Successful email campaigns can generate leads, conversations, meetings and new business wins. However, campaigns must be conducted correctly in order to achieve any of these objectives.
While I claim no significant expertise in email marketing, through trial and error, reading, and watching the market we’ve identified 6 simple, but important things to do to ensure the success of your email marketing efforts:
- Send to an individual, not a mass audience: The days of successful “blast emails” are just about over. Generic one-message-to-all emails are increasingly unsuccessful.
- Double-check the recipient’s address: Emails sent to incorrect addresses usually bounce, and bounced emails detract from your mail server’s reputation (which is a scorecard for your company’s IP address). If your server has poor reputation your legitimate email messages may get blocked, which can further hurt your reputation. Also, if an email is returned, don’t send another message to that address as it will further hurt your reputation.
- Authenticate your email account: Your “From:” and “Reply:” addresses must match; using non-matching addresses is a tactic used by spammers. Think about it this way: if your recipient responds to your message, the reply needs to land in your email inbox.
- Reduce the number of emails sent from your server: If your email account has a reputation for sending a high volume of emails, your recipients’ ISPs may identify you as a spammer and block future messages. To avoid this problem, don’t send blast emails. Reducing your volume can improve your email account’s reputation, which should improve your delivery rates.
- Monitor the size of your messages: Many ISPs block emails over a certain size, though this varies across ISPs and recipients. You need to determine the optimal balance between content and imagery of your messages.
- Avoid Subject and body “no-nos”: Don’t ever SHOUT (type in all caps), use sales buzz words, or have misspelled words in your Subject line. Be sure your HTML emails are properly coded, and links to websites in your body copy properly open and are directed to valid websites.
- Use acceptable attachment file types, or better yet, eliminate them: Microsoft Outlook restricts the use of certain attachment types, a list of which can be found here. Since most people won’t open an attachment from an unknown sender, a better approach is to include a link to content located on your website or micro-site.
I hope these email tips are useful. If you have other items or suggestions to add, please include a comment below. It would be great to develop a best-in-class list that will help other new business hunters.
