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CHALLENGE #1: TEST AT LEAST ONE METRIC PER EMAIL CAMPAIGN
Testing will become even more important to improve your email campaigns in today’s environment. Before you can capitalize on the good or make changes to turn the poor into the powerful, you need to know what aspects of your email campaigns are doing well or what are doing poorly.
There’s so much opportunity to test, there’s no reason you should send a campaign without testing one metric.
Here’s a list of metrics to test:
- Subject Lines. It’s quick and easy. Everyone should be testing subject lines.
- Creative elements and design.
- Long copy vs. short copy. It’s long been debated. Which does your audience respond to?
- Best Day to send emails. It varies across industries. Don’t leave something so important to a whitepaper
that reports averages. Do your own testing to find out what works best for you.
- Landing pages. Are you sending visitors to a specific landing page, or to your homepage where they have to
search to find what they are looking for?
Conversions or website activity. Which emails pushed people to your website, and which emails pushed people to take action on your website?
CHALLENGE #2: DECREASE YOUR LIST SIZE TO INCREASE LIST PERFORMANCE
To push your list to perform stronger this year, you need to weed out the names on your list that are not responding.
Of course, you want to increase you list with new email addresses at the same time (see Challenge #3). But the point is, get rid of those old email addresses that are not performing.
Here are some suggestions for cleaning house:
- Take a close look at your list and list segments. Are there some list segments you are never using?
If so, clean them out.
- Review list of people who have not responded to a message in the past few months. Maybe they should be
contacted in a different way than the rest of your list. If they still do not respond, take them off your
lists. Remember, today’s email success is about quality not quantity.
Review any new list segments you may want to make. Are there any ways to segment and strengthen messages to various groups? If so, segment them now and start communicating to those groups more effectively. Tighter segments should then lead to better targeted messages, the ‘one size fits all’ approach is now passe.
CHALLENGE #3: ONLY USE PERMISSION BASED OPT-IN PROCESS
Sometimes permission is defined in different ways. Make sure your list is really an opt-in list. It’s a common practice to collect email addresses from customers or prospects who complete a form on your website and provide their email address. Whether it’s for a whitepaper, an online contest or something else, if they didn’t expressly say, “Yes, please email me,” they haven’t opted in to receive email from you.
Instead, put a check box on this form with an option to sign up for email. Then, only send to those who check it (and never pre-check it for them). Here are some other ways to collect permission based email addresses:
- Add a sign-up box for your email newsletter on every page of your website.
- Add a sign-up check box at every opportunity - a contact form, a webinar sign-up, purchasing a products, etc.
- Provide an incentive to increase opt-ins.
- Provide a link to opt-in to additional emails in your transactional email messages.
CHALLENGE #4: REVITALISE, REFRESH, REJUVENATE, RE-ENERGISE
It may be the time for a fresh new look at your email, and perhaps a fresh new look for your email. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Do the designs of my email marketing templates and messages still fit?
- Are the content elements in my message still relevant?
- Do I have enough calls to action in my emails?
- What is one item I could add or change that would improve the look of my email?
- How do my email messages compare to my print collateral? To my website? To the rest of my marketing efforts?
Is a template and/or a message format ‘facelift’ in order?
CHALLENGE #5: BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NEW EMAIL TECHNOLOGIES AND TRENDS
There are a lot of new electronic communication opportunities and technologies you should keep an eye out for in 2006.
Look for more info on these trends in future issues of the List Report. Here are some new technologies we’ll be covering in coming months:
- RSS
- Sender authentication.
Technologies for quantifying your success in terms of website traffic and activity.
Work these challenges into your email marketing plans in the coming months. Test some new ways of getting your message to your target audience. But before you test, ensure that you have the measurement tools in place to track changes to response rates. If you need any help with this then call your AML Account Manager and they will guide you through it.
Posted on 20th March 2006