Some Dos and Don’ts of E-mail Marketing

Email is a great way for marketers and companies to reach a huge amount of people with very little time and funds being invested.  Even though email marketing is great for you as a company or marketing consultant, emails are very rarely greeted with excitement from consumers.  Think about the last time you scrolled through your inbox.  You probably deleted half of the things in there without even opening them, and if you did open them, you probably didn’t click on any of the links in the body.  Putting yourself in the mind of a consumer, there are a few rules to email marketing that may help to yield better results, or at the very least coerce a recipient to at least open it.

DO NOT:

  • Send your emails out on a Friday or a Monday.  People are much less likely to open something up on a Friday when they are itching to get out of the office, or a Monday when they are scrambling around trying to get things done.  Try to keep in mind the best practice of sending things out mid-week and mid-morning.  Catch people when they are not as crazed, and have time to peruse their inboxes.  Think about when you usually scroll through your inbox and email your mom and brother back; it’s probably sometime right after you get into the office or sometime after lunch, right?
  • Make things too flashy and send it STRAIGHT to spam.  Naturally, you want your email to be eye-catching and grab interest, but there are tons of advanced spam filters out there with a lot of criteria, making them pretty hard to get past.  Some spam filters will even detect the pictures in the body of the email!  Try to keep this in mind when designing the templates.  If you need a little help, check out HubSpot’s recent article about getting your emails “inbox optimized” here.  Also—be careful with your subject line. Something with too many exclamation points or dollar signs will probably never be seen by a human eye.  Try to tone it down.
  • Be inconsiderate to your recipients.  Not only do emails need to comply with the CAN-SPAM act, but you also want to be considerate of the people receiving them.  Always make sure your emails come equipped with all contact information for the company, and most importantly, an unsubscribe link (although let’s pretend that no one will ever click that.)

Enough scolding. YOU SHOULD:

  • Do A/B testing. While this is really more for your benefit, it can also be seen as a method to send your client base information on things that are more important to them. Not to mention, this adds strategy and intelligence to your email campaigns, which may have at one point felt like mindless blasts with hopes of turning up a few leads.  You can get really creative with it too (which we love.)  Change some colors, phrases, tone up or tone down the landing page, and see which yields better results.  It’s like the science fair all over again!
  • Make your emails themed and valuable.  You obviously talk to your customers, right?  What kinds of questions do they ask you?  What problems have they had in the past?  Take a little bit of time to think about this and compile some topics that will bring value to your consumers.  If you want to increase the open rates on your emails, this is probably the best way to do so.  Make them care!
  • Invest in drip campaigns.  I like to think of drip campaigns as having a little robotic assistant doing your work for you.  Not only are the emails scheduled on a specific time track, but they are dependent on the recipients’ activities.  You can cater the entire campaign around what a prospect does without a huge commitment or time suck.  Plus, by catering the campaign, they’re more likely to open it.  Starting to see a trend here?

There are a ton of strategies and dos and don’ts of email marketing, and new ones are being discovered every day.  Have a few to share?  Comment below and help your fellow marketers out!

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