How to do email marketing and not die trying
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 6:18 am
Nowadays, we all know email as one of the most used marketing tools, if not the most used. We are fed up with receiving hundreds of emails every day that try to convince us to buy any product, that promise us heaven and pretend to be the solution to all our problems. But, what is it that makes us open an email or not? And why are some campaigns successful and others not? What is the difference between reaching our client or ending up in the trash of the email program?
Let's try to draw some conclusions about what differentiates one campaign from another.
As Zun Tzu says: “Battles are won before they begin.” It is exactly the same with email, once you hit the send button, the die is cast and if you have not done your job properly, your campaign will not work.
We can say that the success of an email is marked in several stages:
Database Segmentation
Segmentation is the basis of marketing, we can even say that africa email list marketing would not exist without segmentation.
Segmenting our database consists of grouping the recipients of our email into small, more or less homogeneous groups, whose members share common characteristics or interests. The success of our email will be directly proportional to the quality of our database and the segmentation we have carried out.
How to segment your message correctly? We must first consider what we are going to tell and to whom, that is, what their motivations are and how we can group all the contacts by common interests. Once we have these groups, we will adapt the message to each one of them. In this way we will improve the opening and response ratios and turn our campaign into a successful one.
Prevent email programs from detecting it as spam
The first thing we need to do is to ensure that our sender's mail server does not return the email thinking it is spam. To do this, we need to take into account certain rules regarding design and content.
These rules depend on certain parameters such as: what type of words are included in the message and the characteristics of the client's mail server. It is increasingly common for servers to have more restrictive spam rules and this leads to certain changes. There must be a balance between images and text. If we abuse images there is a greater chance that our design will end up in the spam folder.
Getting the sender's attention to open it
Once we have passed the server filter, we must get our sender to open the email, and for this there is nothing better than being creative. Here we basically have to resolve two needs or points to work on: one, the sender of the email. If this is a contact known by the person receiving the email, it will be a fundamental value that will facilitate the opening, although this is something almost impossible when we are talking about sending to potential clients or prospects.
The second and most important part to capture the attention of our user is the subject of the email, this will determine at first if the content of the email is of interest to the recipient or not.
We must abandon generic subjects and try to be original and capture the attention of customers. We are tired of being bombarded with information that does not add value and does not tell us anything. Segmentation is the queen of marketing and as such, it must be taken into account here as well. The more prices the message is and the more accurate it is for the target audience, the closer we will be to hitting the target.
Push the potential client to click action
Our fourth objective is to get the attention of the recipient of the message and here, each designer has his own rules, or as it has always been said: “every master has his own book”. We have hundreds, thousands of articles that explain how to build a good email: if the images should be on the right or the left, if we should put a headline or not, etc… But if there is a maxim that is common to all and that we should always follow, it is: “LESS IS MORE”.
If we put too much information in the email, not only will our “potential clients” get tired of reading it, but we will most likely lower the click ratio of the email, since we will have told them everything they need to know before they reach our destination. On the other hand, if we tell just what is necessary, if we manage to create expectation in our reader, we will get them to click and go to our destination page, the final objective of any email marketing action.
Pushing you to purchase action
If we have achieved the first four steps, we will be close to success, achieving the purchase action, which depending on what we intend, can be buying in an eCommerce, requesting information or registering on a website.
There are several ways to achieve this, but the most common one (due to its effectiveness, presence and flexibility) is the landing page.
A landing page is a page designed to be the destination of either an email or any other online marketing tool that allows us to redirect the customer to a website (banners, ads, Google AdWords, etc.)
The goal of a landing page is to ensure that potential customers find only the information they need and nothing more, so as not to divert their attention from the purchase.
Why direct the customer to a landing page and not to our corporate website? The answer is simple: for the same reason that when a salesperson tries to sell, he does not tell the customer all the advantages of all the company's products, but only about the product that may interest him. On the Internet, the process is the same: we must focus our customer and show him the information we want him to see, preventing him from being able to navigate to other pages or sections of our website that could distract his attention from the purchase action.
If we take these simple steps into account when doing email marketing, our success will increase, as will the profitability of the action.
Let's try to draw some conclusions about what differentiates one campaign from another.
As Zun Tzu says: “Battles are won before they begin.” It is exactly the same with email, once you hit the send button, the die is cast and if you have not done your job properly, your campaign will not work.
We can say that the success of an email is marked in several stages:
Database Segmentation
Segmentation is the basis of marketing, we can even say that africa email list marketing would not exist without segmentation.
Segmenting our database consists of grouping the recipients of our email into small, more or less homogeneous groups, whose members share common characteristics or interests. The success of our email will be directly proportional to the quality of our database and the segmentation we have carried out.
How to segment your message correctly? We must first consider what we are going to tell and to whom, that is, what their motivations are and how we can group all the contacts by common interests. Once we have these groups, we will adapt the message to each one of them. In this way we will improve the opening and response ratios and turn our campaign into a successful one.
Prevent email programs from detecting it as spam
The first thing we need to do is to ensure that our sender's mail server does not return the email thinking it is spam. To do this, we need to take into account certain rules regarding design and content.
These rules depend on certain parameters such as: what type of words are included in the message and the characteristics of the client's mail server. It is increasingly common for servers to have more restrictive spam rules and this leads to certain changes. There must be a balance between images and text. If we abuse images there is a greater chance that our design will end up in the spam folder.
Getting the sender's attention to open it
Once we have passed the server filter, we must get our sender to open the email, and for this there is nothing better than being creative. Here we basically have to resolve two needs or points to work on: one, the sender of the email. If this is a contact known by the person receiving the email, it will be a fundamental value that will facilitate the opening, although this is something almost impossible when we are talking about sending to potential clients or prospects.
The second and most important part to capture the attention of our user is the subject of the email, this will determine at first if the content of the email is of interest to the recipient or not.
We must abandon generic subjects and try to be original and capture the attention of customers. We are tired of being bombarded with information that does not add value and does not tell us anything. Segmentation is the queen of marketing and as such, it must be taken into account here as well. The more prices the message is and the more accurate it is for the target audience, the closer we will be to hitting the target.
Push the potential client to click action
Our fourth objective is to get the attention of the recipient of the message and here, each designer has his own rules, or as it has always been said: “every master has his own book”. We have hundreds, thousands of articles that explain how to build a good email: if the images should be on the right or the left, if we should put a headline or not, etc… But if there is a maxim that is common to all and that we should always follow, it is: “LESS IS MORE”.
If we put too much information in the email, not only will our “potential clients” get tired of reading it, but we will most likely lower the click ratio of the email, since we will have told them everything they need to know before they reach our destination. On the other hand, if we tell just what is necessary, if we manage to create expectation in our reader, we will get them to click and go to our destination page, the final objective of any email marketing action.
Pushing you to purchase action
If we have achieved the first four steps, we will be close to success, achieving the purchase action, which depending on what we intend, can be buying in an eCommerce, requesting information or registering on a website.
There are several ways to achieve this, but the most common one (due to its effectiveness, presence and flexibility) is the landing page.
A landing page is a page designed to be the destination of either an email or any other online marketing tool that allows us to redirect the customer to a website (banners, ads, Google AdWords, etc.)
The goal of a landing page is to ensure that potential customers find only the information they need and nothing more, so as not to divert their attention from the purchase.
Why direct the customer to a landing page and not to our corporate website? The answer is simple: for the same reason that when a salesperson tries to sell, he does not tell the customer all the advantages of all the company's products, but only about the product that may interest him. On the Internet, the process is the same: we must focus our customer and show him the information we want him to see, preventing him from being able to navigate to other pages or sections of our website that could distract his attention from the purchase action.
If we take these simple steps into account when doing email marketing, our success will increase, as will the profitability of the action.