How to get started with Email Marketing

The days of cold calling are long gone.  So how do you reach your target prospects and get their attention?

Digital marketing is your answer and at the very core of that should be an Email Marketing Strategy. 

Why?

If you construct your email correctly, make it both informative and interesting, you can get your message in front of your target audience at a very cost-effective rate and measure their activity to the point where your prospects will self-qualify themselves.  As over 50% of emails these days are read on a mobile device, your message is more readily available than ever.

Providing you take into consideration the limitations of the medium, and you both track and follow up recipient’s actions, an Email Campaign can be very effective.

Because of the mobile device, your email needs to take that format into consideration.  The HTML must be both responsive and not overly cluttered.

Because of the ever-increasing levels of security being employed on Email Servers, you must take all the necessary steps required to address the various security requirements and SPAM filters.

The right email service provider will help you with all of this and once you have these covered and you have the right platform to build your emails, Email Marketing can reap you the rewards and ROI to boost your Sales and Marketing strategies. For more information you can download “The Science of Emails”, invaluable reading for the email marketer

Platform

Making sure that you have a platform to build an Email HTML that can be responsive and accommodate the various formats required is super important. Email only uses a subset of HTML code, so should not be treated the same as a web page.  You than have different email client software using different subset of the HTML code, so the build tool has to have all the right code hidden away to accommodate for this.

You will also want to track the results of your email campaign.  Again, the right platform will enable you to track who opened an email, in what software, where and when.  It will also track any links clicked and importantly be able to determine whether these actions were taken by the recipient’s email server, or the recipient themselves. PRODOCOM are one of the few, if not only, service provider who clearly differentiates between a server action and a recipient action, meaning your reports and follow up s are accurate.

To take your campaign to the next level, the platform should give you the ability to automate follow up emails based on the activity of the recipient.  This will enable the recipient to effectively self-qualify and turn themselves from a prospect into a hot lead.  Opening an email is good, clicking on a link is better, but then opening up and clicking a link in a follow up email is better still. 

Building your Email Campaign

There are some basic rules to abide by;

1. The email should have no more than 30% images.  Over that and you will trigger SPAM filters.
2. Make sure that your message is clear and concise.  For more information, give the recipient’s links to click on, which will also enable you to qualify their interest.
3. Have at least 2 links in the email that direct the recipient to areas of interest.
4. Make sure that you run a SPAM filter over your email and adjust accordingly before you send it.
5. Make sure that the follow up emails have links that narrow down the recipient’s area of interest.  That way when you follow them up with a phone call, you know what they want.
6. Keep any marketing lists clean.  If email addresses fail, take them out of your list.  Repeatedly sending to bad email addresses will adversely affect your Senders Reputation and may cause valid email addresses to fail in the future.
7. Make sure that you have all email security levels covered off.  Failure to do this will not only result in 30-40% of your emails either ending up in junk or not being delivered at all, but also really affect your ROI.

Some email service providers use the “Spoofing” technique which will fall foul of email security.  They do this so they don’t have to talk to you - a low touch business model, that is outdated. If you want the best ROI, use an email service provider like PRODOCOM who will work with you on setting up everything properly.  This includes DNS (Domain Name Service) records for email security methods SPF, DMARC and DKIM as well as ensuring that an appropriate Return Path Email Address is used.  Fortunately, you only have to set this up once and with the right help, it’s very easy.

Now you have everything setup and you have the right platform, its time to plan and build.  For best results, use PRODOCOM’s Campaign Board that enables you to easily create an initial email and then based on set conditions being met like an email being opened or a link being clicked, follow up emails can be set to automatically go out.  You can even send follow ups to the follow ups.  This is an invaluable tool for the self-qualification process and gives your sales staff hot leads at a very cost-effective rate. 

Marketing is all about a good return on investment.  Do it right, on the right platform and your Email Marketing can reap the rewards that will keep your business smiling.

For a subscription free account with PRODOCOM who will help you every step of the way and make sure all bases are covered, you get accurate reporting and your emails actually get into inboxes go to https://www.prodocom.com.au/register_account or call on 1300 132 739.  PRODOCOM – We’re here to help.