7 strategies for killer email marketing campaigns

7 STRATEGIES FOR KILLER

EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

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With over 144 billion emails sent each and every day, email marketing is one of the most crowded channels for business communication. Yet it remains the most effective in reaching your potential target customer.

So... how can you get heard in all that noise?

To be sure, finding the key to a stand-out message is critical to your bottom line—whether that bottom line is cold, hard cash or community engagement and everything in between.

What follows are 7 inbox-tested secret strategies that the experts are using every day to get their emails cliopened and clicked.

Welcome...

Next to each strategy, we’ve listed a way in which we can help you to achieve email success.

A significant element of email marketing is relationship building, and with

that in mind there is a time and a place for personalisation. However there

are 2 kinds you should be aware of; first up there’s the basic ‘Hey NAME’

emails where the email seems to be sent directly to the recipient, yet this

can come across as ‘fake’. Does a recipient trust you? Does a recipient

even know who you are? When an email jumps the gun by forcing

familiarity too soon, the personalisation comes across as insincere.

Intimacy is earned in real life, and it would appear to be the same way with

email.

Faking familiarity with the subscriber turns many wary email readers off.

But this isn’t to say that all forms of personalisation are off-limits. In fact,

a particular brand of personalisation can pay off big time: Sending email

that acknowledges a subscriber’s individuality (e.g., purchase history or

demographic). However it’s not to say this doesn’t work. Personalised

emails can get a far higher response rate if used effectively. You could

prompt an autonated email to someone who opens your email or clicks on

a specific link in a specific email.

Next up there’s what we call ‘email customisation’. Also known as

‘lifecycle email marketing’. This sends individual emails based upon a

customers actions, triggering a customised, personalised email as a

response. An example of this is Amazon.com. If (like me) you’ve added an

item to your shopping cart but havn’t quite got around to buying it yet -

you’ll notice Amazon will send you a friendly ‘nudge’ a few days later to

prompt you to go ahead and buy it. Try it and see. This ‘retargetting’

approach has been one of the latest breakthroughs in online advertising,

websites like AdRoll will allow you to retarget customers who show some

interest but haven’t quite bit the carrot. Email automation through clever

use of auto-responder series’ can be both time saving and profitable.

Personalise (and customise) your emails

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A study found that product personalisation, in which customers are directed to products that their past purchasing patterns suggest they will like, triggered positive responses in 98 percent of customers.

The takeaway here is that if you use personalisation as an email strategy, do so in a meaningful way. It takes little knowledge or relationship to place someone’s name in your greeting. It shows far greater care to send personalised email that is specific to a recipient’s needs and history.

We can create custom fields, so that you can collect more information about your subscribers, allowing you to personalise your emails, so each subscriber gets that personal touch.

MailNinja: beginners

If you want to take that a step further; we can set up auto-responder series’ which fire out personalised emails when someone opens your email campaign or clicks on specific links.

MailNinja: advanced

If you really want to be smart - we can add a small piece of code into your membership website allowing you to track customer activity and send automated emails based on what they do and when they do it. Like Amazon.

MailNinja: experts

When it comes to deciding how to craft that perfect subject line, there appears to be really only one area to avoid: the subject line of 60 to 70 characters. Marketers refer to this as the “dead zone” of subject length. According to research by Adestra, which tracked over 900 million emails for its report, there is no increase in either open rate or clickthroughs at this 60-to-70 character length of subject line.

Conversely, subject lines 70 characters and up tested to be most beneficial to engage readers in clicking through to the content, and subject lines 49 characters and below tested well with open rate.

In fact, Adestra found that subject lines fewer than 10 characters long had an open rate of 58%.

Short subjects came in vogue with the success of President Barack Obama’s email fundraising. He saw incredible engagement with subjects like “Hey” and “Wow.”

Write killer subject lines

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So the question becomes: Do you want to boost clicks (response) or opens (awareness)? Go long for clickthroughs; keep it short for opens.

Either way, a helpful email strategy is to squeeze out more words or cut back just a bit to avoid that 60 to 70 character dead zone.

There’s a science behind the perfect subject line, and after 15 years we kinda know how this works. We can help you craft catchy, fun, direct and powerful subject lines that get your emails opened and clicked in every time.

How MailNinja can help:

'Should I send my email campaign now, how soon is now, and if not now then when?' I'm often asked this question. Sometimes on a daily basis in fact! No question, which gets asked with such frequency, can have a simple answer, but there is certainly some sound advice I can dispense. One man's meat is another man's poison.

Traditionally, it's been suggested that Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon are the sweet-spot to ensure that your email is opened. Others suggest hitting targets just after the morning rush or soon after lunch.

But actually, these universal sweet spots are a myth.

Look at it this way: If there really was a single best time to hit audiences, everyone would be sending their campaigns at those times, inundating inboxes and turning the sweet-spots into the exact opposite - the worst possible times to send.

What's more, spammers (who you could argue pay as much attention to the stats as legitimate email marketers) would also be sending their spam in these golden time slots, putting a dampener on open rates even more.

The reality is that indications of these sweet spots for email sending are very general, average highs, and shouldn't be taken as indicators of the behaviour of your own customers and target audience.How to identify your own 'best sending' time windows

So, I've explained why I'd prefer you to take industry averages with a pinch of salt in this context. But that's not the end of the story. There are some key questions you can ask to help identify the 'best send windows' for your own customer base and contacts.

Send at peak times

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Theres a forumla to effective email marketing campaigns; send

the right message, at the right time, to the right person. Do this

and you’ll be onto a winner!

When’s the right time? It really depends on your target market.

Are they B2B or B2C? Do they get up early? Do they read your

emails on a mobile device?

We’ll work with you to determine who your audience is,

helping you to drive fresh subscribers and send emails to them

when they are ready to read them.


Who are you recipients and what do they do?

Firstly, I'd like you to consider the demographics of your target audience –

who are these people, what work do they do, how do they live and behave?

Occupation alone can be a major influence on opening habits and

expectations. Are your audience business or consumer? At work, at college

or at home? All these factors can help you build a picture of how your

target market is likely to respond to the timing of your email campaigns.

When do they interact with you?

Use your website analytics or ask your account department to show you

when your market interacts with you. When are the busy buying/enquiring

times and days. When does activity drop off? Build you campaign timings

around these patterns.

Consumers love a free lunch - or a free guide, ebook or download.

In a study on their email list of 6,300 subscribers, Bluewire Media tested

various types of content to see what led to the highest rates for opens and

clicks. The winner was free ebooks and tools, just the kind of freebies that

email readers want.

Here is a freebie example from Help Scout:

Give something away

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Many a consumer will ask, “What’s in it for me?” When it comes to resources, Bluewire Media’s test results say that ebooks and tools outweigh expert interviews, brain teasers, and even photo albums. You will want to test with your own list, but certainly use Bluewire’s research as a head start.

A bit like this ebook - free content + email markeing just works.

Create great content in a variety of formats (email, PDF, videos, webinars, books...) and we will help you use email to get it to the right people through social media and a powerful auto-responder series.


Mobile opens accounted for 47 percent of all email opens in June 2014,

according to numbers provided by email marketing firm Litmus. If your

email list accounts for $100 in sales each month, could you afford to wave

bye-bye to $47 just because your email looks bad on a mobile phone?

Design responsively to ensure that your email looks great no matter where

it’s read. Here are some quick mobile design tips:

• Convert your email to a one column template

• Increase the font size for improved readability

• Make the call-to-action obvious and easy to tap

• Keep important tappable elements in the middle of the screen

47% of emails are read on mobile devices

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Are your emails mobile ready?

We can create amazing looking emails that look great on every device from phones to tabets to PCs.

We’ve got a team of expert designers that can design and build emails that respond the screen sizes and work seamlessly on all devices.


Social media may be the young whippersnapper nipping at email’s heels, but the content king of the inbox still holds sway in social influence, according to a study by SocialTwist. Over an 18-month period, SocialTwist monitored 119 referral campaigns from leading brands and companies. The results showed a significant advantage to email’s ability to convert new customers compared to Facebook and Twitter.

Of the 300,000 referrals who became new customers, 50.8 percent were reached by email, compared to 26.8 percent for Twitter and 22 percent for Facebook.

Email ruled supreme, by almost double.

From a marketing point-of-view you get great return on your investment. It beats all other mediums. The following are returns on each dollar spent during 2012:

• Email $40.56• Search engine marketing $22.24• Internet display advertising $19.72• Mobile $10.51• Catalogue $7.30

To top it all off, 36% of consumers say that email marketing has become more relevant in the last 12 months (2012).

Email beats social media

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Email is king. However social media can be your faithful servant. We can help you bring in email subscribers by driving traffic to your signup forms.


Here’s some advice to help you boost your averages:

Open rate

MailChimp say that the average open rate is currently 21.1% - 23.4%,

however MailNinja customers enjoy a massive 48% average. Email open

rates are highly dependent on the ‘Subject’ field - so get creative.

Click-through rate (CTR)

MailChimp shows the average click-through rate is 3.1% - 3.6%. Hence,

the CTR relies heavily on the composition of your email content, how well

you write, the offer itself and how relevant it is to your audience. However

the real biggie is - how motivating is your call to action?

Track what matters, learn as you go

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Here at MailNinja we understand how to write amazing subject

lines that get your emails opened, then follow that up with a

bold call-to-action that gets your emails clicked on.

In fact, we get an average open rate of 48% and an average

click rate of 22%. Thats more than double the industry

averages.


Meet Doug Dennison - the author

I’m the Managing Director at MailNinja with over 10 years of experience running successful email marketing campaigns on behalf of my clients across the world.

From 2004 to 2010 we were known as a creative design agency called Kudos where we specialised in website design & development as well as logo design and promotional materials. We had a great local reputation and grew rapidly, however I took the decision to rebrand the company to MailNinja to focus solely on helping people design, build and send amazing emails.

We’re currently looking to work with new and exciting companies. I can be reached either by phone at (0) +44 1793 677 511 or by email at [email protected].

You can also visit our website here: https://mailninja.co.uk/

7 strategies for killer email marketing campaigns

Marketing