Email Marketing Strategy

Extremely compelling content scores non-search traffic well before the main website ranks high in the search engines due to the resulting links.

While exercising on Email Marketing which is indeed a powerful VIRAL marketing strategy, make sure you follow certain procedures to get the maximum out of your campaigns. To create a large ripple you'll need to create quality content with the images specific to your market. This will help you fish for customers with a large net, as opposed to one single hook.

Jeanniey Mullen, contributes for ClickZ articles on email marketing and who’s also the founder and exec chairwoman of the EEC (Email Experience Council) states that:

“Email marketing currently generates an estimated return on investment of $48.29 for every dollar spent on it, according to the Direct Marketing Association we conservatively estimate that if all marketers optimized their emails for image blocking, email’s ROI would jump to $52.69. Not paying attention to rendering impacts revenue directly.”

According to a survey by the EEC and reported by The DMA, most retail email marketers (57%) are still sending image-only or heavy image-based email campaigns to their subscribers. Interesting considering the fact that image-based campaigns are known to trigger higher spam scores and reduce open rates based on their large size and, of course, don’t get seen if images are turned ‘off’ in the email client.

Email Marketing Tips to follow:
 
Online Marketers need to include more HTML in their emails by including the following:
 
  1. Headlines
  2. Section heads
  3. Product names, prices and other text companying product images
  4. Text in banners
  5. Lists (upcoming releases, etc.)
  6. Menu and navigation bar text
  7. Call-to-action buttons
  8. Promotion codes and instructions on how to apply them

Rules of thumb:

  • Take the extra effort to create an email campaign that has the right balance of HTML text to images. Keep to the mantra that if images are turned to ‘off’, the recipient can still read your entire message and act accordingly.
  • Keep links as text links. Calls-to-action are the key to any email campaign, so ensure these can be seen and clicked regardless of supporting (and blocked) images.
  • Never assume that your recipients are savvy enough to add you to their safe list manually and promptly. Work for the lowest common denominator and make your email campaign work on every level.
  • Work with your ESP who will work with your ISP to ensure deliverability of your campaign. This will at least give you more of a fighting chance to have your campaign get to the inbox, regardless of content or images.
  • TEST TEST TEST. All email campaigns should go through some degree of testing. If you don’t have the time, consider purchasing a rendering service such as ReturnPath/SenderScore, which can mean the difference between an open or an unsubscribe. Just one sale made by a more compliant and spam filter- ready email campaign can pay for the ReturnPath license, so give it some thought.
 
Building Personas:
 
What are personas BTW?
 
Personas is a tactic in evaluating a customer base for both marketing efforts and product development. Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise. You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns.
 
Follow these three rules:
 
  1. Design for convenience, for that persona. 'Convenience' means different things to different people. For me, it means messages I can easily scan and delete or act on. For someone else, it might mean all the information they need, right in the e-mail.
  2. Tailor every offer to that persona. Sending a 10% off deal to a persona who wants luxury at any cost won't get you much.
  3. Refresh your memory. Every time you launch an e-mail campaign, review your personas. Otherwise you're going to drift into what I call 'coupon land', where every e-mail starts with '20% Limited Time offer!!!!' or some such. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad offer. Just make sure it'll work for your audience.

Because, the odds that someone would be downloading images from every e-mail, the moment they receive an e-mail with images will be Zero.

To sum-up, a marketer should need to be clearly knowing as to whom they are trying to build awareness. Is it within a certain group? Connecting with people you can learn from or who would be likely to become your clients? Do you want to talk to blogging moms, internet marketers, travelers, jobs, reviews or a survey?

Comments

Article rating:
Your rating:

Activity for this knol

This week:

9pageviews

Totals:

205pageviews
©2009 Google