Tips for a successful email campaign

5 reminders to optimize your emailing strategy.

Only one theme per message

The information communicated must be simple, clear and precise. It’s best to use a single theme for your e-mailing, and to emphasize it in the subject line. For an information newsletter, you can of course extend your themes to 3 or 4, which also offers a greater variety of landing pages and greater statistical precision as to the landing pages consulted. However, the information must remain concise, and the first few lines of your message must cover the essential information, in order to capture the web user’s attention.

The object

Internet users receive several messages every day. At all costs, try to highlight your offer. Avoid objects that are too promotional, too long or too common. Internet users should get an idea of the message’s content just by reading the subject line in the list of messages in their inbox. It will take them an average of 2 seconds to assess the interest of your message and decide whether to open it or delete it. Using personalization directly in the subject line can help boost the open rate of your emails.

Be direct

What do you want the reader to do? You need to emphasize the action expected of the reader at different points in your message and in different ways (link in the text, on an image, etc.). Do you want them to visit your site, subscribe to your newsletter, buy a product, ask to be contacted by a sales representative, request a brochure …? Be clear from the start. There’s nothing worse than a message that vaguely introduces a company and doesn’t even tell the user what to do if they’re still interested.

Take care of the shape

The look of your message is crucial. While remaining consistent with your company’s visual identity, try to be original. It’s best to have a message template (a model) designed by a professional and use it regularly, so that the surfer remembers your image and recognizes you later on. Avoid rushed messages at all costs. Grabbing the user’s attention is no mean feat, so don’t drive them away with a message that looks like a personal page. In the same vein, “ready-to-use” templates sold for a few Euros by specialized sites should be used sparingly. Readers won’t necessarily trust you if you use a template they’ve already seen four times from different companies.

Test, analyze, improve

Measuring the performance of an emailing campaign is very interesting. Click-through rate, open rate, number of unsubscribes, etc. are all information that can be used to measure your readers’ interest in a particular message. On-site measurement tools (such as Google Analytics) even make it easy to track your conversions (and you don’t even need an e-commerce site: a conversion can be a form filled in, a brochure downloaded, etc.).

Experiment, use different variations of your message, fine-tune the content and you’ll find the “recipe that works” for your theme and your audience.

NB: The procedure for setting up your links to track the traffic generated by an email campaign on your Google Analytics-equipped site: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578