07/ 29/ 2008
by Marcia Passos Duffy
You have an e-mail marketing campaign ready to go. It has a simple but elegant design, useful content and an opt-in subscription to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. But once you press the "send" button, do you know if your e-mail marketing campaign be successful? That is: Will your subscribers open the e-mail? Then, will they read it? And, best of all, will they buy your service or product as a result?
While today's e-mail programs have endless options to make campaigns polished and high tech, what matters most at the end of the day is if your e-mails are doing what you want them to do: adding to your bottom line.
There are three basic steps every e-mail campaign must follow to ensure a solid foundation for a promotion that not only gets opened and read, but also brings you customers.
1. Make the e-mail enticing to open. Once you have a list of opt-in subscribers to your e-mail campaign (which could be a newsletter, an e-course, tutorial, series of white papers, etc.) the first step is to get the recipient to open the e-mail. If a recipient doesn't trust the subject or "from" line, the e-mail will get deleted. To avoid this problem, make sure you put your company name in the "from" line. To avoid triggering spam filters, don't use words like "free" or exclamation points or all capital letters in the subject line. Make the subject line enticing or intriguing, and offer some useful advice to the reader. A "tip-based" subject line—one that helps readers save time or money—often gets higher open rates, such as "Five Ways to…" or "How to…"
2. Give them readable and useful content. Once the subscriber opens the e-mail, you want them to read it. The key is to give them something that is visually pleasing (a combination of both graphics and text) and readable typeface. Don't clutter the page with too much text or too many pictures. Break up the copy with headlines and sub-headlines. Study the way newspapers and magazines are formatted to draw the eye in and make text easy to read. The content can be long-winded or short and to the point depending on your audience, but it must be interesting, useful and not 100 percent self-promotion. Research has shown that the percentage of content to advertising should be 60 percent to 40 percent.
3. Provide a call to action. Ultimately, the content you provide is a means to an end, which is subscriber action. You need to decide what you want this action to be: Is it visiting your Web site? Making a phone call for more information? Purchasing an e-book? Booking a free consultation? Or buying a product? Whatever you decide you want subscribers to do, you need to ask them to do it. This is a "call to action" that needs be located not only at the end of the e-mail, but above the fold—that is, the top of the screen before the subscriber scrolls down. This call to action is what hooks the subscriber into moving beyond passively reading content to doing something.
E-mail marketing has been an extremely helpful tool for businesses because it is low cost compared to traditional marketing, and data can easily be captured. The beauty of conducting an electronic marketing campaign is that you will know precisely how you fared in your efforts: how many people opened the e-mail, clicked through and if your sales went up as a result. Any tweaking you do to the campaign can be easily measured as well.
While e-mail marketing has been a boon for many businesses don't keep it completely "e". It is true that Internet sales can be done from start to finish without any human interaction at all (just look at Amazon or eBay), but many businesses need the human touch to close a sale. Make sure that you always back up your e-mail marketing campaign with contact information for a live human being in your sales or customer service department who subscribers can contact for help or more information.
