Every week I go to a Cricket class at the gym, and the instructor constantly reminds us to breathe properly. We often breathe as fast as we can, trying to squeeze as much energy as possible into the shortest amount of time. When we should be resting, refocusing, and breathing. A good email marketing strategy is like a breathing exercise: Start with a warm-up, slowly build up to the main part of the workout, and end with a focus on relaxation. I wonder if learning to play Cricket is a requirement for marketers.
Don’t launch an email marketing campaign without preparation, which includes: Determine the comprehensiveness of your email list – have all your customers agreed to receive emails? Have you considered your subscribers’ expectations – for example, what type of emails and how often?
A mailing list with more than 10% undeliverable addresses is a red flag for your ISP. Sending mail to people who have not signed up for mail will inadvertently cause spam and may result in ISP blocking. If you are not sure about the integrity of your mailing list, do not send mail to the addresses on the list or send mail to some addresses to test and analyze the results before sending mail to all the addresses on the list.
In this initial step, you need to make sure that you have an expert in the virtual world. You need a public WHOIS to easily identify domains. You also need a clearly written privacy policy.
Use different IP addresses for transactional and marketing emails. And contact your ISP to get your IP address added to their auto-responder and whitelist. Details are available on your ISP's website, or if you're using an email service provider (ESP), they can help.
Finally, you should always be on top of identity technology. Ensuring your Domain Name Services (DNS) always conforms to the SPF: Sender Policy Framework, along with DomainKeys and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) will allow you to finish the boot.
And now you are ready for the exercise.
Do your best email marketing in a cohesive, breathing way.
A sender address that makes it easy for the recipient to identify your company and a subject line that makes it easy for the reader to identify the content of the email are key to success because they are your only chance to make a first impression on your customers.
Using tricks to get people to open your emails will only make them hit Spam and not solve the problem. Again, a clear “From” address and subject line can also make people pay attention to your company even if they don’t open the email.
Professionally crafted email content is also key to getting a positive response from recipients. Advertisements that look like advertisements in public places may cause recipients to ignore your emails. Make sure your brand is visible and recognizable. Brand awareness is one of the most important goals of email marketing. Also remember that all marketing content should be sent via email, not posted on a website. And since there is no universal email service, keep your email HTML code simple so that it can be easily modified later for different types of emails.
Ok, now let's start learning how to breathe.
Take the time to write targeted posts and send them to the people you choose to target. Use city population information to send emails to each segmented group.
Some companies get annoyed when they receive marketing emails that are mostly images, especially emails that contain only one large image. Add a few lines for mobile users who often scan messages on their mobile devices.
The secret to good email design is to include a short line of text at the top of your email, just below the banner ad. Tell your subscribers why they’re receiving your email, ask them to add your “From” address to their address book, and make sure they know where the unsubscribe button is so they can use it instead of the Spam button when they want to stop receiving emails.
Continue to keep breathing slowly!
Test your message. Send to a small group internally, send to a small group externally. Use the A/B testing method with 2 groups with different topics and content (change the topic or content to be different and send to 2 groups A and B randomly selected from the e-mail list, the topic or content that gets more attention will automatically be sent to everyone else on the list). One very important thing is that when you send e-mail from a new IP address, send it slowly! Nothing attracts the attention of an ISP more than a huge amount of e-mail sent from a new IP.
Now we can press the Submit button and start our relaxation exercise.
Relaxation exercises are essential. Analyzing the report of sent e-mails will help us gain experience and adjust appropriately for the next time we send. Pay attention to heavy bounces – e-mails that the system sent only once due to user bounce codes. Bounced e-mails often do not know the recipient and their domain name. Stop sending e-mails to such addresses.
You should also check for ISP block bounces. If your email is blocked, you will need to look closely at the bounce code to take appropriate action.
Soft bounces may be sent more than once, depending on the bounce code type. These typically include server busy messages or message delay issues. Like heavy bounces, soft bounces should be investigated for delivery issues and the ISP's reasoning.
Check your email open rate. A drop in the number of emails could mean you're sending too many emails to people who don't want to receive them, or that you're sending to an ISP that automatically places your emails in customers' spam folders or filters your emails before they reach the server.
Before finishing the breathing exercise
Another secret of successful email marketers is analyzing spam complaints. If you have an auto-responder set up in your startup, you will know who is hitting the Spam button (they tend to do this because they don't know who you are, aren't expecting your emails, or simply don't know your unsubscribe link).
You need to know who hit Spam and from what addresses. Spam complaints are the number one reason why marketing emails end up in spam folders and get blocked outright.
Getting your ISP to fix your email sending problems is not difficult. The hard part is making the necessary changes so that these email sending problems go away forever.
This is the end of the relaxation exercise, take one last breath and remember this is also a warm up and you should do it slowly over a long period of time, don't try to rush it. Take the time to research good ways to continuously build a good reputation with customers and ISPs.
