5 Important Rules You Need to Use on Your Next Email Campaign

5 Important Rules You Need to Use on Your Next Email Campaign

One of the ultimate weapons in any business marketing armoury is the humble email campaign. Even though it has been around for many years, and has been wildly overused by some companies, the email campaign is still a highly effective at reaching out to your chosen demographic and influencing them. The problem that this success has created means that you can no longer sit down at your desk, tap out an email, hit send, then sit back and wait for the world to come and knock at your door waving their money. Any corporate branding agency will tell you that brand development is the key to any successful business marketing strategy and that anything that leaves your company has to further to brand. 

We have got together with Calgary’s best and most effective corporate branding agency and come up with 5 ways you can breathe a little more life into your next email campaign and cut through the white noise of the inbox that is simply superfluous junk mail.

One Size Definitely Does Not Fit All!

Before your hands hit the keyboard to type your marketing masterpiece, think about your email lists. If you want to reach out to people and be effective, make sure your lists are up to date. If you have purchased a list make sure it is relevant to your market, demographic and company image. Nothing screams ‘I am spam’, louder than something that has no relevance whatsoever to the person receiving it. Your email campaign has a large element of brand development about it, so develop it by contacting people who care. 

How do you eat an elephant? 

One bite at a time. And what does that have to do with your Pulitzer Prize winning email campaign? Apply the same principle with your email address database. Everything is much more manageable and achievable in organized sections. Once you have a relevant database, whether it’s a cleaned up one you purchased or one you have captured from your own web site and social media, break it down into bite sized pieces. Organize it. Group together by industry, company size, interest, product interests, seasonal demand – absolutely anything that allows you to make your list more relevant to THEM as a consumer. Some company’s may fall into more than one list and others only appear on one, but whatever list they are on – make sure they want, or can use, your product or service. Trim out the old or irrelevant and discard; save them if you want to, but why keep email addresses that will not buy? Is this time consuming? – yes. Painful? – that too. But this one act of relevancy will pay dividends in your open rate and your success rate. You can’t afford to ignore it. 

Therein Lies the Treasure…

Make sure your email campaign is full of great content. Don’t go to all the trouble of organizing, writing and dispatching a huge email campaign if what you have got to say is weak or boring. Make every word count! Attract them with your company image and lure them into your delicious web of products and service with your enticing words. If you aren’t able to ‘wow’ them in three seconds – employ someone who can. Nowhere will this pay off more than in the subject line. If your subject line bombs – so will your email, and if you’re going for brand development that is not the way to succeed. Corporate branding strategy was not built on failure. 

Don’t be 2 dimensional about your email campaign either. A major household company sent out an email and got a MASSIVE 82% conversion on it. Imagine an 82% success rate! How? They simply put a .gif image in it. Think outside of the in-box. Video, animations, teasers can all be sent in an email campaign and may just be the ‘wow’ factor your customer is looking for. 

Follow the Game

Whatever system you use to administer your email campaign make sure it provides you with metrics. You need to know what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t. Test the effectiveness of a campaign, try something new, follow the same old pattern – it really doesn’t matter what you do (as long as you keep up your company image), but always track its success. You need to continue building your brand and generating leads and the only way you can do this is to know what is effective for your company. Boring as number crunching the bottom line may be – it’s still the bottom line.

Give Yourself a Promotion

Use social media to promote your email. Create a buzz about it before it goes out, post teasers, ask questions - whatever device you need to create anticipation. You want people to open it so use twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ or any other platform available to whip up a frenzy before it comes out and it will ensure that its read. It’s also a good idea to include links to help people post the content on social media at the end of your email so that you can get your customers promoting your product on their own social media. Brilliant! 

Never be afraid of designing an email campaign as all it takes to create an online marketing storm is a little bit of planning, a little bit of work and a lot of exciting thinking. Work at giving the people that elephant one bite at a time. You know they want it. Think about it. You can do it – I know you can.