Open rates looking good?  Click throughs’ quite high?  Still wondering why you’re not converting enough of these into sales?  It might be worth assessing the landing page.

One of the main goals in email marketing is to drive people onto the site.  Whilst the email side will do the leg work and entice people to your site, you must make sure that the landing page delivers what the email promises and not just confuse the recipient, or as they should really be called now, potential customer.

I say potential customer as they are genuinely interested in the product/service you have offered and are looking further into it; this is where the landing page enters the equation.

If you have offered your customer a certain product in the email, the last thing they want is to be taken to the home page of your site.  They want to view that particular product in greater detail.

To give you a helping hand, use the following list as a checklist for your own landing pages:

Is the product/service/article that they clicked on in the email on the landing page?

Does this look interesting enough to spend more time here and look around?

Now if you look further into the landing page itself, and depending on what you are offering, does it clearly answer these questions from your now potential customers:

How do I learn more about this?

What if I have more questions?

As an example, let’s take a landing page from the newsletter we regularly send out.  We advertise our template design services in these newsletters and link through the page to here.

If you go through the checklist I’ve outlined you’ll see that everything is there that a potential customer could need to learn more, and ultimately, sign up.

This leads me nicely onto the final point.  Though we want our potential customers to learn as much about our system as possible, our main goal is to get them to take on a trial or sign up.  If you take another look at the site, you will see how we’ve made that a priority.  When creating your landing pages, make sure that you still keep your main goal in mind and make that the nucleus of your landing page planning.  As long as you keep that in mind, your landing page should piece together very nicely.

Far too often we see people being lured in by the promise of the amazing average ROI that email marketing produces, but don’t actually know how they’re going to achieve it.

Be Objective

Make sure that when you’re planning your campaign that you know exactly what you want from it.  By always baring this in mind you can always revert back to it when decisions have to be made.

Is your campaign to get sales? Drive people to your website? Keep your branding in their mind?  Make sure you know this before any more decisions are made as this is will shape your forthcoming campaign.

Email List Quality

Too many organisations still go for the quick fix and think that a purchased list is the best way to get instant results.  Unfortunately, purchased lists are an expensive waste and can be very damaging to a company’s email marketing efforts.  There is no substitute for your own list of subscribers that have specifically requested your emails; especially if you want to get the ROI that email marketing can achieve.

Keep to your word

Normally, people will be signing up for your emails for a certain reason, and they will expect you to deliver that.  If you have offered “latest offers and last minute deals” as the hook to getting people to subscribe, don’t fill out your email with latest company news.  With email marketing, people don’t have to tolerate irrelevant emails and will remove themselves, so keep to your word.

Make it interesting

It sounds so simple, but so many email marketing campaigns become boring to the subscribers.  Don’t ever feel like you should send out an email every two weeks if you have nothing interesting to say as people will switch off very quickly.  Keep your emails fresh and interesting (if sometimes sporadic), opposed to consistent but stale.

The importance of Email design

An email design can be the deciding factor in whether a subscriber will continue to read your email or will discard it.  Poorly designed emails will cheapen your brand and will do more harm than good. A properly designed email will not only extend your branding correctly, but will also increase conversion rates for your campaign as the layout of your emails and call to action placement plays a significant role in your campaigns success.

Landing Pages

If your email is sales orientated, this is an area that needs as much attention as the campaign itself.  The transition from email to your site should be seamless, and if they’re interested in a product in your campaign, they best be sent to a page which further explains it and gives them the opportunity to progress their interest further.

Don’t forget about subject lines

This is the first point of contact with the recipient and is often an overlooked area.  It doesn’t matter how much effort you have made putting together an amazing looking email with a truly fantastic offer if your recipient isn’t even enticed to open the email.

Subject lines shouldn’t be too long (approx 50 characters max) so that the recipient can read the whole message.  The subject line should describe what’s inside whilst making an effort to encouraging the recipient to open the email.

Timing

This can make a big difference to your campaigns success.  Send it at the wrong time and all your recipients won’t be interested, or won’t have time to read your email and you’ve lost your opportunity.  There is no set special day for what will work for your company (if there was, everyone would do it then) so you will have to find out for yourself what works best.

Think about your target market and when they will most likely be free to actually spend the time with your campaign.  Once you have that in mind, that’s a good place to start.

Test Test Test

There is no set rule to success.  Every company’s mailing list is different and you must constantly test to see what different factors make your recipients react.  Subject line, design, call to action and timing can all be fine tuned by split testing your mailing list and looking at previous results.  If you have any especially successful campaign, work out what might have triggered it and try and replicate it for your next campaign.

This is going to keep carrying on throughout your campaigns life.  No campaign will ever be the perfect campaign.  There will always be room for improvement, and your mailing list will change in habits as time goes on so always re-assess every aspect of your campaign.

Now, I can hold my hand up and admit that I may have spent too much time getting obsessed with the strategic side of email marketing and not offering some more inspiration for creativity.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a well thought about and well maintained email marketing campaign can really work wonders for you.  The problem lies in the fact that more and more companies are taking on email marketing and soon enough there will be many well maintained email marketing campaigns and yours will not be standing out from that crowd as much.

As well as having a stand out campaign, the main goal in todays climate is to not only grow the recipient list but to make sure that these recipients are attentive to your messages.  With that in mind I started to think about email campaigns and the holy grail of viral-ability (yes, I have just made that up, but if Ian Dowie can do it….).

In a previous post I pointed out how H&M had exceeded my expectations by giving me a £10 voucher when I signed up, which I then subsequently told my friends about who also signed up.  Though this was an expensive technique that most companies can’t really afford, the idea of it is still worth some heavy thought. 

Yes, I know, it’s easier said than done but if you can get something that has that forwarding on effect, you can guarantee yourself some serious, cheap exposure.

You have your usual just for laughs viral campaign that will guarantee forwarding during those long office hours (such as reggae irie name generator). 

But it doesn’t have to just be the usual type of viral campaign.  The H&M one was just such a good offer, it would be rude not to tell your friends about free money.  Another great example of this is from one of our own customers, The Urban Shop. They offer 15% off to anyone who forwards the email to their friends, plus another 10% for the person who gets the forwarded message.  Both people benefit from the forward whilst at the same time encouraging the recipient to sign up to the list to receive greater discount in the future.

Another thing you’ll have to remember is to not leave it to the customer to forward this email on.  Treat the link like you would a call-to-action (which it is really), and make sure that a well-placed forward button is present for them to click on.

So when you’re next creating an email make sure that you think long and hard about your forward link, it could be a fantastic way to not only re-ignite or maintain your recipients interest in your campaign, but may prove to be a successful way to increase your mailing list size in the process.

Useful Related Articles:

BeRelevant: How To Make Your Email Marketing Campaign Stand Out From The Rest

No Man is an iland: Take a design risk and get animated? I was dubious about this idea until I read the post and then was left with a head-nodding hmmm at the end

So, to diagnose how your campaign is doing you must assess what your statistics tell you.

The first step is to look at your open rates.  Even if you’re getting decent traffic through to your site, you could still be receiving low open rates.  This could be for a number of reasons which you will have to ask yourself.  One of the main reasons for poor open rates is the list quality.  It may be that you have purchased or rented a list and therefore you will not have the same level of interest as a company that have self-built their list.  It could also be down to the age of your list, maybe you’ve had the same list for a long time and haven’t actually cleaned up the list from inactive or uninterested subscribers (find good articles on list hygiene here, here and here).

It could also be attributed to the subject line; something that I have previously outlined as a major factor in why open rates can be low.  If you don’t have a subject line that stands out from the other bulk of emails that are in your recipients inbox, you can’t expect high open rates.  This will become increasingly important in 2008 as more companies start to turn to email marketing (find useful articles and the do’s and don’ts on subject lines here, here, here and here).

Maybe, it is in fact your deliverability.  If you are not incredibly vigilant with your reputation monitoring, then you could be falling foul of your email dropping into the dreaded junk folder, or worse, not even getting to the recipient at all.  This subject is vast and can’t really be summarised in this article as there are so many factors to take into consideration (sender reputation articles here ,here and here).  If you take the time, read as many articles on my blog as possible, most of them are based around deliverability and improving sending reputation.

If open rates isn’t your problem, it’s time to start looking at click through rates.  Basically, your campaign is being delivered and recipients are opening your newsletter but for some reason they are not going to your call to action.

Okay, so for those of you who are only making newsletters that are there to inform, this isn’t as much of a problem, it is more for the promotional campaigners out there.

The problem could lie within your email design.  If you have a poorly designed and amateurish looking email, your recipients are unlikely to take you very seriously.  They will have seen hundreds and thousands of below average emails, and they’ve predominantly been spam.  When they open yours, you only have a few seconds to make an impression on them and if it looks vaguely like spam, your email will be closed and never be looked at again.

Maybe your email isn’t spammy looking, but in fact wonderment to the human eye; a masterclass in HTML design.  Problem is, you’ve not being pay attention to the email marketing world for several months and haven’t noticed that ISP’s have different rules regarding how emails will now render in their browsers. Silly you.  Your once amazing email looks like a whole lot of grey with some words sporadically dotted around the place.  Who’s going to even bother with that as far as first impressions go?  It’s time to move on from that age of image heavy emails into the brave new world of HTML lite.  Try to keep your companies branding and layouts professional but cut down on the imagery and embrace background colours to keep the email looking bright.

Another issue that could hinder your click throughs is the layout of your campaign.  If you’re looking to get recipients to click through to your site somewhere, make sure it is clearly obvious where they need to click, it needs to stand out.

Also making sure that the subject line corresponds with the email content is vital too.  If they’ve opened your email from reading the subject line, and found that the content is different or is misleading, you’ll lose your click throughs.  Once again, make sure everything is clear and accessible (read a blog on this here).

Finally, I go back to email design for one more piece of advice.  There is still a lot of scepticism around online shopping, it’s getting better but there are still areas that are concerned about transferring their bank information over the internet (article here).  It is your duty to try and ease those fears.  The best thing to do is offer your customers an all-over branding of all communications with them.  Try to match your newsletter to your website, and in particular, the landing page that they will be directed to from the email.  This way confidence can be instilled in your communications and actual money conversions will increase (find articles on landing pages here and here).   

So what does that mean to us?  Well, to start with email marketers are going to have to consider mobile email marketing a bit more than previously.  I had already outlined in a previous post that b2b email marketers would have to consider mobile marketing a bit sooner than b2c orientated companies, but now that seems to be shifting somewhat.  If it turns out that IMAP accounts prove popular with customers, you will be sure that the other leading email providers (hotmail, yahoo) will follow suit.   

You must then consider that your message will now only get read once by mobile users, and that they may not read your email on a pc as your email will already be marked as read.   Your email design will have to change somewhat to cater for this quickly expanding area. It will be worth your while to set up your own Google account so that you can see what your message will look like on mobiles.   

Obviously that brings you back to one of the longest running debates in email marketing, HTML design vs Text.  If you’re considering mobile marketing it may be more tempting to move towards text as not only does your message render well in the recipients screen but it would also skip a lot of spam filter checking meaning a higher delivery into inboxes.  I don’t believe this is the answer though.  Successful email marketing campaigns evolve around differentiating yourself from the competition, and however interesting your subject matter may be, users will switch off if every promotional email they read is in a text format.  I’m already an advocate of the HTML light (30% image, 70% text) method of email design and believe that email marketers should work around that still as recipients will still read the majority of campaigns on their pc. 

So how can we cater for this market without sacrificing our whole design strategy?  My personal thought is to start to heavily concentrate on list segmentation.  For instance, if you placed all your Google recipients into a sub group you could then alter your main campaign to render well for mobile devices.  This would of course mean a bit more work, but who’s scared of that when the chances of extra revenue increase?   

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Don’t just hard sell to them 

Though obviously you want to sell your products by using email marketing, if you only sell you will find that users will start to switch off.  If you offer a bit more than just what products you have, you will see a constant reader base that will come to expect your email and will be more receptive to your messages.  By doing this you’re laying the foundations for a successful, long-term campaign. 

Let the customer get to know you 

So you’re no longer just hard selling to them, good.  But hold off from giving yourself that well deserved pat on the back just yet, there’s still some work to do.  Try to introduce your company’s personality into your newsletters.  Don’t just write in a formal manner and state facts; be friendly.  This will bring you closer to the customer as you will go beyond just visual branding and customers will be able to relate to the company on a whole. 

Be Consistent   

The last thing you want to do is let the customer forget about you and your company.  If you leave massive gaps in between your campaigns your recipients will have either lost interest in your product or will have forgotten that they signed up for your newsletter in the first place.  Either way, it will lead to a higher complaint rate which will have an adverse effect on your sending reputation, and ultimately deliverability.   

Make it more interactive 

If you want to keep your recipients attention, try to do it by having different forms of interaction in the newsletter.  Small things such as a quick survey can keep their minds focused on the whole newsletter opposed to a quick skim read.  This will also allow you to grab some much needed information about your service or your customers habits that can help to shape future campaigns.  “How do I get them to fill out the survey?” I hear you ask. Read on….. 

Give them something 

Everyone loves free stuff, and people will be much more inclined to spend a couple of minutes filling out a questionnaire if they have a golden carrot of “prizes” at the end of the questionnaire.  Also if you keep offering prizes as a regular feature (perhaps not every issue), then you are guaranteed of repeat opens.Another helpful tip is to include the winner of any prize in the next newsletter.  Not only does it validate that people can win your prizes, but also adds extra content to your newsletter.  And you can be sure of some positive comments about your company from the winner. 

Keep it short 

No-one wants a newsletter to scroll down for what seems like an eternity, so try to keep your message short and clear.  If you have articles for your newsletter, just put an extract of it in your newsletter and then link back to your site for the whole article.  Doing this not only keeps your newsletter short, but also drives recipients to your website.  What’s even more useful is that you will also be inadvertently adding content to your site, which will get picked up in the search engines, and improve your ranking. 

Matching Design with web site branding 

With parts of the population still unsure about trusting e-commerce, you must do everything to alleviate their fears.  With one of the most recent scams being phishing, the recipients will be wary about trusting newsletters that may or may not be from the actual company.  One of the best ways to maintain trust in the newsletter is to have it branded to match your website.  Not only does it maintain trust in the validity of the sender but also that you are a professional company.  Branding is always important. 

Subject Line Tweaking 

Though I have gone on about this in my blog quite a few times, I cannot stress how important a decent subject line is.  If you’re receiving low open rates you have to look at why, and if you’re not receiving massive amounts of bounce emails, then the problem is probably stemming from your subject line.  I have posted a couple of blogs on subject lines here and here. 

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

Luckily for you I’ve decided to compose a no-nonsense start up guide to help you along the way.

What kind of email campaign are you trying to construct?

This is probably the best starting point for your campaign. Will it be a sales campaign? A brand building campaign? An informative newsletter? By stating what you intend to do at the beginning will help you to keep track of how the campaign should be designed.

Subscribers

The success of your campaign depends on the quality of recipients you have. If you are a company that has bought your mailing list from a company then you can’t expect high open rates.I always recommend that if you want high open rates and high returns from your campaign, one of the best ways to do this is to have your own self-built, double opt-in recipient list. If you have the latter, then you are more likely to get a far greater ROI from your campaign. This though can’t be taken lightly, your self-built list will be a lot less effective if you are not regular with your emails immediately afterwards.People need to start being contacted as soon as they sign up. If this doesn’t happen and you leave it a month or so before contacting them, you run the risk of people forgetting about signing up to you and not opening your emails (or worse, marking you as spam).

Email Content

Make sure the content of your email is legitimate sounding. As the email filters advance in stopping spammers, so do the spammers evolve in getting round the problems. What has started to happen now is that perfectly normal words are being brought up as spam by the filters. This means you have to be inventive in the wording you use and work around these filters. As a legitimate company though, this shouldn’t be a problem as long as you stick to these golden rules.

Avoid Spammy words such as free, click here, free shipping, Bonus, Discount, Saving…. There are many more words but you get the idea. If you want a guide on what not to put in, just check your personal bulk folder and have a look!

DON’T SHOUT in your emails. Using excessive amounts of capital letters in a newsletter is bad news. This will trigger the filters straight away and people are getting wise to this and will consider your email to be trying to sell them things instead of letting them know that you have products available which may interest them.

Don’t get too excited!!!!! Don’t start throwing exclamation marks all over the shop. This is very much like the last point with shouting. Spam filters will pick this up straight away and people are once again wise to it and will turn off as soon as they see anything spammy like that.

Email Design

A well designed email campaign will do wonders for your open rates and revenue returned. A poorly designed campaign will reflect badly upon the image of a company and can cheapen the brand itself, causing a lot of harm to the image of your company. This is where you have to be really careful because no matter how good the message is inside, people will judge the design of your email as it is the first thing they will notice. This is put into better perspective if you think that there will be many other companies doing exactly the same as you; and if your email branding is inferior to theirs, you will be losing out on custom just because of peoples perception of your company.

Another really good tip is to create an email template using good HTML coding. By this I mean don’t use programs such as Word to create your campaign. When you copy and paste text from word it attaches a lot of hidden script behind it that gets embedded into the HTML coding. Spam filters don’t like this and will trash your email straight away as a lot of spammers use this process.If you are to construct a HTML email for your campaign, you need to make sure that you have a good balance between image and text. This also means that you can’t just create a pdf file and paste that into the email. You need there to be a higher ratio of text to image. If you’re not sure how much is acceptable, then keep trialing your email through online filters. Set yourself up a hotmail, yahoo and gmail account and send your email through to it. If it’s getting in the spam folders, you have some work to do.I’ll give you an example of what a good email campaign should look like. The example is a newsletter from St George’s Bristol (a concert venue). This newsletter is easily identifiable to the brand of St George’s, which helps the recipient to recognise the email and will be more inclined to open it. On top of that, the quality of the email is high. The general layout is simple and not overcrowded, whilst also looking fresh and modern.The content has been written with the original principle of the campaign in mind. It has informed the recipients of upcoming events and news from the venue, and in turn offered a non-aggressive sales campaign that will not have subscribers reaching for the unsubscribe button.

Learning from your results 

Unless you are the greatest email marketer the world has ever seen and got a 100% open and follow-up rate from your first campaign, you will need to see what you can do to improve.   

Poor Open Rates 

Several factors can cause there to be poor open rates.  You will need to analyse your campaign to see which might be hindering you. 

Quality of subscriber – If you are using a bought email list you shouldn’t be expecting high open rates at all.  Anything more than a 20% open rate should be considered a very good campaign for you.  If you have a self-built list, you need to ask yourself if you have been frequent and consistent in your mail outs to your recipients.  If not, the recipients may have forgotten about you or lost interest in your company. 

Email Content – You may be experiencing an open-rate issue because the content of your email is being flagged by spam filters.  This would mean that your recipients may not even see your message let alone decide whether they want to open it or not.  Make sure you’re not using words which may get caught in a spam filter.  If you’re unsure of what is spammy and what’s not, you can always get a spam check of your email through several companies on the Internet. 

Subject Line – Though normally considered an afterthought in an email campaign, this can be the deciding factor on whether the recipient opens the email or not.  The subject line is the first bit of information the recipient gets to before even judging the design and content so make sure it is good! 

Poor Click-Through Rate 

If your opens are high enough but click-throughs not so, you have to ask yourself if you are expecting high click-through rates.  If the campaign is basically a newsletter then you don’t really need high click through rates.  If your campaign is a promotions campaign you have to look at the layout and see if that’s causing you problems.  Maybe the layout isn’t allowing the campaign to be noticed easy enough.  Alternatively, the campaign might just not be appealing enough to your customers. 

Whatever your results are, you need to keep them for future reference.  Try and get a grasp as to why they might not have worked and don’t be scared to be thorough and drastic if things aren’t improving. Also don’t forget to take into consideration external factors such as seasonal trends.  All these things will help you to shape up your campaign for years to come.  

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

The problem for your company is whether you should be considering the mobile recipient or not.  At the moment the mobile market isn’t big enough to be across the whole general public so some companies may not need to consider it just yet, but for some it could greatly increase the success of the campaign. 

The companies that will most probably benefit the greatest will be the business 2 business (b2b) companies.  If you think of all the people that cannot leave their work emails alone when they’re out, you can suddenly see a hidden market.   

The problem with your email now is that a lot of the PDA’s and phones don’t receive emails in HTML format, meaning that you’re email will just come up with a load of HTML code on their phone.  That could mean disaster for your email campaign as not only have you not managed to grab their attention on their phone, but they have also marked the message as read by opening it on their phone; meaning that you will completely lose your potential customer. 

To counter this problem, insert a “view text version of the email here” link at the top of the email to allow the mobile recipient to read your message. 

Another idea that could work effectively would be with the new coining of Bacn emails.  If you haven’t heard of this click here to read more about what this is.  Basically, Bacn is messages that sites such as Myspace or Facebook would send with notifications of new messages etc. 

There has been questions raised on how this can be capitalised on as people find the emails unimportant and Mark Brownlow has stated already that it is down to the email marketers to make the mail engaging and valuable to the customer.

 I think there might already be a certain audience that find this mail engaging.  As around 75% of companies in the UK have blocked sites such as Myspace and a large amount have blocked free email sites such as Hotmail, you will see people resorting to using Mobile Internet to check their messages; opening up an opportunity for email marketing.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk