max July 24, 2020 0 Comment
Email marketing refers to direct marketing campaigns that aim to send targeted emails to several recipients in a contact database at the same time.
Transactional emails, prospecting emails, newsletters, or promotional emails, all kinds of emails have significant advantages. In general, email marketing enables controlled targeting, ease of use and access to tracking information. Email marketing should be part of your digital communication strategy.
With an email software, it’s becoming easier and easier to create and send email marketing campaigns. But implementing good practices can be more complicated. For successful and effective email campaigns, you just need to integrate a few rules and avoid the usual mistakes.
Table of Contents:
Make your emails easier to read.
Segment and update your contact lists.
Optimize the subject of the email.
Highlight the pre-header and the header.
Choose the best template for your business.
Optimize your CTA (Call to Action).
Avoid practises considered as spamming techniques.
Test your marketing campaign before sending it to your customers.
Schedule your email marketing to be sent at the right time.
Analyze the detailed statistics of your email marketing campaigns.
Don’t minimize marketing automation.
Discover our WordPress plugin, Jackmail.
Avoid long emails.
First of all, avoid sending too long emails. Heavy emails may be penalized by the Internet Service Providers and therefore not arrive in your inbox.
Moreover, if you send a long email to your recipients, your message may be ignored. By opening your email, the recipient may not read it and delete it.
Sending a short email increases your chances of interaction with your contacts and generates more interest.
Make your emails easier to read.
To facilitate the reading of your emails, don’t hesitate to add more visual contrasts between each block of information. Harmonize your fonts to make reading more pleasant (no more than 3 different typographies).
Generally, a person spends only a few seconds on an email. Don’t forget that your recipients receive a lot of information every day, so it is essential to be clear and concise in the content of your email.
Choose your goal.
An email marketing campaign must have a single objective to be effective. Before you start creating your mailing campaign, it is essential to determine your aim. It is the key to the success of your marketing campaigns and it leads to a better return on investment. For example, the purpose of an email can be to inform or to boost sales.
Create a good contact list.
An opt-in contact list can be defined as the concept where contacts must give their prior and explicit consent before being targeted for direct prospecting.
To collect contacts, we advise you to create a subscription form for your emails. Having opt-in contacts will increase the opening rate and decrease the number of unsubscriptions.
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Target the right people.
It is useless to send the same email to all your contacts. Indeed, it is important to target specific contacts or group of contacts to reach the right people in order to increase the performance of your marketing campaigns and achieve your goals. According to the last Email Marketing Attitude (EMA) study published by the SNCD, 51% of Internet users unsubscribe because they receive unsuitable messages. The selection of recipients is essential to the success of your email marketing campaign, as your message doesn’t necessarily address your entire contact base. That’s why it is important to know your customers and prospects to better succeed in your marketing actions.
Segment and update your contact lists.
We advise you to segment your contact lists which is used to group recipients according to specific criteria (demographics, preferences, buying habits…).
That is why the subscription form for your newsletter is very important. Indeed it will enable you to collect information and segment your contacts in order to send targeted content to your recipients. When you register for the newsletter, you can ask for the following information:
- email address (required)
- first and last name
- birthdate
- gender
- country
/!\ Be careful not to ask for too much information. Registration must be quick. Otherwise the user may change his decision and may then stop the registration process.
Moreover, we strongly recommend you to regularly update your contact lists to be more relevant in your email campaigns.
Optimize the subject of the email.
Don’t ignore the importance of the subject of a campaign! The subject of the email determines the topic of your email and must arouse the interest of the recipient. To improve your subject line and to avoid any repercussions from Internet Service Providers, we suggest you to follow the guidelines below:
- Do not use special characters.
- Do not use numbers at the beginning and end of the subject.
- Do not write your whole subject line in capital letters.
- Do not repeat the sender’s name in the subject line.
However, we advise you:
- To use action verbs such as “Discover”.
- To write short subject lines (50 characters maximum).
- To personalize with the recipient’s first and/or last name.
- To add an emoticon 🙋
Highlight the pre-header and the header.
It is essential to choose your pre-header well. The pre-header is the preview of the first sentence of your email. It summarizes the content of the email in one sentence and provides additional information to the subject of the email marketing.
Adding a web copy link is also fundamental because it allows you to see the images in your emails without having to download them if the inbox doesn’t display them automatically. This link is placed after the pre-header.
We recommend you to include your logo in the header of your email so that your contacts can clearly identify your brand.
Personalize your emails.
We advise you to personalise your newsletters as much as possible. It creates a close relationship with your recipients who feel unique.
Personalization allows you to improve the performance of your emails and to increase the opening rate, the click rate and the reactivity rate. If you have the first and/or last name of your recipient, don’t hesitate to place it at the top of the text content of your email.
A qualified contact list is essential to create personalized email.
Choose the best template for your business.
The design of your email should be simple, elegant and match your brand as well as possible. It should also make your recipients want to know more about you. Your Emails must be in responsive design, meaning that the content adapts to the screen size regardless of the device used (smartphone, tablet, desktop). Thanks to some email softwares, it is now easy to create and send email marketing campaigns. It doesn’t require any html or coding skills. It is the case of Jackmail, the WordPress plugin to create and send email campaigns.
READ MORE :
Optimize your CTA (Call to Action).
The Call to Action is a text or a button which aims to persuade a person exposed to a marketing or advertising message to perform a desired action. The Call to Action allows you to guide your prospects to a landing page, for example your website.
The Call to Action must have an action verb and be short and simple. For example, you can say “I enjoy it” or “I’m interested”. The Call to Action must be visible and quickly readable with a contrasting colour to the rest of the content (e.g. orange). We advise you to use one of the main colours from your graphic charter. Use more Call to Action instead of clickable words. Buttons are more visible and generally generate more clicks.
Avoid spamwords.
To avoid being negatively impacted by Internet Service Providers, we recommend you to follow some guidelines:
- Don’t use plain text URLs which is considered as a spamming technique.
- Don’t use a plain text email address that is also considered as a spamming practice.
- Limit the use of spamwords. For example, don’t use the words:
>”Click here”
>”Free of charge”
>”Make money”
>”Enjoy now”
>”Limited offer.”
>”Discount”
- Do not send any attachments
- Use the right text to image ratio. Your email should be composed of 60% text and 40% images.
Avoid practises considered as spamming techniques.
Certain practices often used by spammers are considered as “risky “:
- Empty subject line
- Use of spamwords
- Abuse of certain signs such as “!!!!”.
- Same word repeated several times in the subject of the email…
READ MORE :
Improve your footer.
We advise you to optimize your footer with your contact details and your Social Networks. There can also be elements of reassurance to optimize your brand image and increase the trust of your audience !
Test your marketing campaign before sending it to your customers.
When you want to send an email marketing campaign to a contact list, it is highly recommended to test the marketing campaign before sending it. Indeed, testing is an essential step in your campaign creation. For example, the test allows you to see if there are problems with the display of your email, or with the personalization, etc…
Schedule your email marketing to be sent at the right time.
When sending email campaigns, you need to establish a real strategy to maximize your chances of success.
The best time to send an email marketing campaign is between 9am and 10am in the morning and around 2pm in the early afternoon.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are the days that shows the best campaign performances.
Analyze the detailed statistics of your email marketing campaigns.
Once your email campaign is sent, it is important to measure your KPI to improve your future campaigns. For example, take into consideration the opening rate, the click rate and the reactivity rate…
In BtoB, the average opening rate of an email is between 15 and 20% and the average click rate must be between 2 and 4%. But it can change depending on the sector of activity.
Don’t minimize marketing automation.
Another tip: do not to minimize the importance of marketing automation.
Marketing automation means the automation of marketing campaigns dedicated to the optimisation of lead management.
Regarding marketing automation in the field of email, we talk about the concepts of trigger, scenarios and automated actions.
To automate your marketing actions, you will create workflows. Workflows can be defined as campaign scenarios that will vary according to your objectives.
Discover our WordPress plugin, Jackmail.
Jackmail is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create and send newsletters and email campaigns to your contacts. Jackmail has been developed by a dedicated team within the Mailify company.
It includes a contact manager, an email editor called EmailBuilder, detailed statistics and a professional routing server, with a SMTP server included.
Jackmail is also an interconnected plugin. You can thus connect to other WordPress plugins (Ninja forms, WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms, Contact Form, etc).
Conclusion.
To conclude, although creating and sending email marketing campaigns is becoming more and more accessible, there are rules and best practices to apply to create successful email marketing campaigns.
