Jun
14,2011
Email Marketing – Best Practice
Each day in our email accounts, there is no doubt that you will receive some type of email marketing. It is certainly the most widely used means for a business to reach out to clients and potential customers. However, there are times when email marketing simply becomes a nuisance and has you cleaning out your inbox perhaps each week or day. Similar to website design, there are a set of best practices to keep in mind. Here are a few techniques we use to help our clients at time4design:
A Personal Touch
There is nothing more special than an email with the personal touch. Make a special connection with your client using perhaps a friendly tone in the same style as your website. Selling a service obviously is important, but there should be other information of interest to the reader. As with all relationships, trust takes time so it’s worth designing your emails well with plentiful, related, and targeted content.
Buy me. Buy Me. Buy Me.
This probably would be a subject not to use. The subject line reveals all and carries the most weight. Before your email has even been read, it could already have been sent to junk mail. An engaging message will help attract a better ‘clickthrough’ rate, so avoid spam relate wordage and use something more inspirational. Improve your open rates by perhaps using a personal email address and ‘remain’ with it
It’s 3 o’clock!
We all have a schedule, the typical being 9-5.30. Now, we do say ‘typical’…so when is the best time to forward a campaign? Saturday at 2am might not be recommended, but perhaps midweek avoiding ‘busy’ Mondays and casual Fridays when some take a half day. Dependent on your market and industry, some research is obviously required, and we always recommend to try and email at a regular and consistent time.
Looks are not everything
An email should be designed well and within specifications allowed across all mediums. Email programs will display messages in various ways so an email most be tested and optimized just like a website on different browsers. At Time4design we test all emails with popular spam avoidance software, making sure there are no errors that helps increase the avoidance of junk mail and deletion.
Email Tracking
Always track your email campaign. Manage click rates, conversions and open rates. This information helps future campaigns and the quality of your market.
Most importantly…
Follow CAN-SPAM Act. The official law that establishes requirements for commercial messages.
So where do we start?
Visit our Email Marketing and Promotion Technology Page. We have options that include managed campaigns or election of our own in-house software (Time4mail) that will allow you to generate emails and newsletters.
