Email marketing and developing Eshots
After a recent spell of developing email marketing campaigns for our customers I thought I would write a short article on the subject whilst it is all fresh in mind.
In principle promoting your business through email newsletters or email promotions can be a cheap and effective way of spreading your companies exposure to the masses, however, there needs to be careful consideration to each and every campaign you wish to send.
Organise your contact database
Now hopefully this is something that your business does from the ground up anyway. Client databases are a vital part of any business and when considering your new email campaign then first analyse your database of clients.
As tempting as it is to send out a bulk email to the whole lot you need to consider what you are trying to achieve as a result. For a crude example if you are promoting your new product with a buy now and save offer, you don’t necessarily want to send that out to suppliers or competitors that may reside in your database of contacts.
When analysing your data try to group your contacts as best as possible, previous customers that have bought from you, business leads, suppliers, competitors, web sign-ups and personal contacts are broad examples you could use. If possible, try to segment down again for example customers that have bought particular items or services grouped by what items or services in a category. All this will enable you to pin point a more targeted audience for your campaign, and send relevant shots that the customer would appreciate rather then just bin as spam.
Make your Eshots personal
Seems obvious but when capturing data don’t forget to capture the persons name along with the email address. Companies that are good at email marketing should have no problem in personalising the emails based on your data, in essence it is much friendlier to announce the start of your email with “Joe Blogs we thought this offer would interest you” rather than an aggressive “buy this now” campaign. It may take while to organise your data in this way but once done the structure is in place and making future additions a breeze.
So how did you get my name?
It is often a good practice to help jog peoples memory as to how come your contacting them in first place, nobody likes to feel they are the result of some ill thought spam campaign, so to start you shot with a friendly line such as
“Dear Joe Blogs,
As a recent customer of ours we thought you would be interested to hear of our exciting new service to compliment your recent purchase.”
This form of generic intro would be relevant to most if not all of your previous customers and just helps jog their memory into who you are and why your contacting them in the first place. Other examples would be “we recently met at a trade show” or “you signed up to our newsletter”. Ultimately your putting the logic back into people’s minds and installing greater confidence from the outset.
Create a good headline
Capturing people’s attention quickly is the essence of good correspondence be bold and to the point, often leading with a call to action is a wise tactic. Competitions, promotions and eye catching graphics all help lead customers into a response. People like to feel that have been privy to the information so exclusive Eshot offers or discount codes are also good ideas.
Pointing the way to your website
Ultimately any eshot campaign is about trying to coax the viewer into visiting your website and spending some time getting to know your company again. Provide links from your Eshot to many different areas of your website rather than just your home page. Email campaigns provide the ideal opportunity to get viewers past your home page by sending them deep into your websites content pages and perhaps some other unexplored areas that you may feel more relevant to your campaign.
Got a product to sell, then send them direct to the product, don’t assume that from your home page the customer will know what to do or where to look, you will only sell successfully from your Eshots if you point the way.
Designing your Eshots
Good Eshots should have a good mixture of of graphical content and text content. It is important to remember that in today’s digital age many of your customers will receive their email through a wide source of devices from the humble PC to the mobile phone and beyond. Having a purely graphical email will alienate some, whilst having an all text email will miss vital opportunities to help reinforce your companies brand through graphics in others, therefore a blend of the two is important.
A link to a standard webpage version of your email campaign is equally important. Eshots can be difficult to code depending on the complexity, and unfortunately where things are possible in website development doesn’t always make them possible in email marketing. Commonly there are 4 main Internet browser variants (Internet explorer, firefox, google chrome and opera) there are more than double that in email clients when you take into consideration AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and many other variants. Now good coders (such as ourselves, without wishing to blow ones trumpet), should be able to create email campaigns viewable in the vast majority of these, but for where the email comes through a bit misaligned provide people with a link right at the top where they can see your campaign in all it’s glory!
Share and share alike
Nowadays we can easily provide your email campaign with social shares via Facebook and twitter enabling people to share your email with their friends with ease, a good offer worth shouting about can spread well through social circles. Forward to a friend forms are a good way of capturing further email addresses and contacts relevant to your business through your existing customer base.
Opt-in and Opt-out
Many of your loyal customers will be glad to be receiving email campaigns from you, but some won’t be, make sure that you provide easy and clear unsubscribe message so customers wishing to be removed from your list can do so with ease. Good email campaign software should provide automatic unsubscription so you never have to worry about it, for those that don’t be sure to remove the person as soon as they say, because if you send them a message next time after they unsubscribed you are on a quick route to losing that customers faith in your company altogether!
Analysing your data
Companies providing solid email marketing solutions should be able to provide you with detailed statistics on your campaigns success. As a typical rule of thumb across an average of all our campaigns we see a general pattern emerging roughly 20% – 30% of your emails sent will be actually opened, that counts as an impression on the person so that they have at least viewed your email on screen. Of those impressions a further 20% – 30% will actually click through to the relevant website page, our email analytics can also provide detailed stats on who clicked what also, so you can further analyse and understand your customers interests and browsing habits.
Picking your moment
When to physically send an Eshots needs some consideration, for example if your business sells to businesses consider first thing in the morning when most users have logged in and are checking their emails, if you sell to consumers then maybe scheduling to send at early evening will better, when people are logging on at home. Overseas markets should be sent at the appropriate time for them, not necessarily what’s convenient for you.
As a useful tip, try to avoid Mondays or Fridays, who wants to be bothered immediately following or just before a weekend off work, Monday’s are usually frantic at businesses planning the week ahead and Fridays are often left to deal with until Monday!
Be sure though that email marketing has a short shelf life. Your campaign will have more immediate effect on the first day than any other and will diminish as the week goes by. However when considering an email marketing campaign I think best not to bombard the consumer, even once a week can be far to much for companies new to the format, better stagger your campaigns over time and build a responsive client base that adapts to more relative emails over time than to water down your companies profile by saturation from the offset.
In summary
there is always more elements to this than is suggested from the offset and I haven’t even mentioned spamming regulations and server restrictions and so on. However all of this is not to provoke a negative responsive to the media, on the contrary done properly email marketing can be the most effective weapon in your marketing arsenal, generating more effective leads than many more traditional forms of advertising out there, my advice, talk to some experts first before your jump in!
You can see some examples of our recent email campaigns we have generated:
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