An effective business campaign requires numerous steps to get your brand and message out there. One of the best resources for achieving success online is through the form of email campaigns. But this is one of those areas that has pitfalls. There are a couple of do's and don't that you should try to use as guidelines when trying to effectively promote your products and/or services to your customers.
Use HTML rather than plain text. Wouldn't you rather see a nicely layed out email than a bunch of words on a page? Exactly.
Make your email campaign visually appealing without over-doing the design. black background with lime green letters can come across as pushy. Let your customers make the decision; just nudge them in the right direction.
Most email campaigns fall into the 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels long dimmensions. Try to stick to those dimmensions to provide your customer easy viewing of your product or services.
Always Always Always try to rely on a great list management system. These systems can provide analytics that can help you monitor effective campaigns. For example, you send out 500 emails, wouldn't you like to know how many customers opened your email? how many of them clicked on the link to see your product or service? How many actually received the email. These things will greatly help you achieve the goal you are trying to accomplish.
One of the major areas where email campaigns fail is in the realm of spam. Most email campaign softwares will have some tests to make sure you are following the guidelines. These areas may include not adding an unsubscribe link to your email campaign (which is federal law) or having a relative subject that could be considered "spammy"
Just because the email campaign is created in HTML does NOT mean that all functionality will work. DO NOT use things like Javascript. All images should have an absolute path like (http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/my_image.jpg) many people fail to check for this and end up sending email campaigns where no images show up -- bad move. Also use alt tags in your images. Some customers will turn off the ability to see images in their emails, therefore the alt tag will show shown describing the image.
Do not send your email campaigns whenever you deem fit. First look at your demographic and target. If you are targeting 14-17 year olds for a new clothe campaign, then it probably wouldn't be a good idea to send your email during school hours. So know your demographic and plan out for when the best responce would be. Most analysts do suggest sending your emails from Tuesday through Thursday since those are peak times people are more apt to open emails without trying to catch up with emails on monday and the possibility of not being available to check emails on the weekend.
As a whole, your email marketing strategy must be an integral part of your overall corporate marketing strategy.
There are a couple of do's and don't that you should try to use as guidelines when trying to effectively promote your products and/or services to your customers.
