Email marketing – Five tips for optimising campaigns

While budgets continue to be squeezed email flourishes as one of the most cost-effective and impactful marketing mediums available. RIBA Enterprises' E-Commerce Manager, Robert Easson, offers a hand-full of tips on maximising your returns.

 

1. Set clear, realistic and measurable objectives
   Are you using email to generate leads, raise awareness or as part of a PR campaign to existing customers? Whichever it is will impact on content, tone of voice, the type and nature of any call to action and, most importantly, should influence your follow-up methods.
2. Segment and clean your lists
   The 2009 Adestra Email Census Report* suggests that poor list quality and a lack of strategic planning are two of the biggest handicaps to successful email deployment. As with direct mail, segmentation and the quality of your mailing list are the essential foundation on which high open and click-through rates are built.
   
   This may be a good time to review the criteria you use when developing lists. Customer value, opt-in status and profession are the most basic level you should be working at. Enhancing this with email analytics will generate far more targeted lists and help ensure that your messages remain relevant. It will also reduce the cost of wasted and unopened campaigns.
   
   It's simple good practice to clean your lists regularly. Email data tends to have a much shorter shelf life than mailing data, as individuals change accounts and companies change IT processes.
3. Think about the recipient's journey
   This might seem like an obvious point, but asking yourself where and how you want recipients to respond to your email will have a dramatic effect on the subject line, design and layout. For example, do you expect them to print and read the contents, or would you prefer them to visit your website before downloading a new product catalogue? Whatever your intentions, always put yourself in your recipients' shoes before planning length of copy, links and contact channels.
4. Testing out your message
   If you're investing in new email lists or templates it's always wise to do some initial testing before roll-out to ensure you get the best results from the eventual campaign.
   
   Consider AB testing the following:
   
   
   • Subject line: Vary both message and strength of call to action in your subject headers. Some recipients respond favourably to a direct call to action. Others prefer technical or more newsworthy headers.
   • Timing: I still receive dozens of emails trying to sell me things first thing on a Monday morning and last thing Friday night. Inevitably, I delete most. I've no reason to suppose that architects behave any differently. There are a number of theories as to the best time to deliver B2B email campaigns. It's a metric well worth testing as it will have a dramatic effect on your open rates. First thing Monday and last thing Friday though, are almost certainly a no-no.
   • 'From' address: Are your emails sent from an individual john.smith@company.com or from info@company.com? If the sales team already has a relationship with recipients it might be worth changing from the corporate email address to a personalised one to ensure it gets noticed.
   • Long versus short copy: Ties in with point 3 above. Your target audience is likely to be both design and technically literate. So it's worth including hard-fact details of any developments that may improve the chances of your product being specified.
5. What next?
   Every campaign should be analysed with a view to improving the effectiveness of the next. Delivery, click-through and response figures will provide evidence of where prospects are within the sale cycle. The clues lie in the data. Who opened the campaign? Which links did they follow? Who opened it more than once, and did anyone forward your message to a colleague? Use this information to make your next steps relevant and consistent.

Robert Easson is E-Commerce Manager at RIBA Enterprises. You can email him at robert.easson@ribaenterprises.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robeasson.

*Source: Adestra Email Marketing Census 2009.

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