The success of email marketing campaigns does not only depend on the content of your messages, but also on several other factors. Make sure you follow these tips in order to continue reaping the rewards of your email marketing initiatives.
Set Proper Expectations
At the point of signing up your subscribers, make sure that you advise them about:
- How often you will be sending your messages
- What type of contents will be included in the messages.
Doing this will ensure that your subscribers do not receive a message that they did not want to read or receive too less or too many messages than what they expected. When the expectations are already set up, they wouldn’t have to hit the spam button and will stay on your email marketing list.
Offer Value in the Content
Make sure that your messages have something valuable to offer to your subscribers and not just sales pitch. Repeated solicitation would make people unsubscribe or delete your messages without reading them. Your content must be interesting, offer something that benefits them. It could be a special discount offer or information that can benefit them.
Keep a Clean List
What we mean by that is having list of people that are really interested in receiving your messages. If somebody signed up a year ago on your list does not mean that they still want to receive your messages. Ask them if they still want to continue receiving messages periodically (usually once a year) and if they don’t respond, remove them from your list. Major ESPs measure active engagement of their subscribers and if somebody keeps deleting messages from a certain sender, the ESP will start redirecting such messages to the spam folder to bounce them back.
The Looks of Your Content
- Be sure to test sample messages to see what performs.Put your company name in the “from” line for fastrecognition.
- Add a “grabber” subject line – 50 characters or less.Use teaser text and HTML colors and layout rather thanan image so readers can get an immediate “preview” ofyour email even if images are disabled.
- Put the important content – the offer, call to action,newsletter contents etc. – at the top of the email forimmediate viewing. You only have seconds to make yourcase, so make the most them.
Be CAN-SPAM Compliant
Make sure that your messages are complaint to your country laws and CAN-SPAM regulations. Be sure to check whenever the regulations are updated and change your messages accordingly.
Don’t Use Spammy Words
Make sure that you know which words can trigger the spam filters. When spammers start using a word too often, like Viagra, the spam filters will automatically identify the messages containing such words and send them to the spam folder. Spam filters like SpamAssassin (a widely used open source spam filter) record such information and continue updating their database. GetResponse also has an integrated system to advise you about SpamAssassin’s score before you send your message to your list.