1. A Subscriber List
2. Software
3. Email Service Provider (ESP)
4. Content
5. Design
6. Coding
7. Analytics
8. Strategy
Email marketing software (like ours!) allows you send hundreds of thousands of emails in minutes — in fact we send over 16 billion emails every year. This number keeps increasing.
This type of software is built uniquely for email. It works by automatically sending emails using direct send and SMTP servers.
To learn more about the feature of email marketing software let’s talk a little about ESPs.
A good ESP takes into account many different factors, among those is deliverability — or why email is shown in the inbox, moved to spam folder, or not making it to its destination at all. Measuring and monitoring this is hugely important to the success of an email campaign, but there are other features as well.
Not to sound mean, but this is a question you should ask yourself every time you send your email. People get hundreds of spam email everyday. Just look at David’s spam folder …and believe us when we say it’s not easy to get your message to your customers. So this is why a beautiful email, with interesting, click-worthy, engaging content is crucial (we can help with that, by the way). Check out the one below!
You can thank our awesome design and marketing team for putting this bad boy together. It’s quick to visually digest and is focused on providing subscribers with a variety of content that they can whet their mental whistles with. PLUG ALERT: It was also put together and deployed through our new UI, which is something our customers get the amazing pleasure to experience. Especially those who don’t want to build templates from scratch because we’ve given them three to choose from. This allows them to focus more on the message and less on all that technical mumbo-jumbo that tend to cause people to just sort of zone out and lose motivation and go stare into the refrigerator for a little bit.
But we digress. Moving on …
there are some pretty awful offenders out there. As you ramp up your list, you should always keep in mind the look and feel of the email. Some brands need to be on the forefront of design, while others can be seen as more “informational”.
Litmus, one of our partners, has fantastic email design, because, well, they have to. Like us, they market to marketers, so it’s important to be on top of their game here.
Other brands like Search Engine Roundtable simply list bullet points from a curated set of articles on their site. And guess what, it’s amazing:
Clearly, depending on your brand’s message, the design may mean very different things for your company.
It’s suggested to brush up on your HTML and CSS so you can, at the very least, understand something like…
<a style=”color:blue;”>this</a>
You’ve heard this term before. Yes, it has to do with how you code your templates. This is 100% necessary in today’s mobile-driven world. Check out our blog posts on the subject to learn more.
To wrap up, as an ESP, we focus highly on the performance of our coded templates in all major email clients. We also use fluid responsive design which is the best for email.
You should always be thinking about your email marketing strategy. There are two main times to revise your strategy.
Start with your research and planning. Are you taking advantage of holiday sales like July 4th or Black Friday? Are you targeting dog owners birthdays? Are you targeting newlyweds?
Also, you want to make note of valuable metrics (key performance indicators or KPI) which can affect the content of a send in terms of call-to-action and intent. The reason you want to decide these metrics upfront is so the narrative of how your campaign has some context. This is important because a metric alone, doesn’t mean anything. It should represent the campaigns purpose as a whole.
For example, lets define a goal: a conversion rate of 2.5% based on our average of previous campaigns at 2% is considered good. An informative summary of your campaign would then sound much like this, “The campaign had a Conversion rate of 3% which is considered a great result based on the predefined KPIs”.
Look at week over week, month over month, year over year, and form benchmarks to lead your program in the right direction. Look at which campaigns performed well and which didn’t to consistently redefine and inform your pre-campaign launch strategy.
Previously, we said an example of a metric to look at after a campaign could be conversions. Well, there are many different metrics which all tell a story of their own. If you have a newsletter that goes out weekly, you can adapt it over time to meet specific criteria that will help you deliver better content based on the metrics you get every week.
For another example, say you notice one of your transactional emails (an ecommerce receipt email) has your social profiles linked at the bottom and because of the design, you have a whopping 30% click through to your Facebook account. This sounds like a perfect place to include a newsletter opt-in form as part of your future email sends.
© 2021 WhatCounts. All rights reserved. View our Privacy Policy or our Terms & Conditions.
This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to improve your website experience and provide more personalized services to you, both on this website and through other media. To find out more about the cookies we use, see our Privacy Policy. We won't track your information when you visit our site. But in order to comply with your preferences, we'll have to use just one tiny cookie so that you're not asked to make this choice again.