Receive, open, click, ugh!

So you think you have the perfect email campaign, do ya? You have a killer offer, a targeted and segmented list, you’ve followed all the best practices when it comes to design and copy and then what – you send them to your corporate home page – no that’s just not right!

Five do’s for landing pages:

1. Do support your brand – don’t damage it. Be sure the creative maintains your brand image. The page should be simple and consistent to the campaign that is directing your visitors. The idea here is to compel your visitors to take action, not to distract them, and turn them into prospects.
2. Do keep forms simple/ short – don’t make visitors work too hard to get the offer/more information. You want them to supply essential information so you can contact them directly – you are not looking to write their biography.
3. Do keep them focused – don’t include tons of links that can distract the visitor. You want them to focus on the prize, not everything else going on at your company.
4. Do entice visitors with valuable content – don’t include information on your landing page that they can get anywhere else. This is your chance to show your value – make it worth their time and effort.
5. Do build on the lead – don’t just collect their data and forget about them, after all that work you just did, that’s ridiculous. Start building that relationship and turn that visitor into the customer you’ve always wanted!

Best Practices for email newsletters

These days seems like everyone is developing eNewsletters to support their customer retention and growth efforts. Makes a lot of sense, as long as you keep your customer at the top of mind when creating AND follow these best practices:

• Design should draw the recipient in
• Preview pane should include a logo or company name in a prominent position, a link to view the email online, and engage the recipient even if the images are blocked
• Include a table of contents specific to the issue with links, either to each item in the email newsletter or to the full text on a web site
• Use images as long as they add to the recipient's experience, not detract from it
• Content should be easy to scan, using bullet points and white space
• Personalize the content based on what you know about the recipient (info from sign up forms, web traffic, past purchases, etc.), whenever possible – technologies make this relatively easy.
  

And most importantly, make sure your content is relevant, benefit-driven content for your customer. First impressions mean everything here, if your customer doesn’t like it the first time, they’ll opt-out and we definitely don’t want that to happen!

Don’t forget the subject line.

Why is it that the last thing people think about when creating an email is the subject line? It’s the first thing the recipient sees – right? It should be the first thing we write. Like a direct mail envelope, we have about 3 seconds to catch someone’s attention amidst all the other clutter they have to deal with in their inboxes. Make sure your subject lines works for you not against you.

Subject lines should:
1. Communicate information relevant to the audience
2. Contain a compelling offer
3. Demonstrate timely information
4. Be short and direct
5. Give honest insight into what the email contains.
6. Be tested and tested again