This blog will adress email strategy and planning as key to its success. How to grow a datable and exploring of creative execution of emails. When and how to deploy emails, and how email analytics can be used to track and measure campaigns. Email marketing is a tool for customer relationship management. Used effectively, it can deliver one of the highest returns on investment of any digital marketing activity. Email marketing can be used as tool to help you achieve your business and website goals, and should be considered in line with your overall business, marketing and digital strategy. Promotional emails have immediate goals concerning purchases, downloads or requests. Newsletters tend to focus on longer term goals and usually geared at creating and retaining long term relationships with its readers. Running a successful email campaign requires a business to have a genuine option database. This list of subscribers who have agreed to allow a company to send them emails with marketing messages is the most valuable asset of an email campaign. They have made information gathering more accessible, but don’t be tempted to ask for more than required. Because the more information askes to require, the less likely they are to sign up. Parts of a good email should be sender information first, following a subject line to inform recipients, a header, personalised greeting to create some sort of personality with the greeting, a body, a footer and at the bottom, a small unsubscribe link to always give your customers the option to unsubscribe. Email content that is relevant and valuable to readers is vital to ensuring the success of an email marketing campaign. Valuable content is informative and should address the problems and needs of readers. It is important to realise that the reader determines the value of the content, not the publisher.
There are two important highlights to writing for email marketing;
- Email links. It is important to consider that any links you include in your email copy will lead readers away from your email. You’ll want to keep these to a minimum, and include only when it is a requirement or service feature.
- Subject line. Many users decide whether or not to open an email based on their first point of contact – the subject line.
The technology of email marketing allows for mass customisation – it is one-to-one marketing on a macro scale. Even simple personalisation or customisation can see improved results, for example across demographics or purchase history.
Key measurables for understanding the performance of email include; Number of emails delivered, number of bounces, number of unique emails opened, unsubscribes, Pass-on rate, clickthrough rates and conversion.
Advantages of email marketing are the high return on investment it can give. However, with the increasing numbers of companies and individuals using email marketing, many customers are email fatigues. It requires ingenuity, focus and dedication to maintain an email database and consistently deliver useful quality emails that will be read. It does not take much for email to be marked as spam, and it can be difficult to recover from being branded as a spammer by communities.
By Mayke Johannes
Source: Stookes, Rob and the minds of Quirk (2018). EMarketing: the essential guide to marketing in a digital world (5th ed). Quirk eMarketing (Pty) ltd. (Ed.).
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