Best Practices
There are a number of key best practice principles that Interactive Return believe are important when effectively running an email marketing campaign. Some of the main principles are as follows:
Know your Customer
One of the most important elements in your campaign is your target audience. The more you know your consumer, the more your strategy, offer and entire message will be unified.
Define Strategy
As with all promotional activity, a direct email campaign should be built on the foundation of a company's overall marketing strategy. Before starting, the strategy should be planned out in full.
Determine your offer
Decide on an incentive that best suits your target audience. For example, offering something of value for free or at a deep discount can be a good incentive to a wide consumer market. For other audiences incentives might include free whitepapers and research studies.
Develop Focused Content
Customers need to feel they are known, while companies need to know what they feel. Customers must benefit and this must be specifically explained simply as what they get out of the relationship. Major selling points and benefits appear in main headlines and opening copy.
Respect your consumer's time, intelligence, and privacy
Your email message is going to the customer's PC, which is their private space. Be brief. Make it easy for them to visit your website. Treat them like an equal. And don't oversell.
The design of the (HTML) email should be simple and uncluttered
Clean, simple design can enhance the identity of your brand and make the difference between your message being read and being ignored. Your colours, logo, fonts, layout, graphics and visuals are all elements of design. And of course, so is copy.
Personalise and Customise
Customers expect a company to know what they want and to send relevant information in emails, as anything else is considered spam.
Test
As with traditional direct mail, test your creative, offer, distribution mechanics and reporting on a sample group before commiting to a larger campaign.
Talk to us about your tactical, or strategic email campaigns.
Interactive Return's Email Marketing Privacy Policy
