Here at Smart Cow Marketing, we understand the importance of a targeted e-mail campaign and the positive effect it can have on your ROI.
First things first, you don’t want to use your standard Outlook, Gmail or other basic e-mail system to be sending hundreds or thousands of emails, it will take too long and the system probably couldn’t handle that amount of outgoing traffic.
We suggest you use a campaign tool such as Constant Contact. This organises your emails into campaigns and sends them out without crashing.
Here are the things you need to do to achieve a successful email campaign:
The Basics
• Matching templates to existing brand identity and layout.
• Use analytics to track the success of your campaign and also see where you can improve.
You need to target:
• People who previously opened an email
• People with related interests
• People who have visited your website
• People who have mentioned you in social media
Avoid inappropriate or irrelevant email messages
• Make sure that you stay on topic with your email campaign. We wouldn’t send a campaign talking about online marketing and then tell you about a great book shop. Your readers want to know about YOUR businesses products/services and why they should purchase.
Personalisation
• Send the email as someone’s name, through experience we’ve found that emails received with someone’s first name as the sender get more clicks than just having your business email. This is something that may change for you, so play around with it and track your analytics what works for you.
• Use call-to-action buttons to make it easy for the reader to know where to go.
Test, Test, Test
• Send out two types of emails, with two different layouts, sender names, call-to-action buttons. Run both campaigns at the same time and see which one performs the best and go forward using that one.
Link to your Website!
• The most important part of the campaign is to get people to your site, more importantly to the correct landing page, so that you can generate sales.
• The more links back to your site, the better your site will perform in the search engine rankings as this is one of the key factors of your SEO strategy.
• To find out more about external links click here.
We hope that this has been useful and good luck with your campaigns!
For more great SEO advice from Croydon’s Online Marketing Company read our 30 day SEO guide.