Get to know your web visitors a little better and you can start to develop the kind of email marketing subscriber list that dreams are made of. The journey your visitors make through your website will provide you with the intelligence to design campaigns with a more bespoke approach.

Understand what email marketing your clients want to receive

This should be the starting point of any campaign. Your list of subscribers should be able to tell a story that enables you to target certain products at certain buyers. Segment your list into categories based on the following:

1. Recent purchases
2. Shopping cart abandonment
3. Newsletter sign-ups
4. Enquiries without a purchase

Take these elements and segment your list to create four different sub lists that you can prepare campaigns for. For example; if you are a holiday company, you will have thousands of visitors browsing through your site for particular destinations. Start by segmenting all the visitors that are interested in self-catering villas in Spain. Send them an email template with details of villas in Spain and you will see a big improvement in bookings for this type of holiday. By doing this you are simply providing your opted in clients with the information they want.

If you are getting lots of enquiries but not turning them into business, you need to get an understanding of what these enquiries really want. By looking at their journey through your website, you can identify a pattern and compartmentalise key targets for mailings. If they focused time on looking at particular products, mail them with a great offer that has a time deadline attached and analyse the results.

Don’t forget your recent purchasers.  It is so much easier to sell to existing customers that create new business, so make sure you utilise this list and keep in touch with your clients with new product announcements and offers on a regular basis.

Finally, when you are signing up new subscribers, try to get first name and last name so you can personalise your emails to each client.  This, along with your segmentation and targeted emails will ensure each email marketing campaign is received, read and acted upon rather than just ignored.

For more information on email marketing visit our knowledgebase.

Say goodbye to those double entries in your database. It is impossible to avoid adding duplicates to a large database. If your database contains multiple duplicate addresses, you run the risk of sending an email twice or your email not reaching the inbox at all. If you have taken time to populate a clean opt-in subscriber list, the last thing you want is to tarnish it with lots of double entries. The spam filter at most companies won’t let double sends through and your sender reputation will be put at risk.

But, fear not, the List Doctor can provide a solution to this common problem. The team at Email Blaster UK (these guys never go on holiday you know), have developed a de-duping function that will scan your database and delete the duplicates leaving you with a clean list.  The scan can be activated after uploading a list and takes seconds to complete.  A report is generated to provide information on the number of duplicates and the remaining number of subscribers in that particular list.

The List Doctor has been developed to ensure optimum delivery rates are achieved every send.  Managing multiple databases just got easier.  www.emailblasteruk.com

Getting the design right for your email template can be a challenge. Email marketing template design is very different to web or traditional print creative. The objective is to drive clients away from the email as soon as they have opened it so it needs to be snappy.

The subject line is the reason why your email gets opened so don’t lose the interest by failing to live up to your enticing offer.

Here is a pick of the templates we have sent out recently on behalf of clients. I think they represent their products and services really well and provide the recipient with a good mix of strong content and images.

This first template demonstrates the need to meet with the expectations of your subscribers. The design is reflective of the brand image of the company and offers lots of options to make contact as well as links to social networking sites used extensively in this market.

This next email marketing template gets straight to the point. It has a strong banner with a call to action driving the subscriber to book. The full details of forthcoming events and other information follows. This is a good example of an email that delivers a punch in the first half.

The key thing to remember when designing an email marketing template is that you don’t have very long to get your point across. The subject line will get the email opened whilst the top half of the email has to work hard to encourage that all important click through.

The two templates seen here both focus on getting click throughs within the top half of the email. They understand their market and drive subscribers to the areas that will benefit them the most. Each market will respond in a different way so test your creative before you send your whole campaign.

For more tips and ideas on template design visit our knowledge base. To have a template designed by our extremely talented design team email us or call 0845 263 7266.