Free Email Marketing plan
How to create successful email marketing campaigns
Email marketing is a proven marketing method for all types of business, regardless of products or services offered and geographic location.
Email is the preferred method of contact now across pretty much all industries. With more and more of us choosing to view communications on mobile devices.
It’s a great way to make sure that your company name is what your clients see when they have a requirement for products and services in your industry.
Try it for FreeGreat looking email marketing with great results
Why use email marketing?
Email marketing is an extremely quick and cost effective way of contacting your subscriber list of prospects and clients.Cost
In terms of cost, it offers significant savings over traditional printed media, such as brochures, leaflets and mail shots. As an example, to send 2,000 email newsletters to your recipients would cost £12.63 plus VAT. Comparing this to direct mail, in our sample of three mailing companies, all of them were in excess of £1,000 to send the same amount.
Visibility & reporting
The major advantage of email marketing over direct mail is visibility, through the use of campaign analytics, being able to see how the recipients react to the mailing. Detailed information is available on who read the email, who clicked any links to the website and who failed to receive the communication. This information would prove extremely useful when following the marketing plan as outlined further in this report. Any marketing campaign may need to have small content adjustments as it progresses in order to react to viewer trends.
Compared to direct mail, these insights are vital to achieve consistent success and increasing enquiry rates. Direct mail is not able to offer any statistics on key areas, making key adjustments impossible.
Speed and ease
When employing a new method of marketing, or moving supplier it can often be time consuming. In order to make an immediate start you may want to consider email marketing as there is no software to download, no set up process and importing your existing campaigns and creating new ones is very easy.
Email Blaster offer a large library of quick start video guides, this means that nominated staff can receive dedicated training and support, this is also available by telephone. Our email marketing software is designed to offer a quick start with a very shallow learning curve, meaning you really can hit the ground running.
How to build a mailing list
In order for email marketing to prove to be a successful medium, it is vital that your recipients are well qualified and have asked to receive your communications. At Email Blaster, we can work with you to offer the tools to effectively build a great campaign over a period of time.
We would advise the following key stages:Sign up from added to the website
Email Blaster can make the process of inviting viewers to receive company updates and offers quick and easy.Offer your viewers a reason to sign-up
Web viewers will join your mailing list in greater numbers if they are offered something in return. Use social media pages to drive traffic to yourweb sign up offer
Once the sign-up offer is in place, we would recommend that you use your existing social media pages to broaden the reach. Social media is a great way to broaden the reach, a simple 140 character tweet with the call to action can be very successful in driving traffic back to the sign up page.Contact historic existing client and prospective data
Over time you will have collected quite a bit of data from lots of sources - from sales enquiries through to people that went on to become clients.We would advise that you contact these by telephone and confirm that the data held is correct and inform that will be sending them email communications on a fortnightly basis.
People that have previously contacted you are often the best source of new business if contacted by email.
How to construct an email template.
As the recipients of the email marketing will already be familiar in varying degrees with you. It is suggested that the branding be directly transposed from the website.
Top section
The top section should include the company logo in the top left corner and contact details in the top right corner (tel, email, website). Both the website and email link should be hyper linked.
Main graphic
A full width graphic would provide a good visual prompt, it will make the mailer look professional and well designed. It is suggested that You use the same images form the main company website. This main head image could be a montage pf products/services.
The suggested dimensions of this are 600px x 350 px. The image should not be too deep as it will push the strap line text to below the fold (meaning the viewer needs to scroll down to see the message).
Strap line
This line should be in a larger bolder font size and ideally in one of the main corporate colours. It should be ideally no more than 10 words that clearly detail the purpose & contents of the mailer. It is suggested that you try split testing different variants of this, as it is vitally important that this section really hits the mark with the target audience.
Main body text
The main body text can cover up to three subject areas, each with its own image and text where appropriate. It could cover one product offer, one piece of industry news and one piece of company news. It is suggested that product offers are interspersed with more ‘information’ type articles.
Call to action
This piece of text should be larger than the main body text and possible full width. It should clearly outline what you want the recipients to do next, i.e “please click here to confirm your order”. Successful mailers will always have a very clear call to action.
Contact information
It is suggested that your corporate colours are used, as the background colour for a full width box. This box will contain full contact information, ideally in a bold white font. Using a coloured box acts to neatly let the viewer know where the document finishes, it also frames the mid section of the mailer and directs the eye to this important mid section.
Social media links
It is suggested that you also include social media logos and links through to each of the pages. These help to provide additional contact channels for the recipients and also help to present a modern focused business with a good business plan.
How to write content
The tone and content of your message is very important, it must be easy to read quickly and must deliver the core subject of the mailer in as few words as possible. When writing text for the new mailer, the key areas to consider are as follows:
Number of words
It is vital to keep the number of words used down to a bare minimum, this is important because typically viewers will allow only a few seconds to skim read the contents of an email. When confronted with a large body of text, often the viewer is not willing to invest any more than a few seconds.
The tone of the message
It is important to use a tone that your target audience finds welcoming and easy to read. It is advisable to avoid phrases that make viewers feel pressurized or intimidated in some way.
Spam phrases
If your body text contains phrases that your recipient’s spam filter regards as ‘spam’ then it increases the chances dramatically that your mailer will be filtered into the spam folder. It is often a fine balance between delivering your message and avoiding phrases that could trigger the spam filter. Examples of these would include: sale, discount, promotion, special offer, free, etc.
The email blaster software has an inbuilt spam checker, this can be used to screen your body text against a database of known spam phrases. This really helps to take the guesswork out of spam checking.
Testing different content
It is always advisable to write several different drafts of the body content and test them by sending to small batches of your email database. It is often the case that small changes in the body text will produce dramatically different results with the target audience.
Tips to improve open rates.
The big plus with email marketing, when compared to other forms is that email marketing is completely visible. You can observe and record how the viewers are interacting with each mailer, the email blaster software will show detailed information including the following:
- Delivered and failed rate
- Opens and reads
- Full analysis of hard and soft bounces
- Recording of clicks (every unique click is recorded)
- Geographic location of each click
With access to this detailed information, it makes the fine tuning of your marketing possible. There are many elements that can be changed to produce different results. There are several core principles that if employed will increase open rates:
Subject header line
It is advisable to keep this brief, so that the viewer’s email reader does not truncate it. Often the best performing subject lines will ask a question - the idea is to prompt the viewer to want to read the mailer in order to find the answer to the question.
Send times
These should be varied, in order to find the optimum time to chime with your target audience. The temptation is often to stick to business days, for example, a.m notably Tuesday and Wednesday. Recently it has been noted that campaigns sent outside of business hours can perform better, for example, Sunday evening. This is often a time when your viewer has more time and less distraction to read email.
They are often in a relaxed and receptive frame of mind, but starting to gear up for work in the morning.
Use social media in a supporting role
Social Media plays a big part in communicating with audiences. Email marketing can be supported by using social media in conjunction. When a campaign is sent out, it is advisable to also broadcast links to the campaign through the employed social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. This will draw more traffic towards the campaign.
The email blaster software will automatically post a copy of the mailer to the Facebook and Twitter feeds. This therefore extends the reach far beyond current email subscribers.
Using this technique really helps to boost open rates and the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
A strong call to action
Your email marketing must contain a strong call to action, this statement will ask the viewer to do something, it is vital that this is clearly visible and can be viewed quickly.
If the viewer can see what the purpose of the email is within a short time-frame. This can dramatically increase open rates as the purpose of the mailer is identified quickly.
Suggested best times to send your mailer
The time that you send your mailer, will have a dramatic effect on the open rates and overall success of your email marketing.
There are a great deal of articles published that state Tuesday and Wednesday early pm is the best time. Whilst historically this had been correct to a degree, in recent years the increase in viewing emails on mobile devices has caused a substantial shift.
Mobile devices are often used to browse the web and view emails during leisure periods. This means that the target audience for you could be more receptive at times outside of normal business hours. It is suggested that the first few mailings are carried out both inside and outside of traditional business hours.
If the results of these first few mailings are then observed, an optimum time for your email broadcasts can be noted.
Later on in this document, we will provide an outline of what to send and when to send for the first three months.
Try email marketing Free3 Month action plan
The suggested timescale for the phase one email marketing plan is three months. During this period it is suggested that different mailers are sent at fortnightly intervals. The next section will therefore outline all six mailers and the suggested times for sending.
(1) Web sign up offer
The purpose of this mailer would be to introduce the your electronic mailer, it will outline very briefly who you are and what you do. It is suggested that the body content defines when to expect further mailings and what content is coming over the next few weeks. Explaining the future content and timings really helps to increase the opens & clicks of future sends as the viewer then expects further communications.Call to action: To visit the main website and associated social media channels(2) Introducing our new newsletter & what to expect from us
This mailer will again act as an introduction, the text will be focused on a variation of the first mailer. The purpose of this is to reinforce the initial contact and to try similar content sent outside of business hours.Call to action: Find out more about our product range & pricing(3) Introducing our full range of new products
This newsletter would outline the main products and services offered. It is suggested that three or four products are presented with a small image and descriptive text. This would comprise of the main body of the email. This mailer would avoid prominent pricing, but would focus more on describing the product. The descriptive text would act as ‘link bait’ to prompt the viewer to click to the associated web link to the full web based product page.Call to Action: Click to find out more about the full range of products offered(4) Product Spotlight, introducing our new range This mailer will focus on one specific product, the purpose being to offer more information than a generic mailer containing several products. The results from this mailer should be compared to the last one, this should provide a valuable insight into what kind of formatting that your client base prefer. Different target audiences will prefer different formatting, the results should indicate which are better suited for further marketing.
Call to Action: For further information on our products please click here(5) Starting today. Flash sale, in stock This mailer will use a differing approach to the previous two, it is suggested that you change focus from product information to price and time. In order to further investigate which methods yield the best results for you a slightly tighter focus should be employed. A set price for a set time is often a worthwhile approach for creating product interest. By comparing the results of this campaign to the previous two, it should show a clear divide between recipients that prefer either price lead or information lead marketing. You can then create sub groups of recipients for further marketing with each different approach.
Call To Action: Click here to place your order(6) News & offers Roundup The content of this mailer would by a round up of the previous activity, it would contain multiple text and image blocks covering the main sections of previous mailers: news, products & offers. This mailer acts as a way to reinforce previously sent content, without duplicating previous sends. For email marketing to be effective on a consistent basis, it is important to present what is often the same message but in a variety of styling and formats. This achieves two purposes: it reinforces the original message and offers the chance to review statistical changes from differently styled mailers
Call To Action: Click here to links on each article