Checklist: Your First Email Campaign

Decide how many lists you want. For example, you might want a “News- letters” list, but also a separate “Press & Media Relations” list. Some people set up “Weekly Specials” lists and “Internal Employee Newsletter” lists. The basic idea is that you don’t want to send your weekly specials to someone on your list who might have just been expecting an occasional newsletter.

Decide on your content and frequency. Will you send email newsletters every single month? Do you truly have the time to do that? What will the newsletter be about? Why would anybody want to subscribe to it? What will recipients gain from it?

Get permission. Ask the customers in your database for permission to send them email newsletters, offers and promotions.

Get your privacy policy in order. In particular, issues like “tracking personally identifiable information” or “marketing to children under 13.”

Set up email addresses that you can use as the “Reply-to:” for your campaigns. You might use sales@ or email@. Whatever. Just be sure it works, and be sure a human checks that account. If you use jenny@yourcompany.com, what happens when Jenny leaves the company? You’ll need to change names to the new guy, but spam filters will have already been trained to receive emails from Jenny.

Set up an abuse@ email account. No matter how clean you keep your list, you’ll always get complaints. It’s inevitable.

Set up test email accounts with Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL.

Design your HTML email template. If you’re sending different kinds of communications (sales promotions vs. monthly newsletters vs. how-to’s and tips), you might set up multiple templates for each occasion.

Insert real content into your test campaigns. Don’t just use “lorem ipsum dummy text” when you test campaigns. It’s not accurate, plus spam filters often throw away emails with garbled, nonsensical words in them. Build your plain-text alternative email. Plain-text email has its own pecu- liarities, so you’ll want to get a template for it refined from the beginning. Don’t let plain-text be an afterthought.

Test your templates. And we mean really test them like you’ve never tested before. Send them to friends, family and colleagues. Try the templates in as many different email applications you can. Open your own emails, and click them like crazy. Now go check your reports. Make sure all the tracking works like it should. Click reply and see if you get replies to your account. You want to uncover any embarrassing mistakes before sending to your real customers.

Set up a test list. If you’re like most people, you probably have about three or four email addresses. Why not set up a test list, and send your full campaign to that list?

Make sure you’re subscribed to your own list. Seems obvious, but people often forget. Prepare your website and landing pages for delivery. Before you send, get everything in order. Did you create a copy/archive of the email for your website? Make sure that’s all in place.

Deliver the campaign. Finally!

View stats after sending. You can virtually watch the opens and clicks as they happen. It’s always shock- ing to see how many people open and click in the first few minutes after you send. Then it trails off, but you’ll still get opens and clicks weeks after.

Review performance. After a few days, go back and analyze your reports. How many opens? How many clicks? Compare it to your web traffic logs, and most importantly, to sales. Did the email generate leads or sales? What was the ROI on that campaign?

Plan the next campaign. Use your campaign reports to understand what people clicked and what they didn’t. That should serve as the founda- tion for your next campaign. Maybe you’ll split up your list and segment next time around, or test different subject lines or delivery schedules. Get scientific.

Detailed Look at 2 Common Email Mistakes

If I asked you, on average, how many emails from your personal email box you deleted without opening them first, what would you say the number is? I can tell you, I probably average around 50 a day. That’s mostly due to the fact that I get a lot of straight advertisements sent to me from companies that I haven’t done business with in years, and that send me almost daily updates on any small change in any of their product line. I also get about a dozen or so from computer applications that I installed and disliked, and whose unsubscribe process is too complicated for me to do from my Smartphone.

It has been proven, if you can stay in someone’s face long enough, then you have a good chance of them returning to you to do business. That’s what we’ve been told for years, and there’s lots of evidence to support this. At this point, I can think of a flower service that I probably won’t use in the future, but if I do need them, I’ll finally open one of their emails that they send on that day. For all I know, they could have been trying to bill me for the last two years, since I stopped reading their email about that long ago. It hits my phone, and is deleted within 5 seconds or so of me noticing it. Is your goal to be this company?

Then there are the companies that email me “20% savings TODAY ONLY” at least twice a week. I had better open these emails, the sale ends today! On my way home from work, I recently tried buying something from one of these emails, but when I arrived at the store and tried to get my 20% off, the clerk had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. He told me that I had to buy it online for those savings. I whipped out my phone, and lo and behold, he was correct! It said it in 4pt writing, sideways up the side of one of the graphics. Somewhere inside of me, the thrifty gene I inherited from my peasant ancestors awoke, so I put down the item I was intending to buy, as well as the other three I picked up impulsively while wandering around the store, and went home to buy it at 20% off. On the way home, my phone rang, and I was asked to get supper going. I got home, and cooked an asparagus and chicken carbonara dish that couldn’t be beat. A closet culinary expert I may be, but cleaning up afterwards requires hard work, since I am also the live in dishwasher. Once the dishes were done and put away, I was tired, and went to the living room to watch a little tv after a hard day of work. Guess who didn’t get 20% off online? However, the good news is, I saved around 170%, since I didn’t buy the original item, or any of the impulse things that I really didn’t need but would have bought anyways. I really didn’t need it, but since it was a good deal, and I’m an impulsive person, they almost had me. Is your goal to be this company?

Both of these examples highlight common mistakes that are found in email blast marketing. For example number one: Your goal is to stay current in your customer’s mind, so that if they need you, they know where to look. With that being said, a little discretion goes a long way. Multiple emails a day are more likely to turn your customer to your competitor than they are to attract them to your business. Think about it this way. If I buy $100.00 worth of product from you, and you email me 2 times a day, I’m scared to know how many emails you’ll send me if I buy $300.00 worth of product.

For example number two: The real world always trumps cyberspace. I can understand some exclusivity when you are talking about visiting a location. However, sales that exist only in cyberspace are potentially hazardous to your real business. Why would you want your customer only buying online? If nothing happens until someone gets excited is true, why would you want all of the excitement outside of your establishment? Run as many campaigns as you can via email, social media, etc, but have them always point towards your best place to capture multiple sales.

As a side note for example 2: A sense of urgency is important. I remember talking with an automotive dealership owner, several years ago, before I was in the advertising industry, and asking how he can get away with putting, “Biggest sale of the season” in the paper week after week. He said it was because the average car shopper only looked in the paper for a week or two before making a purchase. He understood that with that medium, people weren’t going to read the ad unless they were actively looking for his product. When an email comes in, I read two things, the sender and the subject, and so if every time I see your name, I see “Sale, TODAY ONLY” I’m forced to “shop for” your product every day. And I start to see that trend, which makes me start to see that you build up a ton of fake urgency.

If either of these look too familiar, do yourself a favor, and contact us, today.

Things You Need To Include In Your Email Marketing Campaign

Write A Compelling Subject Line

Take some time to think about what will get your email opened. Look at your past campaigns, see which ones got the highest open rates and try to emulate the type of subject line you used.

Ask to Get Listed in Your Recipient's Address Book

If the email address that you send your email campaigns from is listed in your recipient's email address book, your email goes directly into the inbox and your images are automatically displayed. You'll want to get as many of these as possible.

Include a Forward-to-a-Friend Link

You don't know what it's going to take to entice your recipient to forward the email to a friend of theirs so your message gets out to a wider audience. So even if they don't click on a "forward to a friend" link you include, it may make them remember to simply forward it using their email client.

Prominently Display Your Logo

Simply put, nothing works on your recipients like a familiar logo of a company they do business with.

Include Your Postal Address

This is simply the U.S. Federal Law, so be sure to include your postal address in each of your email campaigns.

Display an Unsubscribe Link

Even the best email marketing campaigns get unsubscribes, but bottom line is you don't want to continue to send emails to recipients that don't want them. Not only is this included in the federal CAN-SPAM legislation, but it will end up tarnishing your company reputation with negative word-of-mouth.

Insert Lots of Links

If you think you've got too many links...add more! You never know what link your readers will be compelled to click, so make sure you're linking words and images and you're linking often.

Use Your Social Media Links

If you've got people following you on Twitter, or people who are Facebook fans, make sure you include these links in your email marketing campaigns. You'll spread the word to a wider audience from within these campaigns.

Above and beyond these "must-haves" you'll obviously want the articles in your newsletter or your sales copy to be compelling as well. Use this as a checklist for your next email marketing campaigns!