Email Marketing Campaigns: 4 Great All-Around Tips
Email marketing how-to lists and tip sheets often focus on one topic. How to improve delivery. How to craft a good subject line. How to boost your open rates. But we're doing something different. We're taking the top four general email marketing tips that we've seen work time and again, and we're passing them on to you. Here they are:
Use Google Analytics to get the big picture
If you've been on the Internet for some time, you've heard about Google Analytics. Even though it seems a bit intimidating to add something like this to your campaigns, you need to do it so you can see what happens after customers click through on a link in your email. With Google Analytics, you can track your subscribers well beyond your email. You can see which pages they visited, what they bought, whether they abandoned their shopping carts or even which pages are causing dead ends on your site. While email click-through rates are good data to see who's doing what, don't forget that many of your clients are probably viewing their emails through a preview pane, which automatically counts as an open rate. With Google Analytics, you can take things a step further by analyzing your actual click throughs to see who's doing what.
Check your send address frequently
It's easy to create your campaign, set it up to send, and get caught up in analyzing the data from your returns. But what about responses to your email or HTML
newsletter? Keep in mind that while the campaign is over for you, it's not for your recipients. Quite often recipients will use your send email address to bounce back an email asking for more product info. They might even use that email address to bury an unsubscribe request in some other text. Are you checking your send email frequently? Make sure you do to field any and all requests that come back from your campaigns. And don't forget that if even one unsubscribe slips under the radar, you might get a spam complaint.
Segment your emails and up-sell based on customer activity
When you use Google Analytics (see above) with your campaigns, it not only helps you figure out who bought something on your site or checked out a certain product, it gives you an entire new segment to your list. Once you know who your most active recipients are, you can create a list segment and an email that caters to them. For instance, if a customers go to your site and either purchase a certain product or spend time frequenting the pages featuring that product, you can use this list segment to create a new campaign that up-sells an entirely new but related product in your next campaign. Remember – recent data shows that most people unsubscribe to email campaigns because they don't feel they're relevant to them. By segmenting your list this way, you're making absolutely certain that each email is relevant to your active openers.
Archive your emails after you've sent them
An email archive is more than just a place where your customers can go to view past emails, it's a static page that anyone can find in a search engine. The key to taking advantage of this is using a one-two punch. The first step is to put your sent emails – even if they're old -- online. Even old emails give a good picture of what your company does, how things are done, and what type of products you tend to sell. The second step is to place a newsletter sign-up box, also known as an email
Signup Form, on your main archive page. This gives you the great chance to sign up new email subscribers on the chance that they parachute into your archive via a keyword search.
