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1) Targeting
The return on investment (ROI) is important and can only be achieved if this first step is properly carried out. It is indeed useful to determine who your target audience is in order to come up with a strategy on how to attract it.
There are usually two types of e-mail campaigns with two different purposes and consequently requiring a different targeting strategy:
The e-mail campaign for market research or with a special offer
The objective of this message is merely to advertise. The idea is to canvass a potential customer or to gain a new one with a special offer. Usually, the potential customers spend only a few seconds reading it so the message should be very clear and the user should be able to see the value in it right away.
The loyalty e-mail campaign
In this kind of e-mail strategy, regular e-mails are send to keep in touch with the potential customers, for example using a newsletter. To retain a customer you need to deliver the content he may need or want to read so it will require you to customize your marketing approach and offers. Some of the methods would be to send special offers based on the customers interests, customized e-mails or a simple follow up message after a purchase has been made. The subscription of a user to a newsletter shows his will to be informed of the latest news from your brand. The real reason of a newsletter is to provide information on new products/services, surveys, tests, users’ comments, and inform them of special events.
2) Creating
The content of an e-mail campaign must be optimized especially for some criteria in order to go through the anti-spam filter and also to provide the essential information at the first glance. First the subject must be short (50 characters max) and must match the topic of the e-mail. Within the content, it is important to mention the name of the sender, the advantages of the special offer, how long it lasts and to customize the message depending on the senders objective. A well-organized e-mail is necessary in order to have the call-to-action and other elements you can click on easy to find.
The quality of the content has a great influence on the likelihood that an e-mail will go through the anti-spam filter or not. The filtering can be done several ways but in the end the objective is the same: to determine which messages containing advertisement are spam. The subject of the message, its content or the name of the sender and domain can be analyzed.
3) Testing
Before sending out an e-mail campaign, rule number one is to test it to make sure that the potential customer will be able to open it and read it without any difficulty, otherwise sending it, is useless. It is possible to test different things at different moments but the most important is to test how it will come across to several customers. The second test phase is about measuring the impact of various marketing templates. It is called split-testing. Also, called A/B test or A/B testing, its idea is based on testing different versions of an e-mail in order to choose the one with the best result. Let’s take two versions of a message, one with a button on the right, the other with the button on the left. All you need to do afterwards is to select two samples of contacts from your database and send one version to one sample and the other version to the other sample. The end results will enable you to determine which version is the most efficient.
4) Sending
The definition of the mailing is to have any piece of data delivered (for example, an e-mail) via a network (e.g. internet). The idea is simple, you need to choose a path inside the network that will be able to deliver the data from the sender to the recipients.
When you are sending an e-mail, your message will pass through the network thanks to the routers and the gateways. This shows how easy it is for a message to be lost if some of the components of the network do not function properly. Fortunately, a service provider such as Mailpro ensures the effective mailing and the delivery of your messages. Obviously, it is an additional cost but it is the best way not to be black listed by the Internet Service Providers (ISP). Actually, if you send big volumes of e-mails too frequently, you Internet Service Provider may consider you as a « spammer » and consequently will block you from sending e-mails.
5) Analyzing
In order to measure the success and the efficiency of an e-mail campaign, it is important to measure the activity of the potential customers. To do that, we first take different rates into consideration: the opening rate, the click-through rate and the conversion rate. Thanks to these ratios, it is easy to act accordingly with the different levels of conversion of the potential customers and to start follow-up campaigns.
Mailpro also offers e-mailing stats: hourly and daily tracking of the various rates, comparisons between campaigns, analysis of the OS of the potential customers, their browser and their e-mail softwares.
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