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Every year more businesses are turning to email marketing to benefit from lower costs and faster responses in comparison to traditional direct marketing methods. Many are also drawn by the prospect of achieving higher response rates.
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As ACT!, GoldMine and Sage CRM consultants we speak to a lot of marketing teams and of all the support issues logged by our customers in 2006, help with email marketing was top of the list. The aims of any email campaign typically include winning new business and strengthening customer loyalty but many people we speak to are frustrated with the lack of results they’ve seen from email marketing.
To be able to connect with an increasingly savvy customer base and to maintain a competitive edge, businesses need better email marketing tools to understand what actions their audience take in response to every email broadcast. That means knowing which recipients open an email, what time they typically read their email, what links they click and then using this intelligence to send more personalised communication is what successful email marketing is about.
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Introducing Sage E-Marketing
Sage E-Marketing is a web based e-marketing application and through sophisticated tracking, audience profiling, bounce-back management, and spam checking it possesses the technology to enable marketers to achieve real success with email marketing. You’ll find more about this application on our Sage E-Marketing page.
Top Tips for Email Marketing
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As powerful as it is, Sage E-Marketing can’t re-invent a businesses’ email marketing in isolation. To provide marketing teams with some best practice advice and tips we’ve compiled a free Email Marketing guide.
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For general e-marketing recommendation we suggest:
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Use good data - Only rent email addresses that have a verifiable opt-in status. Response rates are generally 10 times greater using good opt-in data.
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Keep the message simple - Email message broadcasting should be seen as a means to an end - the end being a contact with your prospect or a visit to your website. Long messages raise the threshold to response. Keep the reason for emailing at the forefront of the message.
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Keep the creative simple - Try to ensure the whole message can be seen on one screen, including response mechanisms. Don't use lots of different font sizes and typefaces – it confuses and detracts from the message. Make sure that graphics are hosted so that the file size is kept to a minimum - preferably less than 25kb.
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Create a good subject line - Give the recipient a reason to open your message. Poorly considered subject lines will negate any good creative or offer, as the recipient may not even see it. Subject lines should be intriguing and not a direct sell.
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Make it easy to respond - After all, that is the point of the exercise. Always have a clear, concise call to action. Allow them immediate access to your website and contact by email – they are online so use the media. You should also enable them to contact you offline.
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Be prepared to broadcast on multiple occasions - You should not think of email marketing as a one off hit - an all or nothing approach. Research shows that response rates increase with frequency as the recognition factor increases.
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Make use of HTML - Whilst keeping the message simple, you should, where possible use html to create the message - it looks far better on screen, and allows the URL's of links to be hidden behind visually pleasing images. You should always produce a text version of the html to be broadcast simultaneously to the html, to ensure that recipients unable to accept html will be able to receive your message.
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Track everything - Open rates, unsubscribes, clickable-links, emails received, telephone and faxes received. Simply tracking the clicks is only half the story. You should monitor what happened when the click-through occurred on the website, as well as your sales call centre.
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Get the timing right - Don't broadcast over night to B2B databases as the first thing that will happen the following morning is that the message will be deleted. Tuesdays through Thursdays have proved to be the most responsive for B2B broadcasts. Sending a message on a Friday afternoon to consumers has proved very successful.
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