Email Marketing Blog

Top Tips for Email Marketing

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:46:00 GMT

Promoting your products or services by email is a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. With Psy-web design’s powerful email marketing tool, you can create professional HTML email newsletters using a simple 7 step wizard allowing you to keep customers up to date with all products, services, latest news and special offers.

Unfortunately our system cannot write the content for you (as yet!) So we have put together our Top Tips to Creating a Successful Email Campaign which we hope will help you carry out a campaign and ensure a successful return on your investment:

Planning your email campaign is vital

It’s very important to plan your email campaign well in advance of the date you want to send it out. There are a number of things you should think about when deciding what to write your campaign content:

Who is your target audience?

To make your email relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs.
What are your objectives?

Identify what the main aim of your email campaign is. Do you want to raise awareness of your products and services, generate leads and sales or improve customer retention?

Segment, personalise and be relevant

Use the information you have identified from asking yourself the questions above to send your audience targeted, relevant messages. Segmenting your customer database and developing specific offers for each target audience is a key step to creating a successful email campaign.

Write a great subject line

The subject line is the first thing your customer will see when they are deciding which emails to read and which to mark as spam. Keeping your subject line simple but intriguing will encourage customers to open the email and read more. Be careful not to use words like “free” which may trigger spam filters. Personalising the subject line to the recipient and including your company name works well to encourage high open rates.

Writing your all important content

Email newsletters are often thought of as printed newsletters sent electronically; but they are not! The content should be concise and to the point, perhaps a snippet of information which links to the full article on your website. Below are a few points to remember when writing the creative for your campaign

Remember that your reader is reading light, not matter (ink).

When reading light we don’t blink as often and as we are unable to adjust text size by moving the document closer or further from our eyes, we tend to scan a page, looking for key words or phrases to get the information required without reading every word.
Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your reader's attention so write short.

I would suggest 50 percent less than you write for a printed newsletter. Each article should be at the most two page-downs with a maximum sentence length of 15 to 20 words, maximum paragraph length of five sentences, and a maximum article length of four paragraphs. Remember...these are maximums! When writing email content, less is more!
Remember to write in a conversational tone.

Let your personality show through and readers are more likely to spend their time reading what you have to say.
Remember to use lots of bullet points and numbered lists.

Lists are easy to scan and they help the reader absorb each item one at a time.
Remember to limit each article to a single concept.

Add links to your website to allow recipients to read longer articles or gain more information should they choose. Our email tracking system allows you to see when readers click on a link in the email allowing you to use your follow-up call time productively by targeting those who have taken further interest in your newsletter.
Remember that email newsletters are easily forwarded.

Never write anything that you wouldn't want the whole world (including your competition) to know!

Test before you send

First impressions count so testing your email campaign with a number of different email providers is an important thing to do before sending your campaign. I would recommend you send at least 5 test emails to yourself and your colleagues (so they can check for any spelling/grammar errors you may have missed!) and to all your test email accounts, before you send your email campaign out to your customer list.

You should test -

What the email will look like in the most popular email readers (Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Hotmail and Google Mail) - set up as many test accounts with free email providers as possible and leave them in their default settings.
That your images aren’t broken.
That your email doesn’t fall into spam or junk folder
That your unsubscribe link works.

We can provide a service which allows you to see screenshots of exactly how your email will look in more than 15 of the most popular web, desktop and mobile email clients - we'll also run your email through a number of key spam firewalls - the gatekeepers for most ISP's and large organisations. Contact us for further details

Measure campaign success

Psy-webs Online Marketing Suite allows you to see in real time actions customers took once they receive your email.

You can see -

The number of emails delivered (delivery rate).
The number of emails opened (open rate).
The number of click-through generated (click-through rate).
Email addresses that bounced and the reasons why
The number of customers who unsubscribed from your campaign

Ideally, each time you send an email campaign, you want to increase the number of people who open and act on it. Analysing your campaign results will help you do this.

Make follow up calls

Whatever you send out, make sure you follow it up with a telephone call. Start with the people who have opened the campaign most or have clicked through to your website as this may indicate they had a genuine interest in your information or offer.

I hope these tips help you create a succesful campaign, however should you find yourself struggling to get your point across with your marketing campaign, our in-house marketing team offer a copywriting service both for websites and related materials so please do feel free to contact us today to see what we can do to help.

Why am I being marked as spam?

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:50:00 GMT

First off, lets clarify what exactly spam is, the Oxford Dictionary describes spam as irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of users.

Spam is a major issue affecting everyone on the internet. I’m sure none of us particularly enjoy receiving spam but most of us are content to simply press delete and get on with our day. What we do find more of a problem is when genuine emails we send out mark us as spam to our customer base!

Today, more and more words and phrases are being flagged as "spam" words by various email programmes, and thus will automatically block messages using them too often. This is because many anti-spam systems rely on keywords for determining whether an email should be considered spam. These programs assign spam probabilities to each word, so that some words are weighted as more likely to signal spam than others. If the overall email contains a high proportion of spam words, or if it passes a certain threshold of spam words, it is more likely to get trapped in anti-spam filters.

Unless you are careful in using the words and phrases, important business emails or marketing campaigns could end in the spam folder of the recipient.

Avoiding use of known spam words is a key step to getting your message through the over zealous spam filters that some companies use. Apart from this, my advice would be to try not to repeat words, not to use all caps (upper case) and try to minimise use of !, $, or 100% and other punctuation marks.

Below is a list of some of the words and phrases that have been known to trigger spam filters, Trying to avoid multiple use of these words in your campaign can help prevent your email get stuck in the spam filters.

50% off!	Click here	Funding	No-cost or no-fee	Save up to
Amazing	Congratulations	Get Paid	Order now	Search Engine Listings
As Seen On...	Dear friend	Give it away	Paying too much	Serious Cash
Astounding	Discount!	Great offer	Permanent low interest	Special invitation
Awesome	Don't Delete	Guaranteed	Please Read	Special Promotion
Banking	Double your income	Increase sales	Pre-accepted	This is not spam
Bargain	Earn $	Information you requested	Pre-approved	Unbelievable
Call now!	Eliminate Debt	Join millions	Promise you	Why pay more?
Cancel at any time	Expenses,	Learn how	Risk free	Wonderful
Check or money order	Free!	Low risk	Satisfaction Guaranteed	You've been selected

For further information about creating a good email marketing campaign, take a look at this post

Loyalty Campaigns

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:32:00 GMT

Are you sending out loyalty campaigns? You should be! If you're not sure what they are, or how to do it - read on...

For almost every business, there is something that you could be reminding people of.

For example, if you are running a children’s party venue, you could remind parents each year about the great time they had the last time they had a party at your venue, Dentists may need to remind patients about their check ups and so on.

Now that could take up a lot of time, what with developing a process to allow you to remember the events in the first place and then personalising an email to remind the customer - would it actually be worth it?

Yes! Customers appreciate the personal touch, the fact you have remembered them and taken time out of your day to get in touch about a specific, relevant subject makes them feel good. They see your company as a reputable organisation that looks after their customers and they will probably become more inclined to recommend you to their friends and family.

Now here comes the answer to how to do this for your customers in the easiest, most cost effective method - Loyalty campaigns! They allow you to do this via email without you actually needing to remember any dates!

There are 3 main types of loyalty campaigns -

Birthday

Send an email out on a customer's birthday. Tell them happy birthday and offer them a special birthday discount on the next product or service they have from you.

Campaign Join

Send an email based on the day the customer subscribed to your email newsletter. You can use this sort of campaign to send out a series of emails after a customer subscribes. A great example of this would be if you signed up for someone to send you their top 10 tips, sent as 10 emails over a period of 10 weeks. No matter when you sign up, every person gets the same ten tips, in the same order after they sign up.

Anniversaries

Send an email based on custom anniversaries that you can set and define for each customer. Take the party venue for example. When a customer books a party through your online business website, their details create a record in your database. You will then probably need to contact the customer via phone or email to confirm the booking, once in the customer record you can simply set an anniversary date in their record and the system will automatically email them next year inviting them to book their party again. You can keep in touch with customers who have used your products and services for years to come without having to remember a thing! The system allows 5 custom anniversaries to be set for each customer.

For further advice or information about how Psy-Web’s Online Business websites can improve your customer relations, encourage previous customers to return and over all increase your online profitability, contact us today

Small Business Marketing

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:31:00 GMT

I was reading an article the other day about the uphill battle that many small business owners face fighting for business against larger, better funded competitors.

It got me thinking, being a small business ourselves, how we have overcome these problems.

I looked back at the marketing strategy we put into place when we first launched Psy-Web’s Online Business Websites. We were working to a budget and decided to use the system we were going to launch to do most of the work for us!

Psy-Web’s Online Business Website comes with an excellent email marketing suite allowing users to send as many professionally designed HTML emails as desired. Being part of a larger business solutions company, we had an existing customer base we could market to and so we utilised our own facilities to gain more business for ourselves!

We sent the emails, and before we even got around to following them up we were receiving phone calls and contact forms through our website asking us for more information! Great result!

After speaking to the customers who had enquired, we then used the email marketing suite’s analytical reporting to gage interest from customers we had emailed but not heard from.

The reporting shows you how many times the customer has opened the email, which links they have clicked on within the email and the times and dates of all these actions.

One recipient had clicked the contact link a couple of times but we had never heard from them, just one quick phone call to the customer explained that they were very interested in the Online Business Website but had been interrupted with customer calls on the 2 occasions they had tried to contact us and then they simply forgot. That particular customer no longer has the same problems; he now takes most his enquiries through his Online Business Website allowing him to complete tasks with less disruption.

Psy-web Online Business Websites are available to suit most budgets, whether you are looking for just the Email Marketing Suite to add to your existing site or a Bespoke Ecommerce Site built for you we are sure we can help. Get in touch today to discuss how we can help YOUR business DO business.

In this climate, smart marketing is a thousand times better than deep pockets.