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What do you really want from your campaign?
Unless you are sending out an order form, or you are sending out a "Special", most email campaigns are informative and are really about sparking an interest and instigating a conversation, that could lead to a sale. To do this effectively you need to know that the recipient has received the email and what parts of it they are interested in. Just sending out an email and not looking at the reports is surprisingly common and not getting the most out of the campaign.
Get the subject line right.
Using word like "Free" or "Special" in your subject line will likely result in your email ending up in a junk folder, that's presuming it makes it past the mail server. Similarly using special characters will get the same result. There are more helpful hints in the Science of Emails document.
Make sure you use images and text.
We see time and again, emails with just an image that a designer has worked hours on. There is text but it is part of the image/s. This will score really badly with spam checkers and can result in the email ending up in junk. Make sure that your email has text, that you type in as text.
An HTML for web pages, may not work as an email.
HTML's built for a website rely on the website to do a lot of the rendering of that page. Something that you will have control of. However when you send an HTML as an email, you are relying on the recipients email client to handle the rendering. Each email client will handle HTML slightly differently, so you need to build the HTML in such a way as to accommodate for all the little oddities out there. Our online HTML builder does this all for you and we would highly recommend that you, or your designers, use it to get the best possible results.
How to track success?
Of course sales are the best means to track success if that is what you are aiming for, which most are. But aside from that, you really want to know who opened your email and who had interest in aspects of your campaign. To do this, the best thing to do is to add links to content either hosted, or on your website. So if you have a document you want people to look at, add it as a link. That way you will know through our tracking reporting who has had a look at it.
Via the PRODOCOM website you can see not only who received your emails, but who opened them and who clicked on links in your email. Through this you can see how well you are actually reaching your targetted audience and what they are interested in. So plan your HTML email to have links that you can track.
How are you going to follow up the results?
When you look at the tracking reports from an email campaign there will be some results which clearly require a phone call to follow up. Others are maybe not so obvious, but a follow up would at least keep the ball rolling and give you the opportunity to further qualify your audiences intent. This is where Campaign Board comes into play.
You can setup an email with links in Campaign Board and then set follow up emails to go out if someone clicks on a particular link. You can also send follow up emails if someone opens the email. You can send follow ups to the follow ups for as many times as you like, enabling you to further qualify the recipients intent as suggested above. Thus when the time is right to make that phone call, you already know a lot about actions taken.
I've included a link to the Campaign Board User Guide below which might stimulate some ideas for you.
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