Melon Corporate Blog

5 Easy Ways to Improve your Email campaigns

Posted on Jan 23, 2008

I have been assisting organisations with their e mail campaigns for many years - first in an in-house role and subsequently for clients at Melon Media.

Over this time period I have noticed that several common issues with campaigns regularly present themselves.

Most of these issues are quite straightforward to address - considering these issues and fine tuning your campaigns will have a big impact on your results long term.

Below are 5 often ignored issues that you should consider in your next email marketing campaign.

- Consider the time of day your recipient will receive your email.

Many companies (particularly those with limited internal systems) still implement an "overnight" distribution of emails. These emails are received first thing in the morning by most people and get grouped with their other overnight emails and notifications.

What happens to these overnight emails? They get trashed as people look at their highest priority emails and leave the remainder "for later" when they are less busy.

Sending an email to someone whilst they are at their computer has a significant impact on open rates. People tend to open emails when their inbox is clear and they are at their machines - as opposed to when they first log in, and have a batch to go through.

So either use the time and scheduling tool in your email marketing system, or if sending out through an internal system, ensure that you have the resources to send it out at a sensible time of the day.

- Always include an online link to a web based version

Even the most thorough of compliant html coders cannot get emails viewing perfectly across all email programs.

Furthermore, you can't control whether recipients have images turned off.

A link to an online version allows people to view a version in the web browser, rendered in a way consistent with what the marketers intended.

If you use a specialist system, a dynamic online link should be able to be generated automatically.

This link should maintain unsubscribe information, customised fields, and other elements specific to each recipient.

Based on our clients' campaigns, an average of 3% - 15% of recipients in a database prefer to read the email through the online link.

- Include "real content" - with a "what's in it for me factor" for the recipient

We all see the world through our own eyes. Try to close your own eyes, and see the world through your recipients' eyes, and ask yourself "what would they find interesting?".

Avoid the temptation of sending out marketing information only. Every organisation is sitting on independent industry knowledge that recipients would find useful. Leverage this.

Our most successful customers stick to the 80 - 20 rule, 80% real content, 20% marketing. One of these customers has grown his database organically 5 fold in 3 years... which brings me to my next point...

- Provide an easy mechanism for people to subscribe to your newsletter from within your newsletter

Once you provide real content in your newsletter, something interesting will happen. Recipients will begin to forward this email to others.

Upon receipt of this email people may wish to subscribe. IF you provide an easy way to do this they will, we see this regularly with many of our clients.

However if you provide no easy way for these people to subscribe, they won't bother to contact you and request subscription and you would have lost valuable subscribers.

This is a very common missing element of most email marketing and email newsletter campaigns yet is very easy to put in place with any decent email marketing system, internal or outsourced.

- Check, Check and Check again.

You are on deadline and time seems like this evil force constantly pushing you from behind.

You rush to complete the email, give it a quick once over and think, "Yep, looks alright to me...", and before you know it the Send button has been pressed and you are watching your hard work hit inboxes across the country.

You sit back, relax, smile to yourself for making deadline, and open the message as it arrives in your tray to admire your handiwork. Then you see it... a typo. The smile fades from your face. But it's not so bad, right?

It's just one typo. Nobody will probably even notice it. You sure didn't before hitting send...

You look closer. Uh-oh. Another typo.

You test a link to make sure you get taken to the right page and uh-oh again - the link to 'mycompanyiworkat.com' takes you to something definitely not safe for work.

You now hear the boss bellowing from their office.

The motto of this situation is: check your work and test every link.

THEN get your co-worker to read over everything and test every link.

And finally, you guessed it, get the powers that be to read over everything and test every link. Third time is the charm.

Whilst this may in future turn you into a nervous wreck before pressing the "Send" button (see our blog entry on sendphobia), it will ensure your campaign goes out mistake-free.

Time may be the enemy, but having to explain why a broadcast needs to be sent out to correct the one you sent out before is better left avoided.

Check, check and check again.

A quick checklist:

All links, even if you think they weren't changed from a previous edition
Spelling
Subject line: shorter the better
Spelling, typos are easy to miss in subject lines
Creative layout in several email programs: the creative may not only look different in other email programs, they may look bad, test in as many programs as possible, eg: Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Lotus Notes, Hotmail Live, Hotmail Classic, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail.
Unsubscribe link
Alternative text on images
Reply to email address

Comments - oldest entries appear first, most recent entries at the end.

As someone who has made a few errors, I think this is great advice.

Also remember to test on Mac if your recipients are Mac users.

Dean

By Dean Sharfman on 24 01 2008

I would also add, remember lots of people these days read emails on handhelds, blackberrys etc.

Another point people forget about, is that you shouldn’t send massive attachments with your email newsletters. They cause deliverability issues and annoy many people.

Sheryl.

By Sheryl Mathews on 24 01 2008

Re note your time of day comment, I agree, we have large international lists, we segment by time zone and send according to different times, definitely helps our open rates.

By Avi Spiegel on 24 01 2008

Hi Avi

I agree with your comment re time zones. We do something similar with our international clients.

We group about 3-4 time zones together, and then send out the campaign about midday to the middle time zone. This means we have less segments but recipients get the emails at at appropriate time.

Regards,
Kevin Garber

By Kevin on 24 01 2008