Oiling the Links for your 2008 Email Marketing Campaign
When analysing your companies’ latest email campaigns performance you have a number of factors to look at that will determine how much of a success it has been. The obvious indicator of ultimate campaign success is the recipients actually going back to your company and purchasing from you. But that really is the final link in the email marketing campaign.
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).