Effective Email Marketing: How to Avoid the Trash Bin & Get What You Want

Email marketing campaigns are a great way to let people know about a new product, service, or event; to have them sign up for a newsletter; donate money, etc. However, not all organizations make the best use of this method and execution is poor.

People have various reasons for not reading emails. To prevent your email from getting discarded without a glance, here are some tips to maximize the number of conversions.

(In case you don’t know, a conversion is when an email recipient heeds your call-to-action; it is distinct from the response to the offering itself. In other words, the conversion rate tells you how well people reacted to the campaign, and the sales or number of sign-ups tells you how many people responded to the offering.)

To increase your conversion rate, just follow these steps: 

Send a well-designed marketing email, which includes:

• An attention-grabbing subject heading 
• As little text as possible 
• A clear call-to-action (usually a link to a landing page so it’s easier to track conversions—don’t have too many links unless you are intentionally tracking how people respond to different keywords) 
• Clean design that reflects your company’s brand (recipients should recognize where the email is coming from, plus they respond poorly to ugly or “cheap-looking” emails which may look like spam) 
• A reminder about spam filters (retain boilerplate text at the bottom of the email to remind people to add your email address to their accepted mailing list) 

Create an ad hoc landing page just for the email campaign. Too many places still use existing pages off of their website with a hastily added link or text as their call-to-action. The problem is that these pages usually have too much text or distracting links, or they are too off-topic. Use Google Analytics or a similar program to track how many people visited the landing page.

Lastly, treat every marketing campaign as if it were a research study. Review which subject headings got the highest and lowest open rates. Take a look at which links people clicked on. Try splitting up your mailing list and send the same email with different subject headings, or send them at different days or times to measure which performed the best. Always tweak and adjust your marketing campaign approach to optimize results for the future.

Tell us about your successful marketing campaigns. Or even the ones that didn’t fare too well…

--Joanna Kim

Joanna Kim is a writer/content strategist for HRI. As a follower of the "Inbox Zero" philosophy, she immediately deletes terrible marketing emails, but holds on to the good ones for research purposes.