A recent survey by ExactTarget indicates that almost all internet users make use of emails for personal as well as marketing messages. According to this survey, 95% online consumers in the US use emails, 93% receive at least 1 permission based email per day, 83% check emails at least once a day and 64% check it several times a day. These figures effectively establish that regardless of the popularity of social media, emails are still going strong.

The survey also indicated that 70% online consumers always opened emails from their favorite companies, 77% said that they are now more cautious about giving their email address to companies, 91% users have subscribed to a company’s email and later decided they didn’t want to receive it and 18% never open marketing emails.

For an effective email marketing campaign, marketers need to consider various factors. They need to find an optimum balance between in-house emailing and outsourcing. The time at which the email is delivered also plays a key role in determining whether your email is read or not. Today online customers make use of various devices to access internet. So it is important that you optimize your landing pages and emails for mobiles and other devices. Testing is the only way to boost your open rates and click rates. All these factors increase the chances of your email reaching customer inboxes, getting read and acted on.

Identify the motivation behind people signing up for your email list

The surest way to keep your email subscribers happy is to give them exactly what they want. Find out the reason that motivated them to sign up. In most cases, product discounts or free shipping are not the primary motivators. Most people signup for your email because it provides value in form of new and useful information or entertainment. Content is the most important part of your email. If your content is useful and interesting, it will most likely generate a positive response.

Focus on the right content

Make use of emails to spread information about all the new happenings. For instance, you can inform people about your new product launch plans, latest blog post or a new video. Email newsletter linked to other company activities will give better results than an email offering nothing more than product discount.

Ensure your email content is easily sharable

Ease of sharing is also important for the success of your email campaign. It can widen your reach and boost your readership. Good quality content in the form of articles, reports, videos, blogs and the like will help you strengthen the relationship with your subscribers.

First of all, if you want your customers to open the email and see what’s in it, you should avoid spamming their mailboxes. Avoid sending too many emails, irrelevant emails and using spam words like free, discount, offer, freebies etc. To make it more effective and professional, use a corporate or business email id that is created on your website’s domain name rather than a free email account.

Next, you should spend some time to create your own list of prospects from the list of subscribers and website visitors, instead of buying a ready list from other sources. This will make sure you are targeting the right audience and increase the likelihood of sales. Also, focus on understanding your niche market and send emails that are useful to them. Share as much valuable information as possible, but avoid cramming their mailbox.

If you know the names of the subscribers, address them by name and personalize the mail, rather than using a generic term such as ‘customer’ or ‘homeowner. Also, mention your name in the end rather than just using your designation. Make it a point to interact with your customers regularly so that they are reminded of your presence and are updated about your products or industry news.

To begin with, you need to collect the email addresses of visitors who land on your website through a paid ad. When prospect lands on your website through a paid ad, you can ask them to join your mailing list if they are interested. To motivate first-time visitors to share their contact details, you can offer exciting gifts such as e-books, online vouchers, invitation to a free webinar etc.

Also, you can create a special landing page for your PPC advertisement, so that potential customers can find what they want easily and know more about it without any distractions. But to get the visitors’ email id, you should have a “Join our mailing list” option on that landing page.

Once you have their email addresses, you can continue interacting with them sending occasional mails about special promotional and discount offers on your products. Also, you can encourage them to subscribe to you newsletter for regular updates. By combining the paid search and email marketing options, keeping the prospects interested in your products and encouraging them to build a relationship with your company becomes easier.

To review your email marketing campaign, here are a few points you should consider.

Firstly, check whether your email campaign is in line with the company goals and if it is capable enough of achieving them. Also, check if the email marketing campaign is being measured the right way and with the right analytic tools. By analyzing the campaign, you can decide whether or not it is really useful for your business.

Next, you should consider the list of email contacts you have collected, and how it is being managed. Have you categorized the target customers as per their interest in your product? If not, check how useful the existing list can be for future campaigns and make the necessary changes.

Next, review the quality of your email content and how useful it is to the readers. This can be done by checking how many people actually open the mail and respond to it. Also, measure the response rate and conversion rate for individual topics to identify the strong and weak topics of your emails and newsletters.

Finally, figure out how you can improve the campaign. Talk to friends and colleagues in the industry, read books, browse the internet for information and ask for expert advice. Make a list of essential changes and incorporate them in your newsletters, promotional emails and review it all again, till you make your campaign a success.

A key factor that can encourage your customers and subscribers to open your e-mails is its subject line. When you employ an effective e-mail subject line, you can increase both, the open rates and click through rates (CTRs) of your next e-mail.

An effective way to achieve this is to personalize the subject line. When you do this, you will get the recipient’s attention. One way, is to use the customer’s name. Next, add details that pertain to him, like the city he lives in. Another way to personalize the e-mail’s subject line is to include an offer that pertains to what the customer wants at that time. So, it should ideally be timely and important to the customer.

You can achieve this by segmenting your market and gathering data on the preferences of each customer on your mailing list. The easiest and most effective way is to use a tool capable of merging and managing date to generate e-mail campaigns that are targeted.

Another way to get your customers interested in the subject line is to keep it concise. This can lead to higher open rates and higher CTRs. An exception to this is if you are sending an e-mail that alerts the recipient about information that can be downloaded or a subscription product that is offered on a regular basis.

Targeted emailing can ensure that subscribers receive emails that interest them. This will also increase the likelihood of the emails being opened, clicked and converted. Experian CheetahMail conducted a research to find out efficacy of loyalty related emails. The results of this study indicated that emails sent to loyalty program members had much higher success rates compared to bulk mailings. The open rate, click rate and transaction rate of emails sent to loyalty program members was respectively 40 percent, 22 percent and 29 percent higher than bulk emails.

The research by Experian CheetahMail also tried to find out the performance of specific types of loyalty emails by recording the open and click rate of these emails. The reward arrival, welcome, statement and redemption reminder emails had 126.4 percent, 58.5 percent, 56.1 percent and 53.6 percent open rates respectively. While their click rates were 19 percent, 9.7 percent, 6.5 percent and 11.4 percent respectively. These results clearly indicate that consumers show more interest in messages that are relevant to them, like reward arrival and redemption reminder emails. Email marketing is one of the most important tools for strategic internet marketing, and marketers can get much more from this tool by making efforts to send relevant emails to subscribers.

• Keep the sign-up form short and simple. Do not be tempted to ask for information that is not absolutely necessary. Customers don’t like to spend more than a few seconds in filling up forms, so long forms are less likely to be filled.

• Confirm whether the email address entered by a customer in the form is correct. A typing mistake can result in a lost website conversion.

• Allow customers to decide on the communication they would like to receive and how frequently. This will help you send targeted emails. When adding any new categories, give this information to your customers and request them to update their preferences.

• Tell customers about the benefits of signing-up. By informing customers what to expect from a sign-up, for instance, information about discounts and special offers, you can encourage more people to sign-up.

• Include a link back to your website in your emails. Your website contains a lot of information that customers may want to know. Make it easier for customers by including a link to your website in the welcome email.

• Give instant rewards for sign-ups. When a customers signs up for your email list, their interest is at the highest level. By instantly rewarding customers, with links to previous articles or discount coupons, you can assure customers that they made the right decision by signing-up.

The survey also indicated that 55 percent people deleted junk mails, while 27 percent reported such emails as spam. Spam reports negatively impact your email deliverability. Here are some tips to help you increase your email deliverability.

• Use a sender name that recipients know. Very often customers delete or report as spam the emails received unknown senders. You can use your company name for this purpose.

• Ensure that your subject line is clear. Most recipients decide based on the subject line whether to read the entire email or dispose it. A subject line that clearly states your identity and purpose is necessary to ensure that your email is recognized as legitimate.

• Remove defunct email addresses from your list. If you send emails to nonexistent addresses repeatedly, ISPs notice this. Getting rid the defunct email addresses can improve your email deliverability.

• Confirmed opt-in or double opt-in is the most effective method of increasing your email deliverability. In this method, you send emails to the customers who have subscribed through different venues, and ask them to confirm their subscriptions. Email marketing is one of the most cost effective and popular methods of internet marketing, but it can be successful only if your emails make it to the customer’s inboxes.

Email topped the list of personalized marketing tactics with 72.2% of the marketers in the survey saying that they tried to offer personalized customer experience through email. Personalization of other media like direct mail, websites and social media lagged behind at 58.4%, 56.0% and 53.0% respectively. However, only 8.9% marketers in the survey said that they did not personalize marketing through any of these channels. This makes it clear that a majority of marketers understand the importance of personalization in marketing tactics.

Further analyzing email marketing personalization; 42.9% of marketers in the survey using personalized email marketing tactics segment audiences with different messages. 25.7% send emails with basic personalization, 18.4% send emails on mass basis while only 13.0% delivered emails based on individual customer preferences with real time monitoring. Although marketers seem to understand the need for personalization and risks of mass marketing, 25.7% marketers in the survey used an email blast with basic personalization, which is usually not enough to interest customers. While most marketers claim to be working on better personalization for effective internet marketing, some marketers still don’t know where to start.