5-8 Email Marketing Tips

5. Tell a Story
In All Marketers Are Liars, Godin emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a successful marketing strategy. Email offers the opportunity to tell the story in continuous installments.

“Email marketers don’t have a prayer to tell a story,” Godin says, “unless they tell it in advance, in another medium, before they get permission. Otherwise, it quickly becomes spam. The best email marketing starts with a foundation, like Amazon, and uses the email to drip the story, to have it gradually unfold.”

Too much email marketing, Burke opines, is one-off offers written as if recipients “like to run home at the end of the day and turn on Home Shopping Network so they can be targeted 24×7 by commercials.”

A well-crafted newsletter should be more than just a summary of your resume or company history. For instance, each issue of Sant’s Messages That Matter offers a free tip or strategy on how to make business proposals sing. “We focus on providing specific content, messages of a page or so about the kinds of things we’re good at,” Sant says.

6. Let Readers Drive Design
As there’s no such thing as guaranteed delivery in the email business, design is especially important. Because filters often block logos, graphics, and Flash animation, they can determine whether or not a customer or prospect even sees your message. “Filters are getting extremely thorough in what they’re filtering out,” Burke says. “If you’re not careful, those filters can filter out legitimate email.”

He recommends using flat text with hyperlinks to your Web site. “It’s text so it’ll go through,” Burke says. “You can put all of the graphics in the world on your Web site and once they click through to your Web site you’re better able to capture their identity and their information for future follow up.”

Many companies offer both plain and rich text email editions, giving customers the option of registering for the html edition on their Web sites. In those editions, design becomes especially important. But Ogilvy has found that email requires something different than traditional creative marketing design: Its studies have shown that users are most likely to respond to images and copy to the left of an image.

“We have seen increases up to 75 percent in response rates by moving the call to action button up next to an image instead of below the image, or by literally changing a link to a button so it stands out more prominently in the text,” Mullen says.

She has also found that the use of industry-, company-, and brand-specific words and phrases enhances the response. For instance, the word advice generates a high response for companies considered to be the thought leaders of their industry, but companies with consumer products, such as Apple with its iPod, will generate a better response using words like new or sleek.

7. Have an Exit Strategy
People who gave you their email address did so because they wanted to hear from you. But that can change and often does.

“If they stop responding,” Mullen says, “chances are it’s for one of two reasons: either they’re not interested in your content anymore or they’re no longer getting your emails.

“In either case we recommend that you define a set number of non-response messages [after which you] stop sending them emails. It sends a negative brand message and it doesn’t do anything to help reestablish your relationship with them,” Mullen says.

That number differs by industry. Travel companies, for instance, cannot predict when their customers will be traveling and looking for discounts on rooms and airfares, so their horizon is much longer–as long as several years.

On the other hand, a high-tech B2B company is probably only going to want specific information on wireless security when it’s addressing the problem internally. After the problem is solved, continued mailings about wireless security are likely to irritate. Devising a successful exit strategy is much like determining a successful formula for content: Know your industry.

8. Best Practices–Know what you want
The key to maintaining a set of successful best practices is to know what you want from them and be prepared to rewrite them as your business needs change. Mullen suggests starting with a good awareness of what you want your best practices to achieve.

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