Top 8 Email Marketing Fundamentals You Must Know About

In this weeks, weekly MI Academy call… I talked about our 8 fundamentals to Successful Email Marketing. As a treat, I’m sharing that with everyone who read’s our blog. Of course, all group Academy students will receive summary notes and a full recording of the session in a few days as usual.

For today, I’m going to share with all of your the exact presentation given to the group with the eight fundamentals including some insights to a successful Welcome Series, Good Vs. Bad Email Design and a World Class unsubscribe process.

1. Clear Objective: Your goals may vary from creating awareness about your new product launch to selling your product online, but you need to define it at the very outset. This goal will then serve as the framework of your email campaign, defining everything from design, to content to measurement of its success or failure.

2. Pre-header text & Body Content: The pre-header text of your email is the first thing to grab your subscriber’s attention. It should be in sync with your subject line. It’s designed to connect what you said in your subject line with the rest of your mail. This assure’s the recipient they are in the right place.

Body: The body content, on the other hand, is like the trailer of the movie. The goal is to make the trailer so appealing that they come and watch your movie (in this case, your landing page).

3. Interesting Subject Line: According to a survey conducted by Constant Contact in March 2012, 47% of people say they decide what to open and what not to open based on the subject line of the email.

Remember that there’s no right or wrong answer in digital marketing. You have to test everything to see what works and what doesn’t. Always test A/B subject lines. There is no room for gut feel in this digital world! This is a no brainer and really easy to do in most email marketing platforms.

4. Attractive Design: Each element in your email, from an icon to a color, has to have a purpose.

There is an old saying, “Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.” Avoid getting carried away with cramming information, using crazy gradients or too many colours.
Your goal very strictly defined in conversion terms. This doesn’t mean be boring and dull but rather to design your email to bring out the core message clearly and help readers skim through it and take the desired action. Keep it simple, relevant and focused.

5. Compelling Call to Action: The ultimate purpose of your email is to convince the reader to click on the ‘call to action (CTA)’ button. That then takes them to a page on your website or a dedicated landing page. CTA’s can be either a text link or a visual button < Which one works best for you, is up to your testing to determine.

6. Landing Page: The last thing you want to do is send them to a page that has no relevance to the offer or item you’re selling. The landing page can be 1 of three things: Your Home Page with a banner relaying the current deal/offer OR The exact product page OR a fully dedicated landing page for the campaign its self.

7. Timing: As the old saying goes “timing is everything” This is true for email marketing and the new generation of Cross Channel Marketing. Right Message, Right Place, Right Time. Milk has recently been testing B2B time of day/day of week. For B2B emails, Friday between 11-2pm is proving to have the best B2B results across the board. This testing has resulted in about a 50% increase in opens Vs other days.

8. Testing: Test everything. In this modern world of digital marketing, it’s a mistake to rely on your gut when you can test your assumptions so accurately. Always test your segments, creative, subject lines, time of day/day of week, frequency… Just test!!

Want to know more about the Email Marketing Fundamentals? Contact us here!