7 Tips to Increase Your Email Marketing Results

Establish a Relevant List. Develop your own, opt-in list of email addresses directly from your Web site or through personal relationships. These people have not only given you permission to contact them, but they’ve also let you know that they are interested in hearing about what you have to say. Be very careful about renting lists from others; the source of those names may be highly irrelevant, and the quality of the list could be far from what you’re seeking.

The sender name should be recognized by the recipient. Making a personal connection with the email recipient can immediately establish trust. The "From" address in your emails should be a name the recipient will clearly recognize – your company name or an individual’s name for example. Be consistent with your "From" address so your recipients can know and trust that the communication is coming from you.

Develop an effective subject line. If the recipient doesn’t open your email, you haven’t succeeded. While solid copywriters can come up with wonderful subject lines, testing and selecting the right subject line is critical to getting your email opened.

Ask for only ONE call to action. Your email communications should focus on accomplishing one single objective or call to action. More than one will only confuse your readers. You can use email to "tease" the audience and get the click-though, but then make sure your supporting landing page is focused on driving the desired call to action or delivering the desired result. There are many best practices for landing pages, so be sure to leverage what others have already learned.

Measure your results. One of the greatest things about email is that you can find out how many emails are opened and how many links are clicked. The right metrics for each campaign depends upon what you’re trying to achieve, so be sure you set up a process at the beginning of your campaign to track and understand your success. By reviewing campaign metrics, you can continually improve upon your messaging and better your results.

Design appropriately for your audience. A great designer can make something look beautiful, but that doesn’t mean it will be effective. Spend time figuring out the right combination of graphics and text to include in your emails. By testing different combinations, your audience will tell you what they prefer by their response.

Test everything. We can’t stress enough the importance of testing. Develop consistent, rigorous testing for your email campaigns – links clicked, A/B splits – and review your results. With the knowledge in hand of what your audience responds to, you can’t help but to get better and better with each successive campaign.

We are passionate about this stuff, so call us if you have any questions at all. Or, please feel free to contact me with any questions on what you can do to improve the success of your email campaigns. And, thanks for your referrals! We appreciate each and every one, so please, keep them coming.