E-Marketing

Email marketing is the most cost effective channel available to business today, and Digitaldance has many years experience in this area helping many promoters, venues and brands.

So maybe you’ve tried some email marketing tactics that didn’t work. Or maybe you’re doing a little preventative research before you launch a campaign. This weeks topic will help you sidestep the beginner’s blunders and help your campaign launch with return on investment in mind. As you’ll see, there are plenty of overlap in these mistakes. They work together for success, but can also combine to equal certain doom for your campaign.

Wrong list.

The right audience is paramount. It seems quite obvious, but also presupposes knowledge of your target reader. If you have slowly developed your own list through a double opt in subscription on your Web site, congratulations. You should have this list issue pretty well dialed. It’s when you start renting lists that this becomes a major issue. We can help your with finding the best list for your business, just contact us here for more information.

Irrelevant content.

Once you’re pretty sure you have the right audience, it makes sense that you need the right content. Relevancy takes into account content, creative, audience, timing. This doesn’t require higher calculus to figure out, but does support of lot of marketing strategy development. It is said to account for another 40% of your success rate. Readers will only respond to information that is important to them and engaging enough to consider. Of course, this is always easier said than it is to actually accomplish.

Poor creative execution.

Even with the correct list and great content, your message will be lost without reasonably professional creative development. This includes “from” and subject lines, graphic treatments, artwork, photos, logos, colors, fonts, formatting, as well as spelling, grammar, and the amount of information. Traditionally, creative is said to account for the last part of the 40-40-20 percent rule of your success rate, though I tend to believe it’s far more important, intricate and subtle. With all the sales drumming and information bombardment nowadays, how are you going to attract your audience? Is your email engaging? Is the offer and its layout intriguing? Do you offer a reason to learn more?

No call to action nor landing page.

Now that I’ve opened your email and I’m reading it because the artwork and offer are quite interesting, you need to give me a reason to click, a purpose to learn more, a sense of urgency to act, a hook to take the plunge. Any combination of: “call today,” “act now,” “learn more,” “sale ends Friday,” will usually do the trick, depending on your sales style and needs. Once I do click on the link, I want the landing page on your Web site to be just as relevant. It should continue with stellar content and creative to bring me closer to browsing, shopping, finalising the sale, or sharing information.

Dearth of strategy and campaign.

Successful email marketing requires forethought, planning and a budget to continue with a campaign. The same holds true for advertising in any medium. A single insertion ad in the local newspaper, for instance, is nearly a complete waste of money. However, an ongoing media buy in several local and regional publications along with radio, Web and outdoor is a powerful combination. The trick is to hit your audience with the right message more than once, without violating email frequency expectations. For example, if you have a yearly event, you can email pre-show to elicit excitement, during the show with news, and post-show with pictures and commentary. To do it well requires some thoughts around a campaign that ties into the event.

Opaque to transparency.

The work necessary to appear transparent is part and parcel in the email marketing gig, especially for a list that you rent. Your audience needs to trust that you’re not hiding online viruses or worse. Interestingly, the same elements that can help alleviate these concerns are also helpful for improving click through rates. Here’s another area where writing superior “from” and subject lines becomes essential to your success. It’s also helpful to include a signature with contact information and make it simple to manage subscription accounts and to unsubscribe.

Email Design Services

It is a good idea to review the creative aspects of your email marketing from time-to-time. Keeping things fresh helps to maintain the effectiveness of your messages. A good email design, that works well across all email clients, could be the difference between the success or failure of your email marketing.

A good email design can:

• Increase deliverability of your message -- bad HTML and rogue Word markup does more than make you look bad, it could be stopping your message reaching recipient's inboxes
• Increase open rates -- through better use of images and content placement that anticipates automatic image downloads being disabled
• Increase click through rates -- our knowledge of email clients and recipients can ensure that your call-to-actions have the best chance of succeeding

We work daily with the wide variety of email clients and understand their idiosyncrasies. Why not let us review your current email designs to ensure your recipients are getting the best possible experience? If you need us to design your creative we can help with that also.

Contact us

Get in touch to discuss the design of your emails: services@digitaldance.com