Email Marketing - Increasing Your ROI
Email Marketing - Increasing Your ROI
All e-mail marketing is not created equal.
You know this because you, too, have an inbox. You see what arrives there! You can feel the difference between the e-mails you rush to open and the ones that cause you to angrily hit the delete key. If you’re a small business owner trying to tweak your e-mail marketing campaign, where you should start? What’s most important?
Here are five of the best email marketing practices –
1. Keep your email marketing personal
The power of e-mail marketing comes from its intimacy. A person may have hundreds of friends on
Facebook or give their
Twitter to anyone, but they only share their email with people they know won’t abuse it. Take the opportunity to create a personal relationship and speak in a more casual and comfortable tone.
2. Email marketing should be short and sweet
Short articles beat long ones. Hit the high points and give the reader a chance to dive into the topic at their discretion with hyperlinks. Using one touch re-directs not only save time for you but also give another strategy for driving traffic specific pages of your website or blog. Too many email marketing efforts are “in your face” pitches, but like any relationship you can only ask for something if you are giving something in return.
3. Track ALL of your email marketing
Give yourself the tools to monitor everything that is going on inside of your email marketing campaign. Efelle Media’s newsletter and email marketing platform lets you track delivery rates, open rates, link clicks, conversions, customer service calls, etc. – these are the keys to knowing what works, and knowing what works is what enables you to run successful marketing campaigns.
4. Formatting is key in email marketing
More and more people are getting email on their
Blackberry,
iPhone,
Droid, ect. Be sure that your email marketing piece can be easily read and is formatted for all of those devices.
5. Know when to send it
Perhaps most key is sending your email newsletter when people are most likely around to read it and it won’t get lost in the sea of email that they are already receiving. Every industry will have different data on the best time to send out your email marketing, but it’s always safest to experiment and see what works best for you. You probably know not to send it out at 6pm on Friday, but is Monday morning any better? Which will get you the greater return? What does your competition do? The only way to know for sure is to test. As you zero in on the best time, make sure to be consistent so people know when to expect your newsletter so they’re waiting for it to hit their inbox.
Ready to start an email marketing campaign?