7 Ways To Increase Your Email Marketing Success Rate

Most small to medium sized enterprises operate on a tight marketing budget. Typically, there would be only one or two people handling email marketing activities as part of their roles but to get the best return on your investment you need clean and current email lists, relevant email content and some sort of tracking system to monitor the results of the campaigns. Here are seven tips to help you efficiently create, send and track email campaigns that deliver results:

1. Commence with Clean-List Building Methods
   Build your contact list from people that have expressed an interest in hearing about your product or service, either via opt-in boxes on your website or previous purchases. Having prior consent or permission to send an email to someone obviously helps the deliverable success rate and ideally you want the receiver to recognise you as the sender. Segmenting your customer or client list allows you to target different markets with tailored offers so you get better results.
   
   
2. Ensure Your Contact List is Current
   If your contact list is outdated you are at risk of getting blacklisted or blocked which will make it hard for your future emails to be delivered. If you are concerned that you might already be blacklisted, check your domain name and IP address at sites like mxtoolbox.com or whatismyipaddress.com
   
3. Address the Needs of Your Key Customers
   Where possible, personalise your emails. While it’s almost impossible to write an email that works for your entire contact list, by focusing your message on your key customers you will get better results and keep your top customers happy. Make sure you include a clear call-to-action that tells your customers what to do next – click here for a free copy, register here, read more, get a free sample etc.
   
   
4. Write a Clear and Compelling Subject Line
   Once you have established who you are sending your email to you need to work on the subject line. In a sense, it’s the headline or advertisement for your email so you need to make it appealing to your target market. With subject lines, often less is best. For example, “Limited Time Only” is more compelling than “Amazing Once-In-A-Lifetime Deal!” Keywords are critical and the right headline will have a better chance of getting through your prospect’s spam filters.
   
   
5. Establish and Use Your Online Presence
   By using your own website, domain name and email address with your domain name in the address, your emails are more likely to be recognised and opened than if you used a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail address. At the beginning of each email ask your email recipients to add your address to their address book to improve future deliverability. Include an email submission form on your website to help build your list.
   
   
6. Text Tells - Images Sell
   They say a picture paints a thousand words. Keep your content simple with a good balance of text and images. Customers love images and you should make the images clickable to support your call to action. Emails containing JavaScript and attachments also tend to send a red flag.
   
   
7. Continual Testing
   Trial and error is a proven way to test email campaigns. If possible, divide your contact list into sections and send half one email and the other half a different message. This is ‘split testing’ and you need to monitor the open rate and response rate to the respective emails. This lets you then select a winner and next time create a new email to go up against the winner. It’s all about continual improvement. By checking your campaign's open and click-through rates you will gain an insight into what content and subject lines work best.

In summary, you need to monitor and measure your email marketing results. Understand your email marketing metrics including the open rates, unique clicks, conversions and unsubscribes. Use the statistics to create benchmarks that you can measure future email campaigns against.
 

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• Get To Know Your Profit Margins
• Business Start Up Corner - How To Get Off To A Flying Start
• Buying Or Selling A Business? Make Sure It's A "Going Concern"
• Business Builders - Targeting Your Ideal Customer
• Is Your Website Generating New Business?
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