How to make your E-mail Campaigns effective

Why E-mail?

Within business, E-mail is now an essential tool and used by over 200m users in Europe alone - it allows you to communicate your messages speedily and cheaply. Its return-on-investment (57x ROI, Forrester) is over double that of alternative techniques. In addition business users usually check it several times daily and nearly half even whilst on holiday!

With a CRM system it's very easy to start to segment your prospects and customers and send E-mail Campaigns to these lists, but how do you ensure that your recipients are going to read and perceive value in your E-mails?

Here we suggest a few tips toward achieving your aims:

Purpose or Goal

Make sure you understand why you are sending this E-mail, and the purpose of the whole campaign - only when you are clear about your objectives and actually track outcomes can you fully capitalise on the power of E-mail marketing. Tools like VEM allow you to monitor interest in many different ways so you can collect detail about your recipients behaviour and through this their motivations.

Hook their Interest

An E-mail must have a good reason for being sent. If your recipients don't readily see the point of the message they are less likely to respond. The hook of an E-mail is the clearly expressed main point of the E-mail - this needs to be in the headline or first sentence.

Pass the Subject filter

Often, whether your recipient opens your E-mail at all can depend on the subject line - make sure at least a suggestion of the hook is there and there are no turn-offs. If the subject line is relevant or informative enough, recipients are more likely to open the E-mail. Turn-offs might include anything that looks like SPAM or even perhaps a CRM tracking token...

Consider a Barb or Bribe

Just as a fishing hook has a barb to prevent early escape, you might wish to make an offer to encourage take-up by your recipient. This could vary but might be free independent research material, a free trial, a discount or free gift etc...

Make it easy to read quickly

If your audience has tens of E-mails to read their attention span is likely to be short - starting from the top, get quickly to the hook and follow up with the barb. Use adequate white-space and consider bulleting points rather than wordy sentences. The eye can comfortably take in a limited amount of text at a glance, particularly on a computer screen. Cushioning the text with space helps readers scan the text more easily. A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words... Sometimes a P.S. is a useful follow up structure to reinforce a specific point.

Tone, Style, Language and Intonation

Make sure you are using the right tone of voice for your message and audience. Ensure that terminology is familiar and avoid excessive use of CAPS and other 'shouting' marks (!#@*$). It is tempting to use these techniques for emphasis or urgency but overuse is a real turn-off. Use your organisation's style elements for consistency.

Call to Action

Remember, the more complicated you make your E-mails, and interaction possiblities, the harder it will be to effectively analyse the results of your campaign. So, if you want clear results, keep it simple. If you want recipients to sign-up for a training-course make sure you have a BIG button to link to a sign-up landing page.

Link to Content

The cardinal rule in E-mail marketing is never to include an attachment, always link to it. This way you avoid clogging the E-mail system with (possibly large) documents that may not be of interest and possibly triggering firewall rules. In addition you gain the ability to assess interest by monitoring click-throughs. In fact virtually the only time attachments should be used in E-mail marketing is when all recipients are opted-in to a service whereby they EXPECT an attachment.

Links for Interest

Make sure the links in your E-mail go directly to specifically relevant pages - if you are selling a specific product don't just link to the home page! Use monitored links to assess comparative interests of your recipients in different topics or products. But remember to use them wisely: if you try to 'layer' different choices you will reduce your participation levels and greatly complicate interpreting results.

Time of Delivery

This may or may not be important to you, but you should be aware that many business users may have hundreds of E-mails each day and typically each morning will try to clear their desk. If your E-mail is delivered out-of-hours it may not stand out as much as if it is delivered during working hours.

Recipient preferences

You may be very pleased with the nice-looking template you have designed for your E-mail campaign, but just remember that there are a significant minority of recipients that, by choice or otherwise, can only view plain text emails. You should ideally ensure that your E-mail is sent either according to recipient format preference (HTML or plain text) or in multipart format.

Unsubscribe option

Always offer the option to unsubscribe. Whatever subscription choices recipients have made in the past, you should always provide a way for them to change this. Failure to do this may result in annoyance which undermines your credibility.

Test thoroughly

Before conducting a live E-mail campaign you should always test your E-mails and monitoring system. Test in as many different E-mail clients as you expect your recipients to use - Outlook, Live Mail, Google- and Yahoo- Mail etc. Check your format, design, style and copy. Check your E-mail with an online SPAM-scoring tool. Check all links and interaction possiblities are clean, functional and consistent. Check all merge fields and content personalisation.