Promoting your products or services by email is a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. With Psy-web design’s powerful email marketing tool, you can create professional HTML email newsletters using a simple 7 step wizard allowing you to keep customers up to date with all products, services, latest news and special offers.

Unfortunately our system cannot write the content for you (as yet!) So we have put together our Top Tips to Creating a Successful Email Campaign which we hope will help you carry out a campaign and ensure a successful return on your investment:

Planning your email campaign is vital

It’s very important to plan your email campaign well in advance of the date you want to send it out. There are a number of things you should think about when deciding what to write your campaign content:

• Who is your target audience?
  
  To make your email relevant, you need to identify your target audience and understand their needs.
  
• What are your objectives?
  
  Identify what the main aim of your email campaign is.  Do you want to raise awareness of your products and services, generate leads and sales or improve customer retention?

Segment, personalise and be relevant

Use the information you have identified from asking yourself the questions above to send your audience targeted, relevant messages.  Segmenting your customer database and developing specific offers for each target audience is a key step to creating a successful email campaign.

Write a great subject line

The subject line is the first thing your customer will see when they are deciding which emails to read and which to mark as spam. Keeping your subject line simple but intriguing will encourage customers to open the email and read more.  Be careful not to use words like “free” which may trigger spam filters.  Personalising the subject line to the recipient and including your company name works well to encourage high open rates.

Writing your all important content

Email newsletters are often thought of as printed newsletters sent electronically; but they are not! The content should be concise and to the point, perhaps a snippet of information which links to the full article on your website. Below are a few points to remember when writing the creative for your campaign

• Remember that your reader is reading light, not matter (ink).
  
  When reading light we don’t blink as often and as we are unable to adjust text size by moving the document closer or further from our eyes, we tend to scan a page, looking for key words or phrases to get the information required without reading every word.
  
• Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your reader's attention so write short.
  
  I would suggest 50 percent less than you write for a printed newsletter. Each article should be at the most two page-downs with a maximum sentence length of 15 to 20 words, maximum paragraph length of five sentences, and a maximum article length of four paragraphs. Remember...these are maximums! When writing email content, less is more!
  
• Remember to write in a conversational tone.
  
  Let your personality show through and readers are more likely to spend their time reading what you have to say.
  
• Remember to use lots of bullet points and numbered lists.
  
  Lists are easy to scan and they help the reader absorb each item one at a time.
  
• Remember to limit each article to a single concept.
  
  Add links to your website to allow recipients to read longer articles or gain more information should they choose. Our email tracking system allows you to see when readers click on a link in the email allowing you to use your follow-up call time productively by targeting those who have taken further interest in your newsletter.
  
•  Remember that email newsletters are easily forwarded.
  
  Never write anything that you wouldn't want the whole world (including your competition) to know!

Test before you send

First impressions count so testing your email campaign with a number of different email providers is an important thing to do before sending your campaign.  I would recommend you send at least 5 test emails to yourself and your colleagues (so they can check for any spelling/grammar errors you may have missed!) and to all your test email accounts, before you send your email campaign out to your customer list.

You should test -

• What the email will look like in the most popular email readers (Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Hotmail and Google Mail) - set up as many test accounts with free email providers as possible and leave them in their default settings.
• That your images aren’t broken.
• That your email doesn’t fall into spam or junk folder 
• That your unsubscribe link works.

We can provide a service which allows you to see screenshots of exactly how your email will look in more than 15 of the most popular web, desktop and mobile email clients - we'll also run your email through a number of key spam firewalls - the gatekeepers for most ISP's and large organisations. Contact us for further details

Measure campaign success

Psy-webs Online Marketing Suite allows you to see in real time actions customers took once they receive your email.

You can see -

• The number of emails delivered (delivery rate).
• The number of emails opened (open rate).
• The number of click-through generated (click-through rate).
• Email addresses that bounced and the reasons why
• The number of customers who unsubscribed from your campaign

Ideally, each time you send an email campaign, you want to increase the number of people who open and act on it.  Analysing your campaign results will help you do this.  

Make follow up calls

Whatever you send out, make sure you follow it up with a telephone call. Start with the people who have opened the campaign most or have clicked through to your website as this may indicate they had a genuine interest in your information or offer.

 I hope these tips help you create a succesful campaign, however should you find yourself struggling to get your point across with your marketing campaign, our in-house marketing team offer a copywriting service both for websites and related materials so please do feel free to contact us today to see what we can do to help.