Email Marketing

Tips and Advice

The following are 10 email marketing tips and advise to better your email marketing campaigns:

Use Dynamic Creativity in your Email Marketing Campaign

 

New media is not just a banner ad or GIF animation. It's full and integrated media impacting the senses with motion and animation. Use voice, music, movies, animation, and sound effects to enhance the impact, but it has to be dynamic, not static.

 

With the integration of truly new media, use all the aspects of media within your budget. If you have a banner ad, add sound to it. If you have an icon, make it work effectively for you by converting the icon into a QuickTime movie. Innovate with the format that you have to work with. Conceive of new ways of doing banner as. We're talking about integrating all aspects of new media.

 

Be Consistent with Your Message Throughout Your Entire Email Marketing Campaign

 

Your message should be consistent in both your digital marketing campaign and in your campaign across traditional media channels. Often, a client hires a separate online advertising agency to compliment its full-service agency. Different agencies pursue different campaigns, some of which could be contradictory or not complimentary. A consistent message broadcast throughout the email marketing campaign reinforces the same message along traditional advertising channels.

 

Reinforce the Traditional Branding with a Consistent E-Branding

 

Whatever branding you are doing, wherever it is, must be consistent in image and tone with the branding throughout your entire campaign. Again, e-branding that differs from, or contradicts, the branding produced by the traditional advertising agency s problematic. A dropped connection between the two may confuse your targeting market. Companies that have embraced email marketing have taken traditional methodologies and applied them to the email marketing world. The same tried -and-true methods work, if they're applied properly, in the email marketing world.

 

Follow Through with Consistent and Timely Back-Up Email Marketing

 

You don't have a good golf swing unless to have accurate follow-through. The same is true with email marketing campaigns. In the digital world, we're moving seven times faster than everybody else. You must have a follow-up planned before you launch the first foray. Launch your first foray and be prepared with your second and third attack.

 

Your second campaign has to be smart. It must reinforce what the first one said. It has to follow up with in a timely manner and it should have a back-up campaign. In the traditional advertising word, maybe one full-page ad, each quarter, in a particular trade magazine might have worked for you. Now you need to have more consistent, conscientious, articulate campaigns in phase two, three and four ready to go before you even bother with phase one. All campaigns should have a consistent key message across all media, both digital and traditional.

 

Use Innovative Techniques in Your Email Marketing

 

Try a cool idea like a virtual postcard in your email marketing. The postcard should be a screen capture of your home page or a more target-specific page on your website. E-mail that postcard to your customer to link the user directly to a particular page on your site.

 

Virtual postcards are a brand new campaign idea in which you ensure that the message - a specific page link - gets to your users through an e-mail message. It reinforces the visual message. It allows prospects to link directly to a particular page within your site, so it might be the product page for the product you happen to be marketing. Then it allows them to instantly bookmark that page.

 

You're not giving them a general URL home page. You're linking them directly to some secondary or tertiary page inside your site. The reverse side, just like an ordinary print postcard, contains a written message. It rotates by clicking on "Press here to see the back." That brings us back to Rule 2 & 3, which advises linking your virtual campaign - your email marketing campaign - to your traditional campaign and ensuring consistency of the branding message.

 

You can also have a printed postcard mailed to customers. They get the postcard on their desk. The message is reinforced when they receive it by e-mail. You're hitting them with the same message, the same image, in a traditional way, as well as digitally.

 

Enhance Your Database So Message Reaches Your Target Audience

 

Ensure that you capture the data to fortify your database. A major problem email marketers face is maintaining their databases so that they're constantly up to date and properly categorized. This will ensure that your message reflects the interest of your target market.

 

Integrate Back-End Database Access into Your Email Marketing

 

A fully integrated e-marketing program is just that - fully integrated. There is no one pushing paper behind the scenes to ensure follow-through. If you are a recruiter and advertising for people to apply online, invite them to apply inside a banner ad. Have them click their answer inside your banner ad. For example, in box one: "What kind of job are you looking for? Click 1, 2 or 3 to answer the question." In box two: "What salary range?" In box three: "What's your e-mail address?" And so forth.

 

Allow the banner ad to act as a window into your database. If you're advertising a financial institution, allow your target market to calculate interest on an IRA or home equity loan. If you own a research company, allow prospects to enter an e-mail address to download research papers.

 

Reinforce Your Email Marketing with Your Existing Customer Service Program

 

Follow up with voice mail after a customer purchases from you. If you're a true Web person, things that work for you will work with your audience. For instance, you registered for an online grocery shopping service. About an hour later, you got a phone call from the online store's customer service representative, who said, "Hi You. This is so-and-so at the grocery store. I understand you want to shop online. Do you have any questions?" Ensure that your existing customer service programs back up your email marketing campaign.

 

Reinforce Your Email Marketing Message Across Your Delivery Channels

 

Successful e-marketing means that you would have had contact through your website with your customers. Did you send them a parcel? If you did, ensure packaging reinforces your message and reflects your campaign, and put a reminder inside for them to shop again - or include some gift or direct mail piece to once again reinforce that key message. Amazon.com includes Post-it notes, bookmarks, and other items with each other, reinforcing the Amazon image, look, and brand.

 

Think Award Winning Creative When Designing Your Email Marketing Campaign.

 

As with all new media, one can err in assuming that because it's digital, you can lower your creativity standards. For some reason, many seem to think that e-marketing doesn't have to be brilliant. Award winning creative is award winning creative, whether it's on paper or on the Web. The creative must communicate effectively and meet the needs of the client or prospect.

Call us today at 630 - 876 - 8066 and see how Expedite Media Group can help assist you in your next email marketing campaign.