Email Marketing 101: Fundamentals

Jay

 

Jay Kang

HE B2B Division Marketing Senior Marketing Manager at LG Electronics USA, Inc.

 

 


We are living in a world where people are becoming less patient while more information, marketing emails making up a large portion, is being delivered to them than ever before. What used to be a ten-second attention span has now become three seconds, relatively speaking. Consequently, email marketing is more difficult now than it has ever been, and it is becoming more competitive every day. That being said, if I had to offer my tips for new email marketers, I would tell them to make sure you have the following fundamentals down.

1) Set a clear objective – Setting a clear objective for your email will define its purpose and guide how you want to drive your email strategy to achieve your goals.

2) Keep it simple for higher CTR – There are a lot of test data out there that show plain or rich text emails yield more clicks than pretty HTML. But if CTR is not your main objective and you just have to have some visuals in your email, do not include too many CTAs. Recipients can feel overwhelmed by too many choices so they often do not take any action. Or if they are like me, I set the email as ‘unread’ thinking I’ll come back later to read it more closely but I usually don’t.

3) Test everything – From the email subject line to the layout to the sent times, test everything that can be tested to improve the performance.

4) Limit your emails – if you want your audience to be loyal, don’t send them too many emails. I would say no more than one email per week. How many white papers or special deals can your audience possibly handle in a week? Give your audience quality not quantity, and give them ample time to digest what they are getting from you.

CONCLUSION:

There are no magic formulas or email techniques that will achieve maximum email campaign results for all audiences. That’s because there are way too many variables that change all the time, like technology and peoples’ preferences to name just a couple. So your best option is to keep up with the trends and keep testing your emails for improvement. Like Confucius said, “Look for progress, not perfection.”