By Elmer on June 5, 2009

Email marketing is an important aspect of online marketing. Many times it’s poorly executed, and results are not measured. Success in an EDM campaign is not gauged by the percentage of emails successfully sent. Success means additional subscribers, more buyers, or more downloads driven from actions prompted by email messages. The following elements may help your campaigns become more successful.

Easily Recognizable “From:” Field
It is important that recipients know where an email blast comes from. It gives brand awareness that brings confidence to recipients that the email they’re about to open is from reputable sources. Since they subscribed to the newsletter (”BeansBox E-Newsletter” instead of  an unknown employee named “Elmer Cagape”), they’ll likely to open the message.

Attractive Teaser Message at Subject Line
It is easier for recipients to decide whether to open an email or not by giving them hints on what content to expect through the subject line. Of course we want them to open and read out message, so it is always good to review our subject line and ask ourselves, does this subject line entail prompt action?

Example: Last Day Today at Sogo Sale: Up to 70% Off

Put some sense of urgency on the subject line but don’t overdo it.

Working Unsubscribe Form
When subscribers feel they don’t want to receive our emails anymore it doesn’t always mean they don’t like our messages. They might have changed their work roles or simply don’t have enough time to read them anymore. Respect them and allow them to unsubscribe (read: let’s provide a working version that facilitates subscribers to opt-out from our mailing list). The good thing about removing them from the list is that we now have a leaner and more targeted recipients. Many email marketing services charge per email address, so keeping them is also costing us money. Worse, they’ll always be ready to click the “This is spam” button and that act could derail the whole campaign when email servers start sending messages into the spam folder.

Brief and Concise Message
By using easy to understand terminologies and relating to audience in a brief and straight to the point manner, recipients will find it easier to respond to our call.

Targeted Landing Page
If it’s necessary to convey our message in a series of paragraphs, it’s a good idea to drive our audience into a certain web page that continues the story that began in the email message. Plus there are less restrictions on web pages than in emails so we can add Flash animations or JavaScripts if necessary.

Alternative Viewing Page
Providing an alternative viewing page is good safeguard especially if emails were not tested extensively for browser compatibility and display is cluttered (Lotus Notes does a pretty bad rendering of emails). This is implemented often at the top of the message: “Please click here if you can’t read the message below”.

Encourage Forwarding
It’s not a bad idea to try to encourage forwarding of the message by placing a short blurb “if you think this message is useful to a friend or colleague, please pass it on” at the bottom of the email. Let’s not assume one will automatically forward the message even if they know someone might find it useful. A simple reminder can go a long way.

Prominent Call to Action Buttons
Placement if call to action buttons like “Subscribe Now”, “Buy Now” or “Download Now” is crucial in successfully making these conversions happen. Place these links or buttons in a prominent location, make font sizes a little bigger or use colors that attract attention quite easily.

Reasonable Sending Frequency
If we generate messages frequently, let’s pause for a moment and imagine if we were the subscriber, would we be happy or annoyed to receive many emails on such a short period of time?

Personalized Messages
Don’t forget to include subscriber’s first name, if available, when address him/her in the email copy. It is like receiving an email from a friend. You usually don’t get a “Hi,” only. After all, it’s good to have personalized service, right?

Targeted Sending
If you have 35,000 newsletter subscribers, chances are there will be a fraction of them who prefer to receive specific subject and ignore others. In order to implement this we need to set up custom fields that will capture certain interests. For example if we have a magazine that talks about gardening, home improvement or cooking, some subscribers might like to receive home cooking-related updates. They can then fill up the form and check “Cooking”. All the other types of messages will not be sent to them. It saves money in a “pay-per-email” email sender, and be assured that the mailing list will be happy to receive our emails.

Track Performance and Acting on It
How do we measure success of our EDM campaign? Number of opens? Number of clicks? Number of sales? By tracking our every email sending tasks, we might be able to tell what went wrong and how we can improve future email campaigns. Doing so enables us to strive for a better quality copies, better subject lines, more targeted sending day and time, all that lead to improved results.

Photo credit: jeetster

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