Back to Basics – Questions Begging to be Asked
As you are having success with your first few email blasts of the year it is important to view the results as a learning experience to harness future gains. As you are planning your next, or maybe first email blast, here is a checklist of questions you should ask yourself before you send.
Who is the email being sent from? We’ve shown through many studies that an email sent from a personal email address (David@xyzcorp.com) achieves much stronger open and click rates than one sent from a general email address (marketing@xyzcorp.com). And better yet, if contacts have relationships with account or sales managers, every email they receive, even marketing email blasts, should be delivered on behalf of the account manager.
Will your email blast go to the junk folder? There are many things you can do to avoid this, like keeping your subject lines short and consistent with the main content of the email, keeping your email short and to the point, long emails are junked more often, using a third party like Swiftpage emarketing as a reputable sender and more. One very easy thing you should do before every send is put your email through a spam check. It will look at your message as a spam filter would view it and suggest to you what you should change if needed – Swiftpage emarketing has one here – Swiftpage emarketing .com/spamcheck.
What if the images are blocked? When you create your email template, take your hands and cover up the imagery and read your message. If your contacts still know what to do and are able to take action effectively, great. If not, rethink the text portion of your message – This could be the difference between an immediate delete or a truly interested prospect.
What do you want your customers to do with your message? This question should be answered with every email blast you send. You should have a Call to action (Learn more, buy now, get started, etc…) in every blast you send not only to drive contacts closer to a purchase decision, but to evoke clicks which can in turn drive your sales team to call only those people that have shown interest in your message.
How do you ensure the best open rate? Once you have defined the target that you will be sending your message to, split the list in half. Leaving the content in the email exactly the same, send to half the list one subject line and send to the other half a completely different subject line and compare the results. Do this for your next few email blasts and you’ll begin to learn very quickly what language garners the greatest response.
What are you going to do with the results of your blast? You should answer this question before you send an email blast. As a marketer you can use the results to tailor your next blast to achieve stronger results and as a sales manager you may use the results to drive activities for your sales staff. Whatever you are trying to accomplish with your email blast, remember it is simply a piece of the puzzle, the email can only be as effective as you are able to deliver on your offering.
Advanced tip – is your contacts experience a branded one? The tone of your email message should be consistent with any other digital communication you’ve had with your contacts. The links in the email should drive contacts to landing pages that carry the same theme, color scheme, prose etc. Think about the entire contact experience whether or not email is the key player or simply another touch point
