Your Guide to Email Marketing Best Practice

Some recent claims…

• Targeted email campaigns which are personalised to subscriber needs – drive 9 times more revenue and deliver 18 times more net profit than broadcast e-mailings (Source: David Daniels. Research Director, Juniper Research)
• In survey, 70% companies ranked Email as excellent or good. 79% for SEO (e-consultancy)
• Best practice should yield a 36% Open Rate and 13% Click Through Rate (Mail Chimp, 2012)

10 Facts about email and why it works

1. Goes straight into inbox
2. Cost effective
3. Can be personalised
4. Can nurture prospects (who are not ready to buy yet)
5. Can be measured
6. Can be tested (A and B samples)
7. Fast plus you can control when emails go out
8. Enables ongoing engagement
9. Works well with 24/7 lives and global locations
10. Fits well with multichannel consumption

5 Reasons why companies get email marketing wrong

1. By missing key elements (i.e. relevant content, valuable content, personal appeal,  Click Through opportunities, compelling subject lines,  Calls to Action, visually appealing content etc.)
2. By not integrating email marketing into their overall communications  efforts
3. By failing to ask customers permission to contact them (opt in/ opt out)
4. By not testing (open rates, CTR, time of day and week, post click behaviour etc.)
5.  By not understanding how email contributes to the conversion path

Top Tips to take away

1. Set up analytics on your website and prepare your dashboard to track user journeys, devices, goal conversions, bounce rates (Google Analytics)
2. Look into cost-effective email programmes (Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor) to automate the process
3. Test that your website loads and performs well on a mobile/tablet
4. Segment customers across buying stages and look at their behaviour (what they click on, how often and what they have done before) as opposed to pure demographics
5. Always spend more time on targeting than on the visual appeal /creativity
6. React to customers as soon as they have interacted with you – keep the momentum going and respond to them to show you are there for them
7. Always use landing pages on your website to track engagement with your email marketing. You can use different pages for different test samples
8. Think relevance i.e. targeted email campaigns which include say special offers/trials for undecided customers, Infographics for visual appeal and short attention span, Case studies/testimonials for reinforcing credentials /right choices, surveys for customer feedback with incentives to respond, general e- newsletters for bonding, showing happy customers and happy staff and informing of new products etc.

All the best,

The brookscomm team