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Best Practices

A 360 Guide To Plan, Measure and Track your Marketing Campaigns

The online marketing scene is getting tougher day by day. While it’s easy to know where your prospects shopped from last week, the onus is on marketers to use the vast amount of digital info and make their campaigns hit the bull’s eye! This document discusses some basic tenets to make marketing campaigns work.

Let’s start with some general tips that help structure your campaign and set the foundation right.

Personalize your Messages

Messages are the primary tool of communication of any marketing campaign – so give it due respect and importance. People share their email addresses only when they are confident of the sender’s trustworthiness. For marketers, this should be a golden opportunity to strengthen their bond with their prospects.

Tip: Don’t overdo personalization – keep it at its optimum; you don’t want your prospects to feel that you’re snooping around them.

Use messages in a way to make your recipients feel special, to know what their special preferences are; and how you can cater to them personally. Treat every prospect on your list personally. Formulate special ways to bring them closer. Include surveys, coupons, feedback sessions, chat etc. in your emails. These will make them feel important and draw them closer to your business.

Pay heed to time

Send your email messages and newsletters at a time when people are most likely to read. It’s not possible for you gauge a single time when all your prospects will be ready to read your emails – however, you can still chalk out a particular hour of a day that seems reasonable for sending out your emails.

Tip: To decide on the right timing, make use of the available stats near you. Get hold of email marketing reports that talk of data related to click-through, time of email opens etc.

For instance, it might not work if you send emails on Fridays at 6 pm just when everyone finishes off work before the weekend. Also, sending emails on Monday mornings may not work as most would be busy checking their pending work and plans for the entire week. Try experimenting with different timings and decide on a particular time that seems to be relevant.

The table below shows the open rate of commercial emails by days of week – As per a survey conducted by Marketing Profs:

Write compelling subject lines

This is often a determining factor for the success of your campaigns. Composing crisp, to-the-point subject lines always enrich the effectiveness of your emails.

Tip: Try A/B testing with your subject lines. You will get to know the one that works – pick up 1-2 formats and vary on headlines, layout, images, tags etc.

Refrain from using jargon and flowery language. You can experiment with caution with the tone and length of the subject lines. Usually, long subject lines (more than 7-8 words) prove to be a turn-off for the readers.

Track everything that happens

Monitor the nitty-gritty of your campaigns. Check delivery rates, open rates, link clicks, conversions, customer service calls etc.

Tip: Don’t go by quantity alone – the sites or networks fetching lesser amount of traffic might be the ones with better quality. So exercise caution

Analytics are a great way to measure aspects of campaigns like how many people have visited which pages and which social media networks are fetching you most traffic. This way, you will be able to better your campaigns and incorporate relevant tweaks into it as and when necessary.

Never, Ever Spam

Tip: Don’t go by quantity alone – the sites or networks fetching lesser amount of traffic might be the ones with better quality. So exercise caution

Spam can be tricky, make sure your marketing resources are updated with the newest guidelines and follow them to the T

Make Your Campaigns a Roaring Success

The above were some general guidelines to a good marketing campaign.

The following tips are intended to polish your campaigns a bit more and give it the professional edge.

Use Proper Headings & Subject Lines

We are mentioning this again as subject lines or headlines are that crucial. The subject or the headline of your piece should accurately describe the purpose of your message. Often, people ignore emails because of unattractive subject lines. Thorough familiarity with spam guidelines will be of major help here.

Examples of bad subject lines:

“Help!!!” - Monosyllable; and why should anyone need help?
“Problem booting” – too vague without any details
“Buy our products” – what products, what is the company etc. are not specified

A “Re:” or “AW:” in a subject line indicates that the email is reply and not the original one. If you are replying to a message be sure to indicate that it is a reply.

Do Not Send Off-topic Messages

You should always keep in mind why people have subscribed to your campaigns. You are likely to have a better audience if you post to a forum that is appropriate for your comments and questions. Know people’s interests and send them mailers that would interest them. Only then, you would yield benefits from the mailing lists

Chop Redundant Information

Axe off the unnecessary information. Remove previously added junks like signatures, mailing list footer ads and other stuff that do not relate to your email. Also, keep enough reference in your reply so that the receivers know the source of the reply.

Do Not Send Large Attachments

Avoid sending large attachments while sending bulk email. Do not attach core dump files or giant images with your email. This would waste valuable resources when the same file is send to a hundred others. Instead, share your large files on the FTP server and then email the URL. Alternatively, you can send a description of the huge files and offer to email them to individuals who request a copy.

Keep Your Lines Short

It is better if your lines do not exceed 65-75 characters per line. Even if your lines get longer, please wrap it up for an easy reading.

Use Simple Data Formats

Try to use simple coding standards like ASCII or plain text for your emails. Many users receive emails and cannot convert messages sent in HTML. Also, when you do not use plain text format, you tend to waste precious bandwidth and time.

Include Easy Configurations

When including configurations to help research problems or to provide examples, make sure it is easy for readers to read. If configuration is short, simply paste it within the body of the email instead of attaching it. If it is very long, consider stripping all the comments. Again, if it involves only a few lines of configuration, include only the applicable ones. Most of the time, you wouldn’t need to provide the entire configuration file. Lastly, ensure that you explain what each configuration is meant for.

Be Grammatically Correct

Grammatical errors are tacky. While you’re not expected to write Shakespearean English, it’s important that your message is flawless. Incorrect grammar, spell errors and wrong punctuations would cast a negative impression on your readers’ minds. If you aren’t confident about your marketing team’s linguistic skills, seek professional help.

Do Not Use All Caps

Never use all caps in any of your sentence in the emails. It gives the feeling that the reader is being shouted at.

Note: We’ve listed in simple ‘Do and Don’t’ format. Most of them might sound mere reiterations of the above tips; however, we’ve retained them because they are particularly important for bulk campaigns

Bulk email campaigns when executed the right way, is a great tool to communicate to a large number of audience in less time. In addition to the best practices we’ve discussed above, remember the following for your next campaign.

Have Your Campaign Questions Answered Right Away!

DO:

Send emails with an opt-out option at its bottom. This will ensure that they can stop receiving your emails when they wish to.
Make sure that your email contains an address where they can contact you.
Aim at sending out genuine content instead of sending loads of ads and attachments.
Use a bulk email hosting company and not the usual IP to send out your emails. This is because your regular IP may see it as
Spam. Bulk hosting companies are created for this specific purpose only.
Have a method of capturing emails from your purchasing customers.
Use short and crisp subject lines.
Get rid of unnecessary info and stick to those pertaining to your product.
Use simple data formats like the ASCII and the plain text.
Proof-read your email and correct inconsistencies in grammar

DON’T:

Send unsolicited messages which will be regarded as Spam. Though some might go through the emails, most will simply delete the message. Avoid spamming at all costs.
Send off-topic messages to your clients.
Send large attachments in your email.
Use longer description lines in your emails. Set character limit for each line in the email as 75-80.
Include complicated configurations to provide examples.

Clastic helps you with A-Z management of Email Campaigns right from managing lists to deploying your campaigns.