If you’re using email to communicate with current or prospective customers it's important that you apply best practice to achieve the highest response rates possible, whilst retaining valuable contacts.
1. How To Measure Success
Ensure you outline what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are going to be and bench mark each campaign against them. KPIs could include:
Open rate
Click-through rate
Click to open rate (number of unique clicks/number of unique opens)
Bounce rate
Delivery rate (emails sent, measured against bounces)
Unsubscribe rate
Referral rate ('send-to-a-friend')
Number, or proportion of, spam complaints
2. Personalise Where Possible
Improve response rates by personalising the email content. The more you know about your customers such as their topics of interest, their industry or company size the easier this will be.
3. Use Clear Calls To Action
Ensure the content is clear, consistent and communicates a clear call to action.
4. Experiment With Subject Lines
Keep subject lines short and to the point and try to refrain from using words which will be 'junked' by spam filters. A/B test alternatives to find out what most appeals to your audiences.
5. Test With All Email Clients
Test your email content with all the top email clients and providers (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL etc) to ensure it can be seen by the majority of users.
6. Test To Improve Performance
Continuous A/B testing of templates, subject lines, topics and sending day & times can help to optimise open and conversion rates.
7. Images & Alt Tags
Avoid putting text within an image. Most email clients don’t automatically download images, therefore image content is not viewable on first sight. If you have to use text within images, ensure you use an ‘Alt’ tag reiterating the text within the graphic.
8. Avoid Spamming
Try not to send too many emails to your audience unless you know they want to receive them. If you make the mistake of sending daily / weekly emails to your database you may find out that consumers quickly opt out.
9. Keep It Relevant
Consumers like to receive messages that are relevant to them. Don’t try and sell them something they did not sign up for.
10. Promote Key Content At The Top
Make sure you communicate key messages at the top of your email content. Many email clients don’t automatically display all email content therefore the top content needs to be motivating enough to encourage consumers to scroll down.
Data from : Approved Index
http://epidm.edgesuite.net/RBI/ApprovedIndex/AIBUY/BuyerMWSept2010.html
