How To Build Winning Email Marketing Campaigns

08/01/10

By James Bunting, Director of Research & Strategy at Communicator Corp

Email marketing's moved a long way from sending newsletters.

However, the real secret to success is unchanged: it is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.

This can be broken down as follows:

Strategy

Here's 10 areas to consider:

- Identify qualitatively what email does for the business?
- Analyse the current situation
- Complete competitive analyses
- Define target audiences
- Determine the types of email needed
- Develop contact / content strategies
- Consider template designs
- Create quantitative goals /budgets/ ROI projections
- Review...

...

Data

This is who you communicate with. The more you know about customers, the greater the chance of purchase.
However, on initial sign-up, minimize data collection. People don't complete long forms simply to be emailed.
As your database grows, ensure that silos of customer data aren't created within individual business areas.

Create single customer-views, so all business areas see all customer data for integrated communications.

Segmenting this single customer-view allows for targeted offers.

Top Tips:

- Keep data-capture forms short
- Ask relevant questions
- Remember - you learn more later
- Keep collecting data
- Analyse behavioural information
- Ask more questions later

Campaign Tactics

Inboxes are becoming more cluttered. So...

Be relevant
Recipients interact more with personally relevant messages.
Personalising emails increases click-throughs by over 40%.

Be timely
Send messages when recipients are most responsive.
Sending recipients celebratory discount emails before their birthday is more likely to lead to a conversion.

Welcome
Welcome messaging is key.
Highlight sign-up benefits, incentivising recipients to move to the next stage.

Follow-up
Recipients need nudging.
Sending follow-up emails to someone abandoning their shopping cart, gives a second chance for completion.

Order confirmation
Informed customers are happy ones.
Order confirmation emails reduce call-centre costs as customers do not call to confirm.

Referral programme
Referral programmes reduce customer acquisition... continued on page two >

 

 

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