Checklist To Rocket Your Email Marketing Click-Throughs

Here’s your handy 10-Point Checklist

# 1 Segment your audience

The more targeted your campaigns, the more successful they’ll be.

Depending upon the CRM and email marketing programme you’re using, you can segment by numerous factors, including:

Relationship e.g. prospect/buyer/stakeholder
Buyer behaviour (what someone’s already bought)
Prospect behaviour (for example has the prospect downloaded a guide or attended an event)
Demographics: e.g. age, gender, location
Job title
Pain points – their fears
Gain points – their dreams and hopes
And more!

#2 Create a content calendar that targets each major audience

The calendar should balance your marketing and sales objectives with a large number of other factors, including:

Your audience’s interests, pain points, desires
Where they are in the purchase process, for example, if they’ve just purchased product A, remove them from product A promotional list
Seasonality – what context do the newsletters land within? e.g. end of financial year, budget announcement, summer holidays, Christmas?

#3 Be clear as to the goal of each newsletter

#4 Create the content

The content could be just words or also images, video, audio
Content creation alone is a huge topic and too big to include fully here, so get in touch if you need more help
Also watch Sarah’s video on the 3Ps for successful marketing for more insight.

#5 Use highly clickable subject lines

The subject line is one of the most important elements of the whole email.
If the subject line doesn’t compel, the recipient won’t even open the email and all your effort is wasted 🙁
There’s a whole science to subject lines that convert. Whilst I can’t include everything here, at the very least, ensure you DON’T to start the subject line with the word ‘Newsletter’
‘Newsletter’ says to the audience it’s going to be all about you (rather than them), positioning it more as a snoozeletter!
Another tip is to use first name personalisation within the subject line and at key points within the email body
Finally, use AB split testing. This is where you enter 2 options as the subject line, the email marketing system sends a small batch to reveal which tests the best and then uses that for the rest of the list.

#6 Proof the content

After all, there’s no redo or update button once it’s been sent
A simple way of proofing is typing the content into a Word document and doing a spelling and grammar check – remember to use English or American English, dependent upon where your audience is based
You can also pay a proofer, or if you’ve someone with great English skills and an eye for detail, run it past them
Even if your own writing skills are excellent ALWAYS ask someone competent to double-check as we become too close to our own work to see mistakes.

#7 Insert an easy call-to-action

So many emails don’t provide the audience with anything to do that it’s a wasted opportunity
I’m not talking about constantly giving the audience something to buy, but a call to action, such as complete a survey or download a free guide or read a blog you’ve written
Whatever you ask of the recipients, it should be easy for them to immediately fulfil – otherwise they simply won’t do it.

#8 Design for multiple inboxes and devices

Most emails are opened on phones or other mobile device NOT a desktop – so how does your email work on these?
Email marketing programmes offer you the opportunity to review what your email will look like on a range of devices BEFORE you send – make use of this!

#9 Avoid spam triggers

One of the many ways of ensuring your email reaches the recipient is to reduce your spam rating
So, avoid using words such as free, offer for example
Instead, use techniques such as ‘f’ree’ or ‘f r e e’ to convey the same information. You get the idea
When you send a test, it should provide a spam rating/warning – look out for this and revise accordingly.

#10 Test and review

Marketing is constantly evolving, so even if something worked before, it may need adjusting in future
Review open and click-through rates for every campaign and adjust activity in light of this.

Wow, that’s just 10 of many!

Who’d have thought there was so much to email marketing?

Love to also know the:

Then get in touch.

After all you don’t want to put lots of work into email marketing only for it to be a big embarrassing flop and sales in the doldrums!

I work with companies on creating a successful email marketing strategy that gets results. Fast.

Recent results for a food and drink consultancy client included a 2,049% increase in click-through rates within just 2 emails.

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