Chances are you’ve heard of Mailchimp.
We like Mailchimp, because of its dedication to email marketing best practices, and for single-handedly rescuing the whole mechanism – by transforming email marketing from “just buy me” spam to genuine interest-group-led newslettering.
In fact, in this day and age the medium of email is just one of a myriad of communication touch-points and mechanisms to get your message across, so the only way to get decent traction on email marketing is to do it right and do it well, but not do it too often.
Over the next few weeks we’re going to cover quite a bit about email marketing; from how to do it right and well, what to do when your volumes are breaking through the Free of Charge boundaries in Mailchimp, how to go about running your own mail-out software, and equally importantly, how to ensure you’re not falling foul of the charlatans out there who choose NOT to do it right (or just don’t know how) – Layer 5 runs a very powerful, anti-spam service. More of this another time.
So how do you do it right?
The Layer 5 Righteous Pillars of Doing it Properly run something like this:
- Content, content, content: Don’t just advertise product. You need to have something to catch the eye of the reader – FAQs, hints, tips, anecdotes. This is extremely important.
- Don’t buy lists. Build your contacts organically and use double opt-in features.
- Get your frequency right. The right frequency for you depends on many things, but even if you have a very fluid product set that has lots of offers or price fluctuations don’t be tempted to shout about everything every day. Over-emailing will just grind your audience into apathy, resulting in opt-outs, or worse, being reported for spamming.
- Get your timing right. Every email marketing expert will tell you a different time of day and day of the week for when is best, however there are some obvious do’s and don’ts.
- Times have changed since email marketing first took hold, people are no longer tied their desks all day, with most having email on a mobile device, consuming their communications like email, chat and social media on the go. Experiment with different times and research when social media sites peak throughout the day, to get an idea of when your target audience may be connected.
- Expect single figure percentages of open rates, click through rates, and various other metrics, then you won’t be disappointed. Things have moved on, and your eCommerce marketing needs to encompass more techniques than just emailing. But you knew that, you probably saw this article published via SoMe!
- Hook your eshots into your web analytics via medium and source tags.
- Use a mailing service that also does the right technical things. Don’t be afraid to ask your email services host about RDNS entries, SPF records. Some big mail services providers (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google for example) have rules in place that emails received from servers which don’t meet various tech criteria just get dropped.
As per the Layer 5 holistic approach, we wouldn’t just provide a canned strategy to deliver your eCommerce marketing. What we would do, however, is get the technology absolutely right; and we’d help you get your tone of voice, content and frequency absolutely right.
However the first and fundamental tenet is content. In order to engage with your intended audience via ANY medium…
Ask not what your audience can do for you, but what you can do for your audience.
…then ask Layer 5 to just sort out the delivery side of things.
Contact:
Tel: 0161 850 4545
Skype: Layer5Solutions