There are three critical components to successful email marketing:
- A great list
- A compelling email offer
- A brilliant landing page
So how do you know if you’re great, compelling and brilliant?
You test.
What ever you goal—selling a product, gaining a lead or enlisting a subscriber—your email campaign must walk the prospect through a mental process. An analytics program allows you to take a fine grained look at prospect behavior at each step of that process to maximize your results.
Mailing lists
It doesn’t matter how cheap email marketing may seen, a poor list will cost you money. It may be in direct costs, lost opportunity costs or cost in damage to your brand, but a poorly targeted email campaign costs.
To be great, a list must be targeted, timely and accurate.
Here’s how we can help:
- Develop email lists
- Test list samples for accuracy and relevance
- Merge and purge lists to eliminate duplications
- Optimize email frequency for greatest returns
- Segment lists for better targeting
- Automate mailing process
- Ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM Act
- Work with ISPs to maximize delivery rates—and prevent blacklisting
Incorporating Metric Centered Marketing strategies lets you measure greatness.
Sharpen your offer
When you email a prospect, you have seconds to impress them that you will make their life better.
Your subject line separates success from SPAM. The best subject lines tell what’s inside. The worst sell what’s inside. Within that rule, there is a great deal of latitude. Testing one subject line against another allows you to move from gut feeling to measuring what works.
Here’s how we can help:
- Blend industry-wide research, marketing experience and creativity to write the best subject lines for you
- Create an experiment based program identifying the most effective subject lines.
- Align offers to list variables
- Automate unsubscribe
- Integrate email lists with CRM applications
Once you have succeeded in getting your email opened, the email has one simple function: to lead them to a landing page on your site. The email itself shouldn’t try to close the deal. Rather, its job is to engage the reader, outline what you can do for them, and direct them to the landing page where your offer can be more clearly laid out.
Here’s how we can help:
- Create clear, compelling copy
- Test alternative copy in order to continuously improve results
- Analyze copy to remove content likely to trigger SPAM filters
Landing page:
Engaging the prospect in the email leads him or her to a landing page (not your site’s homepage) where you can expand on your offer.
This requires a dialog that can best be defined in two ways: the structural elements and their function.
Elements
- Headline: Does it clearly state what the email is about and is it reader centered?
- Images: Do they reinforce the message and represent your brand positively?
- Content: Will your content persuade the prospect to respond through clearly stating the benefits of doing so?
- Layout: Does your layout match the reader's thought process and guide them to responding?
- Call to action: Can the prospect easily respond with confidence.
- Relevance: Is your offer of use to them?
- Value Proposition: Does responding to the call to action help them?
- Security: Do they trust you?
- Incentive: Should they follow the call to action immediately?
- Apply marketing experience to create effective email offers
- Through A/B and multivariate testing, hone each element of your email marketing campaign to maximize returns
- Analyze responses to enable you to put forward the most effective offers to various market segments
