Email Marketing Secrets to Dramatically Improve Your Campaigns

Email Marketing has proved itself over the years as a medium that goes from strength to strength. When faced with potential challenges such as Social Media, bulk email repositions itself and instead of competing with social, the two complement each other perfectly.

It is apparent that email is a powerful addition to any company’s online marketing efforts and as a result each campaign must be planned and executed with great care. I would therefore like to share some advice that will help you improve the success of your campaigns.

Create captivating subject lines: Create interesting subject lines that trigger interest from your readers. This will have a direct effect on opening rates and the overall success of your message.
Include clear call to actions: What do you want your subscribers to do after reading your email? You should include this call to action in each email and ensure that the reader will understand what is expected of them.
Personalise emails: If your target audience is spread across different age groups, your emails should also cater for this. Use email software that allows various lists and implement a different and age-appropriate approach for each group.
Get the delivery time right: The time of day and weekday you send your email can and will affect its opening rate. Test different time slots. View the statistics of each and continue with the day and time that gained the most success.
Use email templates: An email template does more for your email than just giving it a pretty appearance. If it contains your logo and corporate colours it becomes and excellent branding opportunity.
Make use of freebies: Every now and again you can do a give-away or special discount as an incentive to your database for opening and reading your email. This will encourage dormant subscribers to reconnect with you as well.
Implement AB Testing: To enhance opening rates, perform the following test. Create two or three completely different versions of the same email. Use a different subject line, create different content and imagery. Divide your database into two or three lists and send each group a different version. The email that gained the best results is the type of content that your subscribers like the most and you can work on it from there to enhance opening rates and results even further.

Each subscriber to your email newsletters is special and exceptionally important. Sending out emails without any clear-cut plan or purpose will gain the same unstructured results. Make each of your emails count.