to the ground rules. Here are a few things to remember:

Direct your audience to your site

Using links within your email is a great way to direct readers to where you want them to end. Including a link to a page relating to the email topic (whether this is an event or specific product or service) will help recipients to get to that page easily and result in more sales.

Including a link to your website in your email signature is an easy way to do this without overloading your audience with hyperlinks. The design has been set for hyperlinks so make sure your links stand out and keep the colour blue.

Comply with best practice marketing

When you’re completing an email marketing campaign, there are certain requirements that need to be followed. For example, providing your recipients with a way to unsubscribe is a necessity. Failing to do this will result in frustrated potential customers and in some cases, legal action.

Don’t panic – giving the option to unsubscribe won’t drive people away. It’ll actually assure people that you’re not trying to spam them and that you care about their interests and making their experience of your brand enjoyable and convenient. Using the word “unsubscribe” could cause your email to land in the junk. Instead try “if you no longer want to receive our emails then visit our site here”.

Checking your content is important too. You don’t want to get your email landing in people’s junk folders before they even see it. Take time over your email content to ensure that it doesn’t look like spam, but looks like a personal email. HTML and stylisation can make your email look great but can also display poorly in some email clients. Test and check to avoid errors.

Carefully consider the body of your email

Many people flick through their email inbox and skim-read emails to decide whether they’re important and need to be read in more detail. Keeping your email short and to the point will stop readers missing any important information within the email. Long “essay-style” emails are highly likely to be deleted straight away, with the large volume of content stopping your audience from engaging.

Choose the layout of your email carefully and remember that everyone will be viewing your email using different devices. As this will change how your email is viewed, it is important to set up your campaign so that it scales to browser. Responsive HTML design improves user experience and will help your audience to engage with your content.

Make sure your images compliment the campaign

Many recipients of your email may not even see images that you include, so don’t use them without a reason. Instead of concentrating on using images, focus on the rest of your content. If you do include images, make them meaningful and use the ‘ALT’ text function so that alternative text is displayed when the image is not able to be viewed on some devices. Another clever way to add links back to your website is to place a link on any images within your email.

Initiating your campaign

Make sure that you check your campaign against the previous points before sending it out. You might choose to send it in one go, or in batch settings to a larger number of recipients. For help with your email marketing, get in touch today on 020 7100 0726.