IQ-Magazine-Issue-14

IQ marketing
It may come as a surprise to learn that marketers love email. Last year over 68% of us cited email as a channel that provided
good or excellent tangible results. Yes, it’s true…email marketing can be terrible, and with more than one in twelve of us
getting over 100 emails a day, it’s easy to be speedily directed into the junk folder. But for all its well-known faults, it can yield
serious results when done well.
1. What do you want to get out of it?
You need to set some objectives if you’re going to be
successful. Establishing targets will shape what you need to
create, and will stop you from sending generic updates to
your customers about how Tracy from HR ran into Gary
Barlow at the South Mimms services (yes, that’s happened).
2. Sign up to an email marketing provider
If you’ve been using Outlook to send marketing emails
to your customers, you should stop. Today. Outlook isn’t
designed for bulk activity and as a result, your IP address
could be blacklisted.
It also means your emails probably look rubbish, and you
also have no idea who is receiving your emails, opening them
or clicking through to your website. By signing up to an email
marketing provider (like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor),
you solve all of these problems.
3. Split your data
One of the best things about email marketing is the ability to
be personal. You can segment your email data by customer
type/location/frequency of purchase…or anything else that
might help you meet your objectives. Make sure you’re only
using data where people have opted in to receiving emails
from you, and that your list is clean and up to date.
4. Share great content
Once you’ve segmented your data, you can create a content
plan around what will interest your target audience groups.
By thinking about this carefully, being led by your customers
and your targets, you can create something people will
respond to and act on.
5. Use a quality template
If your email template isn’t right, it’s not going to make the
impact you want. You can hire someone to design this for
you, or you can build your own mobile-friendly template
when using software like MailChimp. Your branding and
contact details should be clearly displayed, paragraphs
should be short and calls to action should be touch-friendly
and really obvious.
6. Link to your site
Sometimes people are tempted to cram all of
their information into the copy of their email.
By uploading this content to your website and
including short snippets of text in your email with
links back to the site, you’re keeping the email nice
and short, as well as pointing traffic to specific areas
on your website.
7. Preview and test
Check what your email looks like on mobile devices
before you send it out, click on the links and make
sure someone else has had a read through to check
all’s as it should be. You can do clever stuff with
testing software nowadays. Visit us at iqmag.co.uk to
learn more about A/B testing your emails.
8. Measure the impact
Once you’ve sent your email, you get to see how
many people are opening and clicking through
to your site. This will tell you how engaging your
database is finding your emails, which can help you
improve the types of emails you send out in future.
9. Keep track of the data
Once you’ve sent out a few emails, compare how
they’re performing against each other. Keep track
of this data and see if you can spot any trends that
emerge over time. An email marketing provider will
store this data for you, or you could use a spreadsheet
and share the information with your colleagues.
10. Tweak and repeat
If something hasn’t worked as well as you thought it
might, don’t keep doing it and hope for a different
outcome next time. Use the insights from the data
to review and improve future emails and learn what
works best for you.
More Information
www.cubiqdesign.co.uk
issue 14 | page 33