By then, email marketing has widely proven its effectiveness as a promotion channel. Still, there’s plenty of marketers who don’t apply the fundamental best practices of this tool. So here’s a quick review of the most important points to keep in mind while structuring an email marketing campaign:
- 1. The hardest part is to collect a valid authorized database of addresses. Matter of fact, it’s essential that all the recipients of your communications had opted in to receive them. Also, it’s important that the target of the list matches the one you have in mind as ideal for your product or service.
- 2. Email marketing is easy to do, but it needs good tools to work properly. A wise marketer should provide himself at least with a professional software that allows an effective management of lists (also capable to handle bounce backs, subscriptions, cancellations, black lists) and the creation of HTML / text-only email messages, possibly with some ready-made templates. Finally, the software should include an analytics tool to verify the results of your campaigns, tracking users’ behaviour once the email is open.
- 3. Crafting a good email message can be tricky. It’s necessary to realize catchy graphics and an interesting content, in order to stand out all the other messages that fill one’s inbox. It’s also very important to value the usability of the email – avoiding attachments or heavy images or particular scripts that are not supported by certain clients.
- 4. Once sent the message, the campaign is not finished at all. On the contrary, a big part of the job is yet to come. You need to get and analyze the data about open rates and clickthroughs, manage your database deleting fake or incorrect addresses, and try to guess the users’ behaviour to improve your next campaign – to make it more targeted, more efficient, more succesful.
