Start by identifying the purpose of your campaign –

Different types of content used in email campaigns might include:

• A regular email newsletter to inform about new products, services and articles of interest.
• Current promotions, discounts and special offers to encourage more sales.
• General updates on customers accounts to encourage more interactivity.

Think about what you would like to write about in your email campaign.

Here are some example campaign topics to get your started:

• Share your expertise with how-to tips – writing from your own experience is usually the easiest content to put together and can provide a friendly and personal way to engage with your customers.
• Business news – promoting recent business developments and launching of new products or services, keeps your loyal customers up to date and also encourages sales from new and existing contacts. Put yourself in the recipients place and ask ‘what would I want to know about this product or service that would make me buy it?’.
• Business feedback – occasional feedback surveys are a great way to gain input from your customers and to promote a sense of community.
• Testimonials – by including testimonials in your mail-outs, helps to build rapport with your customers.
• Special promotions – everyone likes a great deal! send discount coupons, promo codes, and other offers to encourage sales of your products or services. Holiday periods are a great time to send these campaigns as people are always looking for bargains to buy or pressies to send to loved ones.

The Subject Heading

The most important part of the message is the subject heading.

The first thing a recipient sees when they receive an email is the subject heading, so you want it to be short, descriptive and eye catching to draw in attention and provide the reader with a reason to open and read your email.

Best practices in writing email subject lines:

• Summarise exactly what the message is about in a few words
• Avoid using the terms – Free, Percent Off, Help and Reminder in your subject headings as they often trigger a spam filter resulting in your email going straight to the junk folder.
• Use a Standard Heading Style – meaning that the first letter of each word in a phrase is capitalised. Stay away from using “all lower case” or “ALL CAPITALS“.
• Do not overuse the same heading – email newsletters tend to start with a high open rate, experiencing some reduction over time. Try not to repeat the exact same subject for each newsletter as this will quickly reduce interest
• Subject Line Length – keep the subject short and punchy within 50 characters or less.
• For promotional or informative emails, avoid using exclamation marks or splashy phrases in the subject heading.

Email copy worth reading

When writing email copy to be effective use a conversational and informal tone to make the message friendly, open and intimate. Keep the message short and sweet, if the content is boring readers will quickly lose interest.

Before hitting the send button, take a 10 minute break away from your computer and then come back and read your email again before sending. You may be surprised how many mistakes you missed on the first check!

Personalise your message

The more you personalise your message the better the response will be from your subscribers which will result in more sales and more enquiries.

How can I send an Email Campaign?

In some cases you can use email software such as Microsoft Outlook to send out HTML emails to a contact list, however there are loads of different email campaign software solutions to choose from that offer more functionality for your campaigns.

Each email campaign software provider offer different pricing models and features, so it is a good idea to compare a few providers to help you make your choice on what is most suitbale for your needs.

Features of email campaign software may include:

• The ability to manage contacts and have multiple contact lists
• The ability to personalise email messages such as including the contacts name in the email, their location or other demographics that make a more personalised message.
• Subscription functionality – such as adding a sign-up form on your business website and features enabling people to automatically subscribe, unsubscribe and update their details this reduces administration time and makes a better user experience.
• Statistic Tracking – such as being able to view how many people opened the email, who it was, which links were clicked on – this provides a great way to monitor the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Contact Digital Spice to discuss incorporating Email Marketing with your business website including subscription sign-up forms and custom developed HTML email templates.