Creating an effective e-mail marketing campaign is an important step that determines how effective you become in your campaign. Email marketing is a continuous cycle meant to maintain a long trusting, relationship with a client.
A good email marketing campaign involves sending relevant and compelling contents that your client want to receive. It a matter of finding the right client for the right content. A good email campaign should involves;
- Building or maintaining a relationship
- Coming up with a plan
- Refining the plan
- Professionally executing the plan
- Monitoring the campaign
- Optimizing the plan and then going back to the starting point.
How do you then make sure you are creating attractive emails that will not be deleted before the readers even open them? Here are a few tips that will help you in doing that;
Create a Unique and a Compelling Subject Line
The main goal of a compelling email subject line is to motivate the client to open the email but not yet to accept whatever you are offering. Your subject line should be direct and concise. What to avoid in subject line;
- Avoid excessive use of punctuation or exclamation marks in the subject line (eg. Last offer!!!!!!!)
- Avoid using the word free (e.g Free Download), unless you are offering something for free. Even if you use it, do not use it together with capital letters or exclamation marks.
- Avoid Excessive use of capital letters (eg. LAST OFFER).
A good subject line should be about what your readers can relate with. For example, if you are sending emails targeting clients with diabetes, a good subject line can be something like; Learn How to Normalize Your Blood Glucose at Our Free Workshop).
Make your “From” More Descriptive
Most people are more likely to open emails coming from people that they already know, trust, like or they have a relationship with. Making your “From” more descriptive and specific can have a significant influence on how clients react to your campaign. For example, instead of using Tito Diabetes Company, I would use, Tito Diabetes Management Workshop.
Setting Up The E-Mail
You can either choose to use text-only or HTML-emails (emails with graphics) or set up a text version that can be shown, instead of the graphic based email. Whatever mode you choose, just make sure you are displaying the most interesting part of your offer at the very top of each email you are sending.
The next step is to test your emails and make sure they can open in different email providers. You can do this by forwarding the emails to your different emails account in both modes (with or without graphics) and find out how they appear.
Use Spam Filter or Evaluator
Some email providers like Gmail do have inbuilt spam content filter that are used to evaluate e-mails before they are sent to determine whether they are likely to be classified as spam. If your email provider does not provide the spam filter feature, it is very hard to know whether the email you are about to send will be classified as spam or not but there are various simple things that you can do to prevent this from happening, such as;
- Avoiding excessive use of exclamation and other punctuation marks.
- Avoiding excessive use of capital letters.
- Be aware of words that are more likely to be classified as spam such as drug prescriptions, loans, insurance and mortgages.
- Avoid using excessive images or graphics.
- Use the word free with caution. If you use it in your subject line, do not use it together with capital letters or exclamation marks.
Email Testing
The final step is to test the emails that you are about to send in different browsers. You can do this by sending emails to your friends and requesting them to open in different browsers. Ask them to check for spelling errors, broken links or overall email functionality. If everything is working fine, you can now start sending your emails to your leads.
Lastly, if you are here because you do not know how to go about doing an effective email marketing, I just hope this article will get you started. Email marketing is not about spamming around, it about having a strategy and executing it right. Any shortcomings coming from your side would mean a missed opportunity. Email marketing is not about you or your organizations but about what special you can offer to your audience.
