Is email marketing working for you?

Have you ever tried email marketing?  Has it worked for you?  Some businesses have great success with email marketing and others struggle.  But how can you measure it and improve it next time?

Email marketing is usually evaluated by the number of people who open the email and the number of click throughs from it.  At the end of an email marketing campaign you should monitor these statistics and look at how your next campaign could be improved.  The following tips may help:-

• Look at the marketing emails you receive and ask yourself the following questions.  Which ones caught your attention and which didn’t? What did you like best and least about the emails? How do they differ from the campaigns you have done in the past? What would you do differently?
• Have a catchy subject line that will entice your readers.  If the number of emails opened was lower than you anticipated it is likely that your subject line wasn’t working. 
• How often are you sending marketing emails? You shouldn’t bombard your customers with emails as clogging up their inbox will only frustrate them and give your company a bad name.
• Make sure the content of the email is interesting and clearly written. Don’t send out marketing emails for the sake of it. You should have a clear message in your email from the start.
• Is your email relevant to everyone you are sending it to? With so many emails being received it will not even get read if it isn’t. Nobody likes time wasters.
• Some emails, especially those to large organisations can get blocked by filters and end up in junk folders or not being delivered at all.  Make sure that your email provider is not black-listed. 
• The email should not be too large to land in the inbox of the intended recipient. You should try not to use too many images and only use them where necessary and not use large files. 

You should also consider the following points about the design of the email:-

• If someone has ‘image blocking’ enabled what will the email look like without the pictures or graphics?  You should have alt tags on all images so it still makes sense without the pictures. Test it before you send it.
• Are all the call to actions clear? If you want people to click through they should stand out.
• Is the email accessible for the visually impaired? Consider the colour contrasts between the background and the text.
• Remember that people don’t always read their emails from a laptop these days and could be reading yours from a phone or blackberry. 

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