The e-mailing in 2011 (part 2/2)

Last month, we have discussed how to prepare your e-mail marketing.
Today, you will learn the key factors of executing a successful e-mail marketing.

Objective #1: make your recipients open your e-mail
In this step of the process, you will have to focus on 3 items:

• Sender name: people want to clearly see who the e-mail is from. Avoid 'info' or 'contact' since it doesn't say much. Just use your commercial or company name instead. A good practice is to add a person name in that field. It improves the trust in your e-mail sincelooks like a person is sending it, not just 'someone'.

• The title of your e-mail marketing: this is a lot less easy than it seems! Please do spend time on it. Your titles have to be simple, short, spam words-free and appealing. Don't be afraid to be creative. Also, your titles have to describe the contents of your e-mail (by the way, the e-mail marketing has a much better impact when you offer a single topic. If you want to talk about more topics, go for the newsletter format in which you can write with a different style and offer more interesting contents).

• The sending time: I don't think sending an e-mail to your contacts on a Monday morning about a promotion for the karting, valid the next week-end will work well. Put yourself in the place of your recipients: they would be much more open to receive an e-mail for a leisure activity right before the week-end, on a Friday afternoon and why not on a Saturday, for an invitation the next week-end? There is no best practice in that case, keep testing and analyzing so that, after a while, you know when your audience is the most open to receive your e-mails.

Your contacts have opened your e-mail: fantastic! But you should now make them feel like reading and 'processing' it. How? With clear contents and structure (see the previous newsletter about that). Use the personalization (basic: Dear [name] or more advanced with other fields. But don't over-personalize your e-mails).
Mind the 'call-to-action'. This can be a picture, some words, a link to a video, etc. This is where you want people to click! You want them to subscribe to an event? Link to your email address or to your online booking system. You want them to discover more about a promotion? Send them to your dedicated website page.
Please avoid the 'click here to know more' kinds of links. That's just terrible!

Objective #3: analyze your campaigns to improve the next ones

First thing that you should know: the average e-mail marketing opening rate in all sectors is between 1% and 4% (= people who clicked to open an email). From our clients' experience, we have seen that, in our domain, some campaigns give opening rate up to 25%! If you have a database of 25 000 e-mail addresses, it becomes very easy to fill an endurance with 15 go-karts! There are basic statistics which you can use to improve your e-mail marketing campaigns: opening rate, click-through rate, links clicked, etc. Just use them and take them into consideration.

The trigger e-mail marketing: the ultimate trend in e-mail marketing!

What is it?

The goal is to send an e-mail to a person depending on her/his behavior. This has to be done automatically (technically), but you have to think about what you want to send. 2 examples:

• Send an e-mail to all the recipients who click to your restaurant image in your banner. Invite them or offer them a nice promotion combined with another activity. This e-mail can be sent right after of 1 day after.
• Send an e-mail to the recipients who did not come for the last 6 months to your center. A good promotion will stimulate them to come back.

Be aware that most of these advices are very easy to integrate in your e-mail marketing campaigns. Just go step by step and you will see a great improvement for your business.

Kind regards,
Benjamin