Quick pointers for better email marketing

In the July 2009 issue of Catalogue e-business, DotMailer’s business development director, Tink Taylor, takes an in-depth look at his company’s Hitting the Mark 2009 benchmark report on marketing email. In the meantime, here are his top five email marketing tips for retailers in the recession:

1) Include “forward to a friend” and “add to social networks” links. Half of the marketers surveyed in the benchmark study failed to include any kind of viral link in their emails. Yet viral and word-of-mouth marketing is an inexpensive way to spread your marketing messages, drive traffic, collect contact information, and ultimately boost sales.

2) Personalise your greeting. Seventy percent of the emails reviewed failed to open with a personalised greeting—even though such personalisation has been proven to significantly improve both open and click-through rates.

3) Check renderability before sending. Nineteen percent of recipients will delete an email unread if it fails to display properly—and only 20 percent of the emails reviewed rendered correctly in every type of email account.

4) Make sure your template has a good balance of text to images. As well as helping your campaign to pass spam filters, this ensures that an email is readable when an email server switches off the images.

5) Present a clear call to action. The key to the success of an email campaign is to help recipients answer three questions: Who is the email from? What’s in it for them? What should they do next? Provide clear guidance on what you expect a recipient to do once he has read your email—click through to a product page, forward to a friend, contact someone in your sales department, request a catalogue.