Email marketing strategies are vital to effectively and efficiently utilise and discover the potential of emails. In this interview between Dale Beaumont and Malcolm Auld discover Malcom’s top ten strategies to maximise your email marketing.
Since 1987, Malcolm has worked in the US, Asia and Australia running advertising agencies for Ogilvy & Mather Direct, J Walter Thompson, Euro RSCG Partnership and his own agency, Malcolm Auld Direct (MAD). He is also the principal of The Marketing Campus.
Having written a book entitled Email Marketing Made Easy, what are your top ten tips for making the most out of this medium?
- Test and test again – subject lines, formats, timing (time of day, day of week).
- Use short sentences, bold cross heads and subheads to make scanning easy.
- In subject lines, don’t use definitive articles such as ‘the’ or ‘a’ or ‘click here’ or ‘recipient’s name’ or links.
- Don’t use capitals or words like, ‘free’, ‘guarantee’, ‘win’, ‘sex’ or ‘happy’. Run your copy through a spam filter before sending to test for words and phrases that will be blocked.
- Use a specialist email distributor – either outsource it to them or use their software on your system or via web access.
- Pay professionals with direct marketing experience to design and write your messages.
- Remember, your ‘from’ line gets your message opened and your ‘subject’ line gets it deleted.
- Contact non-responders or those who don’t open their messages to increase response.
- Use personalisation wherever you can and repeat offers through the content to determine the best-performing locations.
- Ask for subscriptions in the navigation bar, on the homepage and throughout your site.
In case you’re wondering, a cross-head is another term for subhead. Many direct marketers sell the ‘space’ in their shipping cartons to non-competitors as another profit centre. For example, when you get delivery from some office equipment suppliers, there might be a free copy of a business magazine with a subscription offer. Most traditional marketers have no idea this media exists. There is a rule of thumb that if you re-mail your list with the same message promptly after a successful campaign, you’ll get about another 50 per cent response from the list of original non-responders.
Most marketing is common sense – we marketers are the ones who complicate it. A simple rule of thumb is to consider what you would say or do if you were talking face-to-face with your customer and then do something similar in your advertising. After all, advertising (in all its forms) is what you would say if you were there in person.
For more of this incredible interview check out Dale’s “Secrets of Marketing Experts Exposed!“.
