Make the best use of Melon's e-shot manager
More and more businesses are turning to email marketing to benefit from lower costs and faster responses in comparison to traditional direct marketing methods. The prospect of achieving higher response rates and reaching more customers in their target demographic sounds very promising. To achieve this, we have listed the top 10 tips to improve your e-marketing campaign using Melon's Eshot manager.
1. Avoid Spam Filters
The majority of large Internet service providers now use rigerous spam protection mechanisms to trap unsolicited email before it gets into their customer's inboxes. To make sure your emails don't get flagged as spam - and deleted before they even get to your subscribers - avoid using words such as "Free", "£££", "Save", "Discount", etc., in both the subject line and try not use them more than a few times throughout your copy.
2. Maximise Click-Thru Rates
Both web pages and emails can contain a lot of text and graphics, and this sometimes makes it harder to get your subscribers to perform a certain task, such as clicking on a link to see your special offers. The majority of Internet users respond better to a plain, bold, blue text link as opposed to a banner or button. So, if you are going to include links in your emails, make sure they are clearly visible, bold, blue and underlined.
3. The Power of Personalisation
The power of personalisation can and should be used in your emails. In fact, by simply starting your email with "Hi {FirstName}" instead of the boring "Hi there", you can increase both your reading and click-thru rates because your subscribers feel like they already have a relationship with you as you have addressed them by their first name.
4. Increased Response on Tuesdays and Wednesdays
Research analysis has shown that the best days to perform a mail-out to your list are Tuesday and Wednesday, as this is when people are more receptive to communication. This means that they are more likely to read your content and click on links, meaning more sales. On Mondays, everyone is still recovering from a hectic weekend. On Thursday and Friday, people are working on projects or tasks that require to be finished by the weekend and are already looking forward to the weekend
5. Repeat Email Communication
E-marketing is only effective if it is being followed up shortly after the first e-shot went out. and is a great way to follow up with your subscribers or provide them with more information on your products/services.
6. Keep Consistency
If you are sending frequent e-shots, make sure you keep the look and feel consistent from issue to issue. By keeping the look and feel consistent, you help to maintain and strengthen your brand and your image to your subscribers, which again will make it easier to close sales when you need to.
7. On Time, Every Time
When sending an email to your subscribers, always make sure that it's sent on the same day of the week in a month. Your subscribers will come to "expect" your email to arrive in their inbox on the same day at the same time every week, meaning that they want to read your content and are generally more receptive to any special offers or promotions you may include.
8. The "Half-a-Second" Rule for Subject Lines
When your email arrives in your subscribers inbox, you generally have about half a second to catch their attention with the subject line of your email. After this, they will either delete your email or ignore it. In your subject line, try and specify a benefit that the subscriber can expect by reading your email. For example, instead of using '{company name} Newsletter Issue #1', use ‘{company name} Newsletter: 10 Tips for Financial Freedom'.
9. The Power of "Free" Content
If you're looking to grow your subscriber list, why not create or source a product of value to your visitors (such as an eBook or discount coupon) and offer it to them for free when they signup to receive your newsletter? Doing this regularly will drive subscribers repeatedly to your website, providing more and more exposure are your user-base grows. And not only that, your offers may circulate through other channels (forums, messengers, email forwarders).
10. Track everything
Open rates, unsubscribes, clickable-links, emails received, telephone and faxes received. Simply tracking the clicks is only half the story. You should monitor what happened when the click-through occurred on the website, as well as your sales call centre, making sure your staff asks any new customer how they heard from you. Tracking that data will enable you to fine-tune your future campaigns and improve the click-through ratings as well as new and repeat business.
