A Dozen Ways to Succeed with Email Marketing in 2011

Ask a group of email marketing specialists, “What’s the most important component in e marketing campaigns?” and you’ll get  a dozen answers.

With considerations around design, mailing frequency, message, length, tone, landing pages, compelling offers, and incentives, it’s nearly enough to make you quit before you begin.

But don’t.

Although there are many ways to approach e marketing campaigns, there are consistent principals to follow that can result in increased conversions and, ultimately, more sales and revenue. 
1. Your email must be relevant to the reader. Segment data so that you’re sending the most interesting message possible to your recipients. Offers need to match the reader’s motivations for them to act upon them. Segmentation and strong statements of relevance and quality are important.
2. You have only a few seconds to make that connection. Your customer scans his inbox to see what can be deleted, not what can read. Make your words count.
3. Use a compelling subject line to stand out from the other emails in your recipient’s mailbox. Focus on benefits and stay away from passive language: not “Check out this whitepaper on how to get more web leads” but “Six website navigation tips that boost conversions by 40%.
4. Have a clear objective: emails that attempt to do too much are ineffective. In other words, communicate one point well, not several points poorly.
5. The email sender needs to be a person, not a department; sending from sales@yourcompany.com is not personal. People buy from people, not an anonymous department.
6. Compelling content entices the reader to learn more – and how easy have you made it for them to take the next step? It should be an obvious and single click away.
7. Email doesn’t need to be tarted-up with graphics and banners to be compelling. In fact, your message may be perceived as more authentic if it looks like plain text. Simple HTML can be used that looks like plain text yet still enables email marketing reporting.
8. Can readers absorb the message and understand what steps are required to get to the offer without making them work for it?
9. The purpose of the email is not to sell. It’s to create a level of interest in that compels the reader to take the next step.
10. To optimize the message, meet your readers where they are and guide them to where you want them to go (the landing page, where the offer can be presented more effectively).
11. Use the landing page to present the benefits of the offer and have a strong call to action. Including an incentive to sweeten the deal adds urgency.
12. When it comes to running successful email campaigns, we’re told to follow the rules that everyone knows work. And then there’s what really works for you. Test and continue to optimize over time.

In the B2B world, people buy from people. And people are far more likely to read your email, view a landing page, and respond to an offer that has value to them if its part of a meaningful conversation.

Are you happy with the results of your campaigns? What change have you made most recently that increased effectiveness?

Learn how to avoid the Dirty Dozen Email Newsletter Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes, courtesy of HubSpot and MarketingSherpa.