The Red and Yellow cards of email marketing
With our £5,000 championship well underway we have put together some help and advice guidelines to follow when constructing your email marketing campaign in the The Red and Yellow cards of email marketing.
Whether you are new to email marketing or you are well experienced, the points may seem obvious, but they are steps in the campaign process that many people fall foul of, including ourselves in the past. Our team have put together the 8 most common mistakes people make…
Red Card – Targeting the wrong people
If you do not have your own data collection you will not know who to target when it comes to purchasing prospect data. If this is the case you need to think about your ideal customer.
Are they business contacts or consumers? Does your business target a specific postal area? A particular job role? This is one of the most important factors to making sure your email is read and relevant. Our email marketing consultants can help advise you on who to target.
Yellow Card – Content Errors
An email can be one of the first things a potential customer sees about your company so the email needs to make a good impression. Errors do not impress!
Always check your spelling and grammar. A good idea is to get a second opinion before pressing “Send”. Our delivery team will check through every email sent to ensure that our clients are giving the right impression.
Yellow Card – Boring and Incorrectly designed email
Our design team have had many years experimenting with what works and what doesn’t when it comes to email design. They have found that with plenty of text, two columns can be easier to read than one continuous scroll. As long you keep your layouts simple and clear with relevant and interesting imagery you should see a better click-through rate.
Keeping to a 70:30 text to image ratio and slicing any large images ensures the delivery of your design is better. Always include plenty of calls to action and remember that they are most effective above-the-fold as some readers do not always get to the bottom of the email.
Red Card – Too much Spam content
Spam filters check your email against a list of criteria to judge whether to allow your email through as normal or whether to put it into junk. Points are assigned to each spam phrase or word and will give certain criteria more points than others. Once your email reaches the point threshold is when the email will be placed in “Spam”.
Be aware of Spam trigger words and avoid using phrases like “Click here!”, “Free”, USING CAPS, exclamation points!!!! and others. Our design and delivery team have the software to run your email design through a process of checks to indicate whether or not your email may junk.
Yellow Card – Bad Subject Lines
The subject line can contribute towards your email’s spam score. Using spam-trigger words and phrases can be problematic. The subject line is one of the most important factors contributing towards campaign success as this is what triggers your reader to open the email. It needs to be compelling and interesting to your target audience.
The key to a successful subject line is to make it fall in line with your offer but leave as much as possible to the imagination.
Yellow Card – Sending at the wrong time
The time of delivery is important to ensuring your email is read and not put on the bottom of the pile, glanced at or worse, deleted. Certain times of the day can be risky such as early Monday morning, late Friday afternoon and busy times of the day. Think about the typical way a day is spent by your target audience and when they may have time to read their emails.
We find that Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in working times can be best for business contacts and lunchtime, evenings and weekends can work well for consumers.
Red Card – Not testing the email
Testing the email is one of the most important stages before the campaign goes out, yet many fail to do so. You want to ensure your message is going to be sent and seen exactly as you intend it to be. This process involves testing the delivery in different email clients and devices, checking content and images and making sure all the links in the email are going to all the right places.
Our delivery team use an email checking tool which shows you previews of your email in different inboxes and on different devices, estimates a delivery rate and checks your email campaign html for mistakes. There are many tools around that you can use yourself to do similar checks. The golden rule is to check, re-check, find someone else to check, check again and then click SEND. Good Luck!
Yellow Card – Not measuring the campaign performance
Many people send their campaign and expect that to be their email campaign complete. However, every email campaign should be measured by open, click-through, bounce, delivery, referral and unsubscribe rates. One email campaign may not always enough to generate a sale, it is the same as any sales process, nurturing and follow up is a must. This may mean following up your email with another, or a telephone call to keep the potential customer interested and possibly converting into a sale.
Past campaign results should always be used as a reference for any future campaigns, you should monitor the successful elements and make note of where improvements can be made.
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