Steps to Email Marketing Success


Permission-based direct email beats all other direct-marketing vehicles because there are no production, paper, or postage costs. But it does take some work. That is, to create an ongoing successful email-marketing campaign, you need to constantly test it. It's important to test your promotional email and all its parts before you spend a lot of money on a potential campaign failure.

Web Resource: Stay in the Know

Email Marketing Weekly (www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/newslettersub.cgi) is a good resource for staying up-to-date on email marketing. It covers a full range of email-marketing issues from stories that appear over the week on www.dmnews.com, along with some original content.


You see, the Internet is the perfect direct-marketing medium, and those who were raised within the direct-marketing profession understand this. They also understand the importance of testing a direct-mail campaign before a full-blown launch.

Testing is the process of getting information about the marketplace from the marketplacethat is, discovering what the audience will really do, not what it says it will do. By testing multiple variables with small percentages of your list before you roll out your full email campaign, you can base the message decisions of your email campaign on results instead of opinion.

Here's how to test your email message in seven easy steps.

1. Test Your Subject Line

The subject line of your email message equates to an envelope. You must catch consumers' attention with this, or they'll send it to the trash file. Your subject line must immediately grab their attention and make them want to read the first few lines of your message.

The old adage in direct marketing is to hit the prospect with benefits and phrase those benefits in a personal statement, such as "How to get out of debt in 30 days" or "What stock brokers don't want you to know." The trick is to rephrase your subject line and test it in two or three different ways to see which one brings you the best response.

For example, "How to be debt-free in 30 days" and "7 quick and easy ways to pay off your debts now." For the test, try these iterations of the same statement with your test groups and see which one pulls the best.

Here's something to keep in mind when constructing those subject lines: Spam filters catch certain words, so avoid those words if you can. To find out more, go to www.grokdotcom.com/email-subject-lines.htm.

2. Test Your "From" Lines

Staying anonymous will quickly send your email to the dustbin. People want to know who is sending a message. Use your domain address in your "from" line. Or if you can, use the name of your company (XYZ Promotions), or even your real name and title (John Doe, CEO). In tests, the "name" part of the "from" line, the section that goes just before the sender's email address, indicates that this area is a very significant piece of real estatemaybe even more important than the subject lineto entice recipients to simply open the message.

3. Test Your Headlines

If the recipient has gotten this far in your email message, you have a few short seconds to keep his or her attention. The preview window of most email application programs is only two or three lines deep, meaning that you have fewer than three lines to keep the reader's attention.

What you say in the headline of the message body and the one or two lines that follow dictates whether the recipient will read the rest of your message. Your headline and the few lines of text that follow need to have punch. Sum up your entire offer and make the recipient read on. Your headline should be direct and personal, and should supply a benefit to the reader.

That leads to testing your offer.

4. Test Your Offer

This is obviously the intent of your email: to get recipients to buy or take some kind of action. Your objective is to test up to three versions of your message to a small percentage of different recipients on your list. If you're selling something, offer three different discounts to three different groups of recipients. For example, offer one test group a "Save $10" discount. If this represents a 10% discount off your product or service, test a different group with a "Save 10%" offer. You might even raise your price a bit and test a third group with "Buy One, Get One at Half-Price."

On the other hand, if you're trying to get your recipients to take some kind of action, such as join your preferred customers club to gather demographic information and interests for future marketing campaigns, test one group by offering a discount on the first purchase, test another with a contest, and test another with a free sample for signing up.

The information gathered from these test offers can help you focus on what kind of offer your recipients will respond to.

5. Test Your Response Options

Just because you send your offer electronically doesn't mean that your recipient wants to reply by same way. Give the recipient several different ways to take advantage of your offer. Besides the option of hitting the Reply button, give them the opportunity to respond via a toll-free telephone number, fax, link, or even snail mail. With Merchant Solutions Standard or Pro package, you can create track links to test response rates. Link Tracker enables you to assign special codes to each link to your store. These special links can be embedded into your email offer. You can use this to track how many visitors you're getting and how many sales arrived at your store via each specifically coded link.

To create a trackable link, follow these steps:

1.

In Store Manager, click Create Links in the Promote column.

2.

Enter a name for your link and click Create New Trackable Link For. The name is used only to help you identify the link; a unique link code is created. Another special link is created to show reports on how much traffic and revenue that particular link has generated.

Test each of these response mechanisms in your test messages to see which response medium they prefer. Never make assumptions about your target audience.

6. Test Text Versus HTML

More users than ever can read HTML email, but that doesn't mean they want it in their email box. If you choose to present your message in an HTML format, keep in mind that the HTML can be formatted in many ways. Test these to see which format brings the best results. But keep in mind that most users cruise the Net at 56K. This limits the size and type of HTML message you can send.

Tip: Don't Forget the Link

If you do send HTML, include a link to the URL where it resides in the top of your message, just in case the recipient cannot view it.


7. Test Your Links

If you are sending an HTML email, test what your audience will click on in response. Those pretty graphics that your designer has slaved over might look good to you, but if they can't elicit a click-through, it was a waste of time. Will recipients click on logos? Photos? Call-to-action text? Don't forget to flag links individually to determine where the click-throughs originated. With third-party email software, such as Constant Contact and Campaigner, you can track every single link on your email newsletter. You can generate reports to see how many and which readers clicked on which link.

Additional Email Tips

Those who succeed in email marketing have found the following to be of great importance, regardless of the seven easy steps just explained.

The time you send a message can affect the response to it. For example, messages sent on a Friday versus a Monday, or at lunchtime versus first thing in the morning, can pull dramatically different responses. Send all your test messages at the same time on the same day.

Also, test only one variable at a time. Change the subject line in one test, the message in another, or the "from" line in another. Also, designate one variable as a controldon't change it across all testsand use it to measure the others.

Establish some success metrics. Will you be testing click-throughs, revenue per transaction, or new customer registration? Decide before you start your tests. When your test results are in, it's easy to check the click-through rates and close rates on your test program. Pick the variables that tested best, launch your full campaign, and watch the money roll in.

Finally, remember that testing never ceases; it's an ongoing process. What worked several weeks ago might not work now, so build a testing process into every email campaign. It will pay for itself many times over with a successful responsive campaign.




Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
ISBN: 0789735342
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 208

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