Top 10 Tips for an Effective Email Campaign

True, this article isn’t about websites. But I’ve read a few books on email campaigns recently, and I know that more than a few of you have ongoing email campaigns, so hopefully you’ll find the tips useful.

Let’s assume you have an email list of old prospects sitting around. Or perhaps you have a list of previous customers that haven’t done business with you in a while. Why not begin converting those prospects and inactive customers into new and active customers? A targeted email campaign is a great way to create business seemingly out of thin air (although really what you’re doing is monetizing your past efforts in marketing and sales.)

Below are the top tips from my research that you can use to make your next email campaign more effective. While mostly targeting towards service-based businesses, many of the tips below apply to product-based businesses as well.

1. Don’t overuse the words free, bonus, amazing, etc. These commonly appear in spam emails and may cause your email to wind up in your recipients spam folder.
2. In your email, get to the benefits part quickly.
3. Timing is everything with email campaign. Don’t send your email campaign on weekends, Mondays and Fridays. Also, try to avoid sending your emails first thing in the morning. People are in a rush first thing in the morning, and emails not immediately relevant to their work are likely to be deleted. Tuesdays through Thursdays in the late morning and early afternoon are better times to send your email campaigns. Most email campaign software allows you to schedule specific times for sending out your email campaign.
4. Write your emails to target your customers’ “hot buttons”. These are challenges that are of the utmost importance to your customers. Your email should make your customers aware of things that are preventing them from getting the results they’re looking for, and, of course, should pose your products and services as part of that solution.
5. Keep your paragraphs short (2 to 3 sentences) and include as few as possible.
6. Personalize the subject line – the more specific, personal and relevant, the better.
7. Ensure that the email appears to be sent from you rather than some generic address like sales@yourcompany.com. Nobody really wants to read an email from sales@yourcompany.com, particularly if they may not remember the name of your company.
8. Use font styling like bold and italics often to keep the text visually interesting. Do not mix font faces and font sizes.
9. Be clear about next steps. There should be no confusion (it should be blatantly obvious) what you want the prospect to do next.
10. Include a supplementary offer in your email in case your main “next step” is considered too daunting. Examples of a supplementary next step include signing up for email updates on your blog, downloading a report, visiting your Facebook group, etc.