-by George and Sarah
Despite elections and Olympics, 2008 has been a down year for traditional media, according to an article in the Financial Times published last week, with economic slowdown cited for marketing cutbacks at Coca Cola and General Motors.
However, many Fortune 500 and small businesses are seizing competitive opportunities by maintaining, even increasing their advertising budgets, with the goal of continuing consumer awareness through electronic marketing. Recent surveys point to organizations balancing traditional media by increasingly turning to relationship marketing with electronic newsletters, community sites and eblasts for these new economic times.
We’ve been pioneering email marketing for over five years and we’re constantly attending seminars, working with consultants and, generally, just testing new opportunities to improve every day. We’ve found that business managers like it because they can measure effectiveness with open rates, click-through rates and sales!
We design and deliver many eblasts each week. Here’s our Top 5 list you can use:
1. Update your database- keep it current, including adding new relevant addresses (always with opt-in) and removing addresses that are no longer valid.
Industry experts agree that email databases degrade at a rate of approximately 25% per year, due to people changing emails for new jobs, new internet service providers, etc. We highly recommend opt-in databases, and we’re in the process of updating our online sign-up systems to operate with double opt-in confirmations for even higher security.
2. Avoid certain keywords, messy code, too many images, and even poor grammar that immediately set off red flags for spam filters.
Spam filters are becoming much more sensitive, making it difficult for you to ensure that you’re receiving all of the emails you’ve asked for. Their main purpose is to protect you from perceived unwanted content, so even the slightest suggestion that an email may be unwanted will cause it to be flagged as spam — and never delivered to your inbox.
Poor grammar may not get your emails trapped in spam filters, but it may hurt your image if the eblasts or enewsletters you are sending are not consistent with company’s quality. We always strive to create organized content — both text and images — and we focus on keeping emails informative and interesting to the reader.
3. Make sure your web server has a good record with all of the major Internet Service Providers (ISP’s).
This isn’t always a sure bet, but it certainly helps in maintaining your true credibility with intended recipients. The best way to make sure that unprofessional and fraudulent email marketers don’t drag you down with them is to set up a dedicated server solely for your email marketing. If you’re on a shared server, their bad reputations are automatically attached to you in the eyes of spam filters.
4. Put serious thought into your subject line.
The goal of your efforts is for your recipient to OPEN your email, and your subject line is usually the determining factor if that will happen or if they will hit DELETE. The 5-7 words you chose for your subject line are important. What got you to open this one? We closely monitor “open rates” for the eblasts and enewsletters we send and we’ve learned which terms work better than others.
5. Use email marketing to drive readers to your site.
One additional benefit of email marketing is to direct recipients to your web site via links placed throughout the body of the email. It’s a commonly used marketing tool used to increase web site visitation. You should monitor your web site visitation on the day you send your eblast and days immediately following and “should” see significant spikes in visitation.
If you would like a price quote or more information on an email marketing program, please contact us. We’ll gladly share options with you and supply client references. If you are interested in switching your hosting to us, or improving your site thru a design makeover, take a look at our work, and send us an email.