Best Practices for Email Marketing

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1st Step: Choose an email marketing provider that fits your marketing strategy.

There are lots of email marketing providers, who provide different features and costs.

Considers how many subscribers are in your database and how many times you want to email them. Some providers impose maximum sending limits – so read the small print.

2nd Step: Build your database organically as your company grows.

Never purchase email databases. Using purchased databases will only cause problems, not sales.

Grow you data organically, use data collection forms, or manually upload emails collected through you current sales route.

Use an email provider with intelligent bounce management systems to keep your data base clean.

Regularly send email campaigns to your database to keep your company familiar, but always limit campaigns to a couple each week.

3rd Step: Organising your email contacts

Before your email database really starts to grow, try to plan ahead. Think about how you intend to target your database, for example you might want to send a campaign to a certain age group.

If you plan to target groups, make sure you record the required information about the user in online forms or when manually collectingdata.

4th Step: Decide the objective of your email campaign

Before you start designing your email campaign choose one goal you hope to achieve.

Start by deciding one main message, and continue creating the campaign in a manner that backs up the main message, using customer testimonials, further product or service information is a great way to make an email informative, yet also increase sales or sign ups.

5th Step: Keep the design simple.

If you don’t have a design background, don’t panic, most email marketing provider will supply templates. Templates are a great place to start and will help to keep a consistent theme between your email campaigns.

If you are designing your own email campaign or editing a template always make sure you use enough text and don’t use too many picture. The ideal ratio of text to images is 80% to 20%.

And finally, if you do have HTML experience, remember the best email campaigns still use table formatting! And many of the HTML tricks we use for websites still aren’t supported – So always check your emails before sending.

6th Step: Ensure your content is perfect

Always double and triple check your email campaigns. Sometimes the simple things can be forgotten, like spellchecking and grammar checking.

Remember your target audience - always try to write in a style that is appropriate to your target audience.

Avoid words like “Free” or “Buy Now” as words like these will be flagged by SPAM filters, meaning your emails won’t be delivered.

Try to make content different and interesting, tailor content to your database and make sure your chosen goal has a call to action– like a “Click Here” or “Order Now”.

7th Step: Track Results

Remember your goal and use tracking tools such as Google Analytics or Email tracking tools such as tracking images and links.

Closely monitor open and click through rates to look for opportunities for your next campaign…

Low open rates, suggests issues with an email subject or a message that doesn’t relate to your database.

Low click rates, suggests issues with the email message or that call to actions haven’t been clear enough.

8th Step: Review, Learn & Adapt

As the previous step suggests, learning from previous campaigns is the best way to continually tweak your marketing.

Always be prepared to change, even if a design or a template works for several months, it doesn’t mean it will always work.

There isn’t a “One shoe fits all” solution; the target market of a pharmacy would be significantly different to that of a sports club. As you review previous campaign data look for differences that could have improved the open and click rates, such as the content, time of send and subject of an email.

Thank You,

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