Basic rules for effective email marketing

When you hear email marketing, you think SPAM? Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, provided that your email is valuable and well-prepared.

It would seem that email marketing has lost its importance in the era of modern media. Now everyone uses the benefits of social media, instant messaging, and all this using the latest smartphone. However, statistics indicate a completely different situation. According to data from IAB, Poland does not lag behind world leaders such as Australia or Germany in terms of clicks and openings of emailing. The newsletter open rate of 19.32% and the click rate of 6.51% are results that bring a smile to the face of every marketer. In turn, research conducted by Econsultancy in 2014 indicates that revenues from email marketing increased by as much as 28% in one year.

Therefore, the question remains of skillful use of emailing in the marketing activities of the company. What to do so that recipients do not throw our email into a large bag marked “trash”? Here are a few basic rules.

A properly defined target group is the basis of every marketing campaign. Even if our email is a true ideal, with perfect creation, catchy title and valuable content, after reaching the wrong recipient it will still end up in the trash. It is therefore important to know who we are sending the email to.

Our recipient is after all a potential customer, right? True. However, we need to define who our potential customer is. Analysis of the demographic, geographical or even psychographic characteristics of the recipients will help us in this. A catering company in Poznań will not interest a customer in Kraków just as discounts on a men’s collection will not interest teenagers.

So how do we find the right recipients of our mailing? You can build a mailing database in various ways. Starting with newsletter subscriptions on the website, through offering discounts on the collection in exchange for signing up to our customer database, to sharing the full content of articles only after providing an email address. Each company and each industry can approach this differently, depending on the type of products and services offered.

The title is the first thing that the recipient of the email sees. It is up to them whether they want to open the message or immediately click the “delete” button. Even if subscribers have agreed to receive emails and have signed up for the newsletter, there is no guarantee that they will open them when they receive them. An effective email header therefore requires solid preparation. No one will be fooled by a title like “Today is the deadline.” The recipient expects specific information. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or make promises. Show that your message is valuable and helpful in solving the problem. After all, the point is for the recipient to feel intrigued and curious about what you have to tell them. A title that includes a so-called call to action will also work.

It is easy to get messy in an email. The next rule is – do not introduce information chaos. The message will be legible with a minimum of text. Your information should be short and concise. We do not want our subscribers to spend the whole day reading the email with their heads hanging down. And this is still an optimistic version. Most of them, with a large amount of text, will not even start reading it. Do you have a lot to say? Send your recipients to a blog or website, there is a place for it. Give readers some information – email marketing is to encourage them to visit this blog or website.

Text is of course the basis, but good emailing must also include a few important elements. What should be included in our message?
• A headline, preferably simple and legible,
• Graphics, should be appropriately matched to the content of the message, creative, but in moderation. As with text, a large number of inconsistent graphics can easily cause information chaos,
• Call to action. A button that everyone will notice and understand its message,
• Information about the sender, a field with basic information, a button that links directly to the sender’s home page would also be useful,
• A button or link that allows you to unsubscribe from the list of subscribers.

Preparing and sending mailings is not everything. Remember to analyze, it will help avoid errors in the next sending. Check the basic indicators, CTR (click-through rate) and OR (open rate). Thanks to them, you will find out how many people opened your email and how many clicked on your links. Remember, however, that your email will only be counted as opened if images are loaded (a large number of users have blocked automatic loading of images in the message content). Therefore, the CTR indicator is more reliable. At the same time, check what recipients click on, where they click, which content is most interesting to them. What values ​​of these indicators are we aiming for? The average for Poland in the case of OR is about 19.3%, while for CTR it is about 6%. Remember, however, that in a valuable analysis, comparing numbers alone is not enough.