Is email marketing dead?

With all the buzz about social media, it's easy to ignore email in your online marketing mix. Is it worth spending your time writing an e-newsletter? Or should we just spend our time updating Twitter and Facebook?

The answer - email marketing is alive and well, and like so many things in online marketing it works even better when combined with social media. A recent survey of 500 million emails found a threefold improvement in click throughs when social media sharing links were included in email newsletters.

So we thought we would share a few tips for successful email marketing.

Be focused

It's very tempting, as it's so cheap and easy, to send to everyone on your mailing list. But don't! Segregate your mailing list to those for whom it's most relevant, and write in a way that will appeal to them rather than generically. Not only will this improve response but it will also decrease the risk of "overload" by recipients receiving way too many emails from you, many of which they find completely irrelevant, causing them to add you to their spam list.

Have clear calls to action

What are you wanting to achieve from your email campaign? Make sure that the email you're sending makes the response you're looking for easy to achieve.

Work alongside your social media

Writing an article in your newsletter, make sure that your recipients can comment on your blog or Facebook discussions. Can they share the article from your newsletter with friends on their social network, do you always feature buttons to allow recipients to become fans or followers? Considering all of these things when putting together your email will improve the success of both your email and your social media campaign.

Build relationships and prove expertise, don't just sell

Don't just use your email to hard sell your latest product, email is great for building relationship and especially for proving expertise. Providing great content not only proves your expertise in your industry, but also increases the chance of your email being forwarded on and kept for future reference.

Test, test, test

If checking your website across different browsers causes you headaches, it's nothing to checking the appearance of your email newsletter, especially since Office 2007. Check out the email standards project website for more information. So make sure you check your email's appearance in as many viewing platforms as possible including web based email. Also, as with any marketing, test different subject lines and content, both to reduce the risk of being spam blocked and improve open rates.

I hope these tips have reignited your enthusiasm for email marketing. If you need help getting an email marketing campaign off the ground, or to improve the performance of what you're doing now, give us a call.

August 18, 2010 at 10:11 pm | Design, Social Media | No comment

Making sure people read your website and take action

Gerry McGovern’s book "Killer Web Content" is a great guide to putting together and managing the written content for your website. I’ve just finished reading it and will be recommending it to all my clients. Two key themes run through it, writing the words your customer is looking for and getting rid of dead, filler and dated content.

Writing the words your customer is looking for.

Customers are looking for the words that they care about and are familiar with, a concept that Gerry McGovern calls “Care Words”. For example, if looking to fly, visitors to your website will be looking for the words “Cheap Flights” not “Low Fares” as many marketers would have used in the past. The book recommends some excellent techniques for discovering, testing and using care words. Writing titles, summaries and body copy making good use of these will help search engines and ensure that your visitors remains on your site as they have found what they are looking for (to misquote a U2 song!).

Get rid of the dead, filler and dated content

In one example given, of a large website, 99% of the people visiting the website visited 1% of the content, and 35% of content had never been read! The content that is rarely or never read is the dead and filler content, when a visitor comes across this it will more than likely drive them away to another site.

Writing the right content

The book suggests that you follow the six Cs whenever you sit down to write content:

Who Cares?
Is it Compelling?
Is it Clear?
Is it Complete?
Is it Concise?
Is it Correct?

Most importantly:

Never be a “putter upper”, just adding content to your website because you can and it’s at hand.
Thoroughly edit any content you do add, preferably using a third party as a fresh pair of eyes.
Test all content, monitor your webstats to see if it’s working.
Regularly read through your website, removing or editing content that is out of date or incorrect.

Improve your website content now

The book includes many other useful hints and tips for writing for your website as well as thoughts on blogs and search engines. Why not buy a copy of “Killer Web Content” now on Amazon and get your website working more effectively for you?

July 6, 2009 at 5:21 pm | Design, good books | 2 comments

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