When is the best time to send an e-blast? It depends on your audience. What are the best keywords to put in a subject line? Analyze your analytics. Bottom line? Email marketing success is dependent upon knowing your audience.
Email marketing helps businesses and nonprofits to stay on their target audiences’ radars. It is a tool for delivering the right content to the right people – and, when sent at the right time – can drive action and generate ROI.
Follow these 10 tips for increasing your email marketing success:
- – Segment your lists. What’s important to your clients may differ from your prospects. The same can be said for donors vs. volunteers, strategic partners vs. lead generators, etc.
- – Time your distributions to match your readers’ consumption habits. Look at the open rates for various days and times on previous e-blasts and e-newsletters.
- – Make subject lines succinct. You don’t want your headline getting chopped off. You want readers to open your emails because they are excited and intrigued – not because they are confused. Or, even worse, have them delete the email without opening because they don’t know what it is about.
- – Be responsive. You want to use a responsive email marketing template to ensure your communication is easily read on all devices.
- – Be consistent. Consistency speaks to both the frequency of your emails as well as the overall design aesthetic and messaging. Eblasts are branded marketing assets – both clarity and consistency are key.
- – Be perfectly clear. While you want the copy to be creative and compelling, you also want to make the key points clear at first glance. This may include pertinent details, associated deadlines and desired action, to name a few.
- – Make it visual. Use images to enhance your message and, in some instances, help to streamline copy by synthesizing information in a new and unique format.
- – Make it personal. If you followed our first tip – always segment your email marketing lists – you will have the opportunity to make your emails more personal. For example, this may mean acknowledging a group of donors’ support of a previous campaign or acknowledging people’s attendance at a prior event. You want to show your contacts they aren’t just a number – they’re real people. Show them that you know them.
- – Plan ahead. Just like you create an editorial calendar for your public relations and social media marketing efforts, you should set a calendar for your email marketing. This will help to ensure tip five – be consistent – is adhered to throughout the year. That said, news breaks and timely opportunities arise. Seize these timely opportunities when you can – just be sure to make adjustments to your standing schedule, if needed, to prevent audiences to become overwhelmed by too many emails.
- – Be unique. While email marketing can help spread the word of your exciting news, you don’t want audiences to feel fatigued by repetitive content. Find opportunities to package important but repetitive information in new and compelling ways as well as identify high value content that you will make available to your target audiences only through email campaigns.
Whether your organization is best-suited to distribute a monthly e-newsletter, weekly e-blast or daily digest, focus on making your content audience-centric, actionable and high value.
