Email Campaign Best Practices

Monday August 6, 2007 / Lone Star Eagle News / Web News / Ken Freeman

Are you planning an email campaign, make sure that you can effectively track it from beginning to end. Here are some tips to creating a successful email campaign.

Measure Your Success.
Before sending out an email campaign, consider what you're goal is for this email campaign. Do you want 20% of the recipients to reply to you? Are you promoting new products? Attempting to increase membership? Encouraging inactive members to reactivate their accounts? Maintaining contact with your customers? What is the main thing you want to accomplish by sending this email campaign.

Now think about quantitative metrics that can help you measure the success of your email campaign.

Metric
Conversion Rate (number of desired actions divided by number of visits from the email)

Measures
How effectively your emails work in tandem with your site to drive specific actions such as a purchases or signups

What Tool Can I use to measure my success?
One of the most popular tools is GOOGLE’s ANALYTICS. If you visit www.google.com you can click on their business tools and sign up for Goolge Analytics.

Tag your links to build multiple “Calls to Action” reports!
Your email campaign should contain carefully tagged links so that when you use your Google Analytic report, you will be able to see the clickthroughs your email campaign has generated. When tagging your links, the best practice is to follow Google’s instructions to “set utm_source to the email title (for example, spring_news) and utm_medium=email. If you tag your links this way, the visits and conversions will be shown in the line item "spring_news[medium] in the Source Conversion report.”

To better increase the effectiveness of your website, all of your current links to your pages, email addresses or external links should be tagged for tracking. It makes sense that the more trackable links you have embedded in your email campaign, the more information you'll have about your campaign.
Here's an example of one of my trackable email campaign using Google Analytics:

Do you see all the links embedded in my email campaign?

"...Click here for July’s Web News": http://www.awebstore.com/news.php ?utm_source=newsletterjuly2007 &utm_medium=email &utm_content=webnews &utm_term=em &utm_campaign=JulyWebNews

News image: http://www.awebstore.com/news.php ?utm_source=newsletterjuly2007 &utm_medium=email &utm_content=webnews image &utm_term=em &utm_campaign=JulyWebNews

News image caption: http://www.awebstore.com/news.php ?utm_source=newsletterjuly2007 &utm_medium=email &utm_content=webnews &utm_term=em &utm_campaign=JulyWebNews
"Site Security Alert": http://www.awebstore.com/news.php ?utm_source=newsletterjuly2007 &utm_medium=email &utm_content=bulletedlist &utm_term=em &utm_campaign=JulyWebNews
etc...

Do you see how easy it is to make your links trackable?
Before sending your email campaign, always check the mechanics of your email.

1. Are the links being tracked properly? Depending on the email campaign tool you use, try sending out a few test emails to your own email address and then click on each link. Open your Google analytics page and verify if these links were all recorded properly.

2. Are all of your links valid? Don’t assume anything. Make certain that your email campaign references correct URLs in each and every link.

3. Are there any typos? Print a copy of the email you receive from your test. Reading it on paper will help you catch any typos. Have someone else read your email. A fresh pair of eyes can proofread your email and help you find any typos. Get rid of those typos before you send your message.

Before sending it out, check the mechanics of your email campaign message.

E-mail subject lines: The first thing your recipients will see is your subject line. This needs to be a “MUST KNOW MORE INFORMATION” statement. The subject line of your email campaign message is the first and primary part of your message that ultimately causes them to decide either open and read your message or delete it as SPAM.

Sender Info: Like your subject line, your reicipients will look to see who the email is from. The fact is, no matter how great your subject line is, if the recipient doesn’t know WHO YOU ARE, you can bet your message runs a high rish of being trashed as junk mail.

The time of day and/or day of week your email campaign is actually mailed out: It is a known fact, that if you are you are aiming your email campaign to businesses, a Monday morning 9am e-mail may not be the best strategy. In fact, I find that the most opened mail occurs on Tuesday or Wednesday. This is one reason one of the most aggressive eMarketers created a weekly webcast/podcast called the Wednesday Minute® This is why even with my Monday Minute® mailed to non-profits does send out on Monday because they are usually starting their week checking the weekend’s email before their staff meeting mid-morning. It pays to know who you are sending your mail to!

Use of Images or Graphic or audio/video files: Just because its easy to create a Word File and convert it to HTML, you may think with tools like Outlook that you can beautify your email campaign with nice graphics, but consider how the customer on a 28.8K dial-up connection will feel having to download a large email full of graphics. What does the person see who has images turned off? Find a balance between email size and graphics. I heard this from one of my recipients.

I was sending an audio file and 4 images per email to a certain email list. She said she could not open the message because it exceeded her ISP’s limit on email file size. She was on a dial-up. She said even if she did get the images, she could never get the sound file. Ever since being ‘confronted’ by her situation, I now send a simple 5 line text message announcing the webcast/podcast with links to a landing page on the web. The number of people opening the message rose significantly.

Message Layout: Will users respond better to your email if the text surrounds the image or is to the right of the image? Experiment with the design and layout of your email. Remember when building an email campaign, an email message is not the same width as a web page. Keep your total layout under 600 pixels wide. When creating an email message with images, compress and resize your images to a minimum for use on the email. Use a tool like AWEBER or CONSTANT CONTACT to manage and build your email campaign.

Content: Write your content to lead the recipient from one sentence to the next, or they might lose interest before your call to action is read? Experiment with tone and style.. Use the service of a professional copyeditor to make your copy sing. Write in a conversational manner as if you were speaking to a recipient. Avoid fluff and stuffy words. Keep it simple.

Remember to TEST your results:
A/B Testing is a simple and efficient way to conduct your testing. Learn more about how to set up A/B Tests with InstantAudioGenerator. Get creative with experimenting. Send a target test audience message #1. Send a second test to a different audience segment. You never know what you'll find -- and the results may surprise you.

Ken Freeman is senior web consultant and owner of AWS Creative, AWS Hosting Solutions, and Site-Keeper Support Services. His portfolio of clients span California to New York City, Houston to Chicago. In Marshall, he is the vendor of Marshall Chamber of Commerce, the Civic Center, 12 Way Foundation and Wisteria Garden Bed and Breakfast.

See: www.awebstore.com for more information

News Source: Ken Freeman