Email Marketing Campaign Best Practices, Tips And Tricks

Hi there. Today I’m just going to briefly talk about five tips for writing a marketing email to get the best out of your email campaigns.

The first one is to acquire your database legitimately. If you think about all the unsolicited emails that you get when you didn’t sign up for things or you didn’t expect to receive these emails, chances are you’re not going to respond to them. You’re just going to put them straight in the junk folder, and that’s exactly what everybody else does.

So, if you buy some database lists off some nasty little company somewhere, what you may find is that you’ll get a much larger reach, but less number of subscribers and certainly not that many people that are interested in your business. There are legitimate database lists out there. Just be very careful when you’re choosing them.

Number two, refining your signup process. On your website make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and give them every reason to. With your email opt-in and also with your social buttons, put them somewhere prominent on the page, maybe in the top right [corner]. Make the button quite big. Make it obvious to people so that if they are looking for it, they’re going to find it very, very quickly.

When they do click on it, when you get to the signup page, you want to make that as simple as possible. Ask for the minimum amount of information, maybe just an email address or email address and name, something like that. If you start going into addresses, dates of birth, type of work, size of company, all that sort of thing, unless you really need it, I would say leave it out. People get bored. They also get quite sensitive about sharing that sort of information. Chances are you’re going to cut down your number of subscribers.

Make it as quick and easy as possible. Tell them exactly what they’re getting, so that they’ll get discounts, offers, or exclusive bits and pieces. Make it clear to them what they’re going to get in return for signing up for your emails.

Also, I know a lot of people don’t like to do this, but make it easy for them to unsubscribe. People are more likely to come back if you allow them to unsubscribe easily and then re-subscribe.

If you force them into staying with you and repeatedly getting these emails they don’t want, they’re either going to junk you, which is going to look really bad and could cause issues with further campaigns, or they’re just not going to like you and they’re not going to want to use you any more. So keep it friendly. If they want to leave, let them leave. Chances are they will be back at some point.

Subject line. In your subject line you need to be obviously making it clear to people what this email is about and what it’s for. I wouldn’t use words like “free”, stuff like that. It can come across as quite spammy. It can also get picked up by quite a lot of spam filters, and it’ll go straight into anybody’s junk box. They’re never going to see you anyway.

Terms like “exclusive” or “limited time” are okay if it’s true, if that is what you’re doing and it’s not just a way to try and get people to open email. If you really are offering an exclusive deal to subscribers only or a limited time offer, then you can put that in the title.

Don’t use all capital letters either. It’s very tempting when you’re using words like “limited time only” and stuff like that, but you’re literally shouting at people, and they tend not to like that so much. Also, it can look a bit spammy.

All you’re doing with the subject line is giving them a reason to open. It’s not like a full description of everything that’s going on in the email. It’s just like a taster to get them to open it. So keep it short. Keep it sweet. After about 40, 50 characters people tend to turn off. So if you use that as a rule, then hopefully they’ll have opened it.

Timing. With your timing, again, think about the type of business that you have and how the timing will fit for you. If you email too much, people are going to unsubscribe. If you don’t email enough, they’re going to forget about you. It is going to be different for every industry. It depends what you’re doing, how time sensitive your line of work is. But maybe test a few different times, like start sending out maybe once every three days, five days, one day [etc]. Then, if that doesn’t work and you are getting a lot of unsubscribers, try lengthening, shortening, and see what happens.

Equally with the timing, you need to think about when you’re going to send this campaign. I would say avoid Mondays and Fridays because everybody’s tearing about trying to get the week started or finished. Avoid first thing in the morning, 9am. Again, everybody’s busy. Last thing at night, not many people are going to be there.

So maybe try mid-morning, mid-week, like Wednesday at 10:30am or something like that to start with and see how you go, again, unless your business model suits something different.

Frequency, same deal as timing really. If you send too many, then people are going to shut down. If you don’t send enough, then people are going to forget about you. Vary it about a bit. Try it, test it. Maybe ask a few people. Maybe even ask some of your current clients how often they think it would be acceptable or beneficial to be receiving an email from you.

That pretty much covers it I think. Thank you very much.