Ten e-Mail Marketing Tips to Get Started or Improve on Your e-Mail Marketing Success

Beginners: How to get started

• How to come up with content: Read your trade magazines or search news sites for related stories on your industry. Comment on the news or provide educational content about your industry. The people on your list should perceive you as an expert, and they will appreciate the information you provide.
• Make a schedule of content. For newsletters, brainstorm ideas for issues and make a schedule for the next three to six issues. You can create the content in advance so you won't create unnecessary pressure when publishing time comes.
• Make an offer that relates to the editorial. If you want quick results with your campaigns, tie in an actionable offer that related to the issues content. It is a surefire way to increase your chances of immediate returns.
• Decide who will write it. If you are a strong writer and have the time – by all means try it yourself, but remember – experienced web copywriters will apply rules of writing for the web and can increase readership and results.
• Decide who will design it. If you have a designer or design department, you can design the email yourself as well – but make sure to test it thoroughly in different email clients – don't be caught sending out an email that looks terrible because of technical mistakes.
• Decide on how you will send it. Sending it yourself from your computer may cause many problems – including ISP limits on sending group emails, lack of automated unsubscribe functions and reporting functions such as opens and click-throughs, dealing with all of the bounce-backs and other list management issues. Your best choice is to use a reputable ESP (Email Service Provider)

Experts: How to improve results

• Use dynamic content inclusion to provide more relevant content to different segments of your database. Use what you know about your contacts to provide a tailored reading experience.
• Track user behavior beyond the click-through. Professional web analytics programs can track visits to your web site from email links to report on page views, actions and sales from your campaigns.
• Review your message templates for effectiveness within new email clients. Make sure your messages can be viewed without images – and that the most compelling content is "above the fold" (on the first screen) in the preview pane.
• Consider breaking up your stories at a cliff-hanger point to increase click-through so you can better measure your readership. If prospecting is your main goal, you can use score reporting across multiple email campaigns to determine the contacts that you are engaging the most to create a “hot call list”

If you would like to discuss any of the points in this document – and learn how we can help implementing these tips on your next campaign – please call Keith Holloway at: 416 597 9256 (direct line) or email keith@agito.ca

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