An email marketing campaign can be an incredibly effective way of reaching your target audience. Whether you’ve captured data from an email newsletter sign up box on your website or because a visitor downloaded a document, by showing this engagement your email subscribers are interested to learn more about your products and services. So, a regular email marketing campaign is a great way of keeping your potential clients informed.
However, email marketing can be daunting. There’s pressure to get your content right and with so much to review little things can be missed which could affect click through rate, engagement and worse – lead to unsubscribed. So, here’s our tips on what you should check before you hit send so you have a great email campaign.
Proof-read
Even though you will have automatically done a spell check, you still need to take time to thoroughly proof-read the content of the email. Check for spelling, grammar and the overall flow.
Try and read it as if for the first time and check whether your message is getting across clearly. If you can get a colleague to look at it too, even better. If someone who hasn’t been close to the content up to this point looks at it, they can usually spot things quickly that you may have overlooked.
But, don’t just read the body of the email. Always double check the titles and footer too. We’ll cover these in a little more detail.
What’s the subject of your email?
You want people to open your email so remember to check the subject line for typos. Also check it not only makes sense but will it entice people to open it? A good benchmark is to work to 50 characters. Succinct and to the point. Remember that 47% of people open an email based on the subject line.
[FIRSTNAME]
If you’re adding in the recipient’s name using dynamic tags then you need to check that these are working correctly. You want their first name showing not another field from your database! Generally, you’d only be using the dynamic tag for a first name so make sure that this is working correctly.
Check all links
When you send yourself a test email, check that all links work including social media handles and that they lead to the correct page. Fix any that are broken.
This means checking the links in your footer too, especially that the unsubscribe link works. While you don’t want people to unsubscribe, it is inevitable. For someone wanting to unsubscribe they will find it rather annoying to then not be able to complete this function all because it wasn’t on your round of checks before distribution. This could then lead to bad reviews.
Call to action
You’re sending an email for people to engage with and ultimately take action. Whether that’s to read more, book a consultation or watch this video. Having a bold call to action button will entice people to click, this makes this a crucial button to ensure that the link is not broken.
Social media
We’ve already mentioned that you need to check these links work but this is also a note that if you have icons in your email that they need to be clickable. It’s just natural that we want to click them. So, don’t just think you can have an icon and assume people will go to Twitter and try and search for your business. You need to make it really simple. Cut out unnecessary steps to keep your prospects engaged for longer.
How’s the formatting?
Check that the layout of your email is not affected on the test and fix any issues. Look out for call to action buttons or bullet points – are they positioned correctly? Is font colour and size consistent and easy to read?
Responsive
Check your test email on all devices. Does it look OK? Are the images replicated well on each device? It’s worth doing that last check on your mobile. Let’s face it 81% of us open our emails on a smartphone – so make sure it looks good as that’s a lot of potential clients you could lose.
Unsubscribe
If you’ve previously sent emails to customers in the past, then you’ll know all about GDPR compliance. Ensuring you have a clearly visible unsubscribe link is essential. It needs to be very simple for people to stop receiving your emails. It’s usual to include this in your footer of the email but just because it forms part of the template does not mean you shouldn’t check it each time. This is a definite to do on our email marketing checklist of actions before you click send. That’s why we’ve mentioned in twice!
Email marketing agency Croydon
Email marketing offers a great Return on Investment – 42% of B2B organisations say email is one of their most effective lead generators.
Or email marketing service forms part of our inbound marketing services in our suite of digital marketing tools to help businesses grow through online lead generation.
Depending on your business goals, we can provide email marketing strategies as a standalone service or as part of a digital marketing package as email marketing consultants in Croydon. Why not get in touch for a free consultation and we can discuss the best approach for your business.