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Avoiding
the spam filter: Email campaigns that win people over
Good,
well-designed and well thought through email campaigns should
not be thrown in the mix with the likes of viagra spam. Far
from it, attractive designs coupled with a splodge of quality
information can actually be very useful and be more than welcomed
by recipients. Obviously a lot depends on proper targeting
and profiling of recipients. If we assume mailing lists are
clean and measure up to current legislation then organisations
should not feel lame in exploiting email. Skilful designers
can put together smart looking campaigns in a number of hours,
tagging hyperlinks so that important statistics can be quantified
further down the line. Not only can we reach clients in a
cost effective manner, we can track and measure delivery,
open and click throughs, giving us feedback on our return
on investment (ROI). Link this with website analytics and
we begin to follow visitors paths and behaviours. For those
who want to get the most out of their email campaigns its
essential that conversion tracking along with post click and
post view are properly monitored and analysed. Post click
illustrates the actions of web site visitors after clicking
through from an email, whereas post view provides details
of the people who visited the web site at a later date. By
monitoring if a particular campaign delivered on its goal
to take visitors to the point of ordering, booking, enquiring
etc. email delivers much more than most other forms of marketing.
The
number and staging of email is crucial in order to get the
best out of any campaign. This is especially true if the campaign
consists of several steps. Send out too many too often and
you risk alienating the audience. If the message carries little
of anything that’s useful and smacks of nothing more
than blatant marketing, then the recipient may decide to opt-out.
Bombard the audience and again heavy opting out may result.
If we continue the flight booking scenario we'd expect a confirmation
email followed by perhaps a scattering of offers relating
to accommodation, places to visit and car hire, to name but
a few. As the flight dates approach perhaps an email re-confirming
the flight times would be useful. Last minute changes could
also be flagged, not to mention a reminder to take your travel
documents, passport, euros and so forth. After the event -
at a later date, maybe a few more offers relating to similar
destinations would be reasonable.
Overdue
the campaign and people may start to feel a little abused.
It’s a bit like overstaying your welcome or constantly
knocking the neighbours door to update them with the latest
gossip. But if the campaign provides mainly good information,
the campaign may make people feel special, even cared for.
It goes without saying much depends on the individual, but
we need to be cautious and play it somewhat conservatively.
Far
to many campaigns make the mistake of never knowing when to
stop. They wrongly assume that because we took a short flight
with them, we'll want a weekly update of offers. Once the
initial courtship is done they should realise that emails
should be scaled back. They'll most likely be little need
in their services again for quite a while and any regular
web user will be checking out competitor prices all over again.
Possibly a once a month update is about right. OK, so we always
have the delete key, but being too pushing can become an easy
turn off. Through good profiling of clients it should be possible
to determine the regular flyer from the intermittent flyer
and therefore establish whom to best hit with more frequent
information.
This
article is free to republish provided the resource information
below remains intact.
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