If you’ve heard that email marketing doesn’t work or have even had poor results yourself, some crucial elements have been left out of the campaign. Just like with other forms of marketing, there are certain practices that will boost a campaign — and others that will limit its effectiveness. Here are some tips for improving results and avoiding the pitfalls of email:
- Restrict Mailings to your Own opt-in Lists.
Purchased lists are full of addresses that are already overly bombarded with emails. Worse yet, some of these lists are made up of harvested or scraped addresses. If you email to these purchased lists, you may be accused of spamming whether or not you did anything wrong.
- Use a Great Subject Line.
Attention-grabbing subject lines have action words that tell people what you want them to do right away. “Vote for Your Favorite Food” is a great example. Also, avoid using unprofessional tricks like adding weird symbols or excessive exclamation points. Finally, avoid words associated with spam. The same goes for pretending your email was forwarded to the recipient or was a response to some prior communication. A great amount of spam starts with “FWD” or “RE,” and it’s to the point that any email that starts with either of those terms is a candidate for immediate deletion.
- Personalize your emails.
This doesn’t mean slap the recipients’ first names on them like the companies that sent the 10 million other emails that are sitting in their inboxes. It means to tailor the message to the recipients’ interests. Send different messages to current customers, those who haven’t bought anything in a while and those who’ve never purchased anything at all. One caveat: Don’t be too quick to send reactivation emails. It’s very annoying to get an email that asks “Why haven’t you been back?” one month after buying two months of supplies.
- Vary your Messages.
You may want to sell the same thing all the time, but readers will get bored and stop opening your emails if they never say anything new. Switch things up so they can’t guess what will be in the email just by reading the from line. When you do get back to pitching your favorite item, come up with different angles before returning to the tried-and-true.
- Test and Test Again.
Split testing isn’t just for websites and pay per click ads. Send out various types of email content and see which ones get the best results. Do this even if you have a winning campaign — you may be surprised to find that a minor tweak turns a good performer into a superstar. One example is using different colors for your imagery or backgrounds. Color has a surprising impact on people’s willingness to buy, so test a variety of them before settling on one.
These are some of the best ways to improve the results of your email campaigns, but they aren’t the only ways. Do some brainstorming, and you’re likely to think of some other tweaks that can pump up performance. If you need any help, find someone to help manage your email marketing campaigns; trusting expert experience is much easier than trying to learn everything yourself.
