How to create effective email campaigns
Effective email campaigns require two critical
elements: good list hygiene and an understanding of customer
preferences. Michael Thompson, director of database marketing firm
ClickSquared, gives some quick tips for
building and maintaining a good email list and shares his
recommendations for how to capture customer preferences. The aim:
to deliver relevant and effective email marketing messages to your
audience.
Good List Hygiene
Regardless of how well an email is crafted, if it's not making
it to the inbox, it has no impact. Current statistics show that
more than 25% of email addresses churn per year. No matter how
clean your initial list, it is imperative that you have a process
in place that manages and removes bounce-backs and inactive
addresses.
Here's a checklist to tick off:
- Are your email addresses accurate?
- Have they been updated?
- Are your prospects and customers still receiving communications
at their listed email addresses?
If not, ISPs will notice that you consistently send messages to
bad addresses. Left unmanaged, this will have a direct impact
on your organisation's ability to deliver email to ANY customer's
inbox.
Moreover, if a significant percentage of your emails are not
being delivered, your marketing ROI will be negatively impacted;
the CPM rate you pay to your ESP doesn't discern between delivered
and undelivered email.
There are a number of steps you can take to ensure your list is
clean and up-to-date:
- Send a triggered opt-in confirmation email while collecting
addresses. This confirms that the address is active, and gives you
the opportunity to explain what communications the recipient should
expect to receive from you.
- Develop a strategy to remove inactive and/or invalid addresses
that bounce from your database. ISPs are increasingly measuring
engagement, i.e., how many people read or click on your
emails. Removing inactive addresses keeps engagement
measurements high.
Collecting Customer Preferences
Collecting and utilising customer preferences allows you to
create more relevant email communications by providing your
customers with (only) the information they want - when they want
it.
Customer preferences help you understand two key things: your
customer's specific interests, and their preferred method(s) and
frequency of receiving information.
Your goal is to leverage this information and create relevant
messages that speak to your customers as individuals. In
short, you are aligning your messages to the topics they find most
important, and delivering those messages at the times and frequency
they find most appropriate.
Once you collect customer preference information, you should
marry it to the activity and behavior data you're already tracking:
who opened what, which links did they click, what are they buying,
and how often are they buying. Understanding these
inferred preferences will enable you to further refine
your messaging and content to drive even greater results.
Find out more about
ClickSquared
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