4 tips for effective marketing communications

Effective marketing communication is the key to grab the attention of your prospects. If you want to hook your prospects, you got to first listen to them, know what they like and dislike and then tailor your communication accordingly. Only then, your prospects will consider your offer as a relevant one and respond to your call-to-action.

Try the following:

1. Identify your prospect’s problems & needs and personalize your message based on that.
2. Conduct periodic surveys to get the pulse of your audience.
3. Send an email with a special offer each month.
4. Consider customer service as a top priority.

4 tips to improve email deliverability

Email deliverability is one critical issue that hampers your email marketing program’s success. Even your best email copy will go in vain if your emails don’t reach your prospects’ inbox on time.

Try the following:

1. At the time of subscription, tell your subscribers how often they will receive your emails and stick to that.
2. Before sending your email, check your email copy for any ‘spam’ words.
3. Create an email seed list to test your email on different email clients, domains and devices. It helps you to check email deliverability, appearance and take corrective measures if there are any issues.
4. Provide an option to unsubscribe in a click. If you don’t, there are chances that they might click the ‘spam’ button.

3 tips to improve email marketing results

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools that can offer better ROI when compared to other marketing channels. Here are 3 tips that will help you to improve your email marketing results.

1. Ensure that your emails are delivered to the intended audience. Send relevant content, avoid spam words & build seed lists to confirm email deliverability.
2. Focus on your potential subscribers and offer something of value to them.
3. Send emails based on past purchases – recommend complimentary items, send loyalty offers to your subscribers and request customer feedback.

How to use ‘post scripts’ to improve email click-through rates?

Post scripts are one of the powerful tools that will help you to improve your email click-through rates. Unlike conventional emails, it helps you to grab your prospect’s attention.

Try the following:

1. Repeat a key benefit of your product and add relevant links in the post script. This helps you to reiterate the point and improve the chances of click-through.
2. If you have focused on one big idea and its benefits in the body of the email, include a surprise gift in the post script.
3. Use post scripts to add more credibility to what you are saying. Maybe you can add a success story or customer testimonials, etc.
4. Use urgency to push your prospects towards a desired call to action.
5. Guarantee your prospects on the quality of your products/service.

5 tips to write an effective email copy

Writing an effective email copy is one of the most daunting tasks for marketing professionals. Here are 5 tips that will help you write one.

Try the following:

1. Your email copy should clearly convey the message. Avoid using complex sentences and metaphors, etc.
2. Use a conversational style and write in the second person (you, your).
3. Ensure that the content is engaging.
4. Try using different email templates and see what works the best.
5. Be authentic in addressing your audience. Maintain consistency in tone and vocabulary that reflects your brand identity.

2 reasons why purchased email lists are detrimental

Businesses purchase or rent expensive email lists in the hope of making their email campaigns a grand success. But unfortunately they don’t make much out of it. These lists may have email addresses that have not opted-in to receive emails from you; and worst, some of them could be invalid email addresses as well. Experts say that using purchased email lists can be detrimental to your business in the long run.

The reasons are:

1. Purchased email lists have high email bounce rates and therefore it can affect your sender score which is determined by the number of email bounces and spam reports. 
2. You may get blacklisted and completely blocked by companies. 

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

3 email marketing tips to increase ROI

One of the best ways to increase sales is to cross-sell or up-sell to your existing customers. But sadly, more than 60% of the companies don’t effectively cross-sell or up-sell their products / services.  

Try the following:

1. You already have your existing customers’ data from various sources – your CRM, web analytics, etc. Make the most of it.
2. Analyze the data and come up with the right cross-sell or up-sell offers.
3. Send your offers based on customer behavior or via scheduled newsletters. You can also send your offers while sending purchase receipts or shipping details because your customers will pay attention to these emails.

Source: eGrabber Newsletter

Importance of the Email Subject Line in email promotions

Source: Mel Strocen's Blog

Epsilon recently published a study on the importance of the subject line in email promotions. Overall the report confirmed the widely held belief that shorter subject lines performed better but concluded that the correlation was not as strong as previously believed. Other critical factors affecting click and open rates were subject line word order, word choice, and brand and audience awareness.

More importantly to email marketers, Epsilon found that email domains like AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail restricted the number of subject line characters displayed by default. Character limits ranged from 38 characters for AOL to 47 for Yahoo with Hotmail coming in at 45. Together the 3 web-based mail providers control 57% of the US market ensuring that email recipients at those services see only truncated message subjects.

Epsilon’s analysis of more than one billion emails over nearly 20,000 separate campaigns led them to recommend that email marketers keep the following in mind:

* Front load subject lines. Important information first.
* Keep the subject line as short as possible.
* Use longer subject lines only when necessary.
* Test, if in doubt.

The complete whitepaper can be viewed at: http://www.epsilon.com/Epsilon_SubjectLine_WhitePaper.pdf