Email marketing offers an impressive ROI and there’s plenty of software available to help you to craft your emails, send them out to your list, and monitor engagement. However, this doesn’t mean that email marketing is easy to do well.
To build trust and a good reputation with your audience and customers, you need to ensure that you get even the little things right. Something as small as a spelling error could be enough to damage your brand and a mistyped link to a landing page could result in you losing a lot of potential sales or conversions.
Have you ever received an email that says “Dear [first name]” or two emails in quick succession from a brand, with the second, titled something like “Oops! – this is the right link”. Mistakes like this look amateurish and can result in lost business revenue for the brand in question, but they’re also very easy to make and therefore quite common.
For this reason, it’s important to have an email marketing checklist in place to run through before you hit the “send” button on your email marketing software. This will make sure that your email marketing messages are doing the job you intended and don’t have any embarrassing or damaging mistakes.
Have a Clear Strategy
Before you even start to write your email you should have a strategy in place to help you figure out what you need to say and what your aims are for sending out this particular message. You should consider:
- Who are you trying to target?
- What is the goal of your campaign?
- Have you correctly segmented your email list and cleaned it up?
It’s important to know your audience in order to get the tone and voice of your email right, to offer something of value to them, and to be able to judge how frequently you should send out emails and when is the best time to do so.
For example, if you’re speaking to a mainly corporate audience that works 9-5, Monday to Friday, you can pretty much guarantee your email won’t get read if you send it out on a Friday afternoon.
By having a clear picture of who your audience is and what is the goal of your email, you can create a more effective campaign and improve your open, read, and click-through rate.
The Content of Your Email
Emails are an informal way of communicating with your audience. They’re also quick and easy to write and send so it’s easy to become blasé about creating email content.
However, the content of your emails is just as important as your website and other marketing materials. Your emails should be an extension of your brand and should be checked carefully for mistakes just as you would with print media.
Before you send, ask yourself:
- Do you have a subject line that recipients actually want to know more about?
- Are you using the right language to speak to your audience?
- Did you include personalisation?
- Have you proofread the copy for errors?
- Do the images complement your branding and message?
- Have you included a clear CTA (call to action) in the appropriate place to encourage users to click?
- Have you checked your preview text to make sure it’s targeted and grabs attention?
Running the Final Checks
If you’ve created your email with your marketing strategy in mind and checked that the content is compelling and free of errors, you’re off to a great start. However, there are still a few final checks you should make before sending out your email to your list to make sure it will be viewable and works for everyone:
- Have you checked how it looks on different screen sizes and in different email clients?
- Did you complete a test run of your email campaign?
- Is your personalisation working correctly?
- Have you clicked all the links to make sure they go to the correct pages or social profiles?
- Have you scheduled your campaign to go out at the optimal time and day of the week?
The Art and Science of Email Marketing
Is your business currently using email as part of your overall marketing strategy?
There’s more to successful email marketing than writing up a quick message and hitting the send button.
Here at Swift Digital, we can help you with your email marketing campaign to make it a success!
To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our sales team today on 02 9929 7001.
