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Marketers, like football teams, can use these five winning strategies to improve their e-mail marketing game:
1. Study your competition
Research the e-mail activity of other organisations in your industry. Some may not be sending e-mail at all, giving you a significant competitive advantage.
If they do have an e-mail marketing program:
- What are they doing well that you could incorporate into your efforts?
- What aspects of their game need work that you could capitalise on?
- Maybe the sign-up is hard to find on their website, or perhaps the opt-in form is too long.
- Is their content as relevant and as up to date as your customers would expect?
- What’s the value of your competitor’s e-mail offer vs. the value that you can offer your subscribers?
- Make sure you’re offering a better value and communicating it clearly and you can only know this when you understand your competition.
2. Make sure your Guernsey is clean and your socks are pulled up
You don’t want to look sloppy to your subscribers. Make sure you’ve tested your e-mail in multiple e-mail formats to ensure that is looks good to everyone. If you’re using images, make sure that your message still comes through loud and clear to the clients e-mail accounts that disable images. As mentioned in the List Report last week, this may need the appointment of a professional e-mail broadcaster. Just like a football team, you will need to adapt when playing on different home grounds.
Be careful of blistering runs through the middle and blind turns in the forward line. If you’re using Flash, video, form fields or other rich media, make sure it’s going to work in all e-mail formats. If it’s not, maybe it is safer to just make the short pass and let your forward have the easy shot for goal: Include a link in the e-mail that takes recipients to a landing page where they will be able to view these media.
3. You must make your free kicks pay off!
There are passages of play in every game that you have to make because they’re easy and they can make a big difference in the overall outcome of the game.
Your welcome message is an easy shot, yet it’s very important for the future success of your e-mail campaigns. This message should set the tone for your overall e-mail marketing strategy:
- What e-mails should subscribers expect to receive from you?
- How often can they expect to receive them?
- It should also reaffirm that you do not share personal information and provide a link to your privacy policy.
- Give an easy way for recipients to manage their e-mailing preferences.
- Do all this with a style that is consistent with the rest of your e-mail efforts - weak kicks coming off the side of the boot! Too often, welcome messages are text based poor attempts that barely travel 30 metres.
4. Practice new plays before every game
Keep your strategy fresh by testing a different element of your message. It could be:
- the subject line,
- the landing page,
- the offer,
- the call to action
- long vs. short copy,
- image-only design vs. text-and-image combo, etc.
Don’t blindly accept the latest report of what helped one organisation’s e-mail efforts. Test it yourself to be sure your recipients will respond in a similar way. Test can be run as simple A/B splits or n-th level splits if your list is large enough to create a statistically relevant test split.
5. Don’t give away cheap goals or stupid free kicks
SPAM Act violations, such as not having a working opt-out mechanism or physical postal address, can get you a seat on the bench or a league fine, or they can result in your suspension from the game. Check everything twice before the game starts, make sure that preparations have left nothing wanting, having done all this hard work, the last thing you need is to give you competitors an easy ride.
Simple moves can pay off in goals on the scoreboard: Simply make sure that recipients have stated they would welcome e-mail form your organisation and take steps to ensure you don’t wear out that welcome - so send relevant content and keep a close eye on frequency.
Go Bombers!
Posted on 02nd April 2007