If you do e-mail marketing - do it right - here Gofish presents an overview of the do's and don'ts - Ignore at your peril.

1. Email Marketing
By Thomas Henderson
22nd May 2014
gofishcc

2. Newsletters bring the most value per visit
of all traffic sources
Subscriptions show trust in your brand
Trust breeds loyalty
High quality ROI traffic
72% of consumers check email more than 6
times a day
What is a newsletter? I want one!

3. What are your goals for a newsletter?
Have a Great Subject line
 This often is the difference between
ignored and opened
Offer something different
 The mail must be share-worthy
Maintain Your Database
 Curate your audiences for their
needs
When to Send
 Know the optimal time to mail your
community

4. Subject lines
Test your subject lines will greatly assist
with improving your open rates.
Audiences are different
 Depending on your industry open
rates will differ
Test Subject Lines
 Trial to 10% of your database
Measure Results
 Winning subject line goes to the
other 90%

5. Offer something different
You don’t want to run with the same stuff
week in week out.
Don’t just Sell Sell Sell
 Sometimes this hammer approach
can harm your brand
Build your brand
 Offer cool testimonials, videos,
jokes & stories work
Experience Rules
 If they have enjoyed your mail, they
are more likely to open the next one

6. Maintain your database
The quality of your database will provide a
lot of insight to your marketing
Bought Databases
 Very bad idea considering you know
nothing about these users
Bounce Rate
 High Bounce means your domain may
be identified as a spammer
Quality over Quantity
 Higher quality means higher opening
rates

7. What time to send your newsletter

8. What day to send your newsletter

9. Managing your newsletter?
Get comfy with HTML editors and bulk mailing tools
 MailChimp
 Touchbase
 Groupmail
 Touchstream
Important features to look out for
 Compatibility Testing
 Reporting
 Bounce Management
 Spam Testing
 Split Testing

10. Keep it simple
 Keep to your CI colours and fonts
 Use a standard Web-based Font
 Provide Continuity
 Optimize images for mail
 Should not exceed 500kb
Style guidelines

11. Continuity guidelines

12. Content guidelines
Your content determines if you get that click,
or be ignored. These guidelines will assist.
Avoid
 Spammy keywords: free, call now, sign up
 Excessive punctuation and CAPITALISATION
 Link text such as “click here” instead use “more info”
Include
 Unsubscribe option
 Legitimate Sending From & Reply to Address
 Social Profile Links
 Personalised Mails with the receivers name.

13. Content strategy
One mail a quarter is better than none.
No excuses!
Plan Ahead
 Seasonality
 Events
 Projects
Frequency
 Strategy Dependent
 Daily is extreme
 Weekly
 Fortnightly
 Monthly

14. Test Email Compatibility
 Html is interpreted differently depending on your browser or mail
program
Test for Functionality
 Are your links working, do the images display
correctly
Test Tracking
 Use Google Analytics to track links clicked
and behaviour thereafter
Stuff to do before you send

15.  Html depends on your
browser or mail program
 Outlook 2003 is different
to Yahoo Mail
 You have to cater for the
a bunch of programs
 Outlook 03, 07, 10, Mac Mail,
Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo
 Mobile Testing for Android and iOS
 Mail is still predominantly read on desktops but the growth of mobile
cannot be ignored
Compatibility testing

16.  Functionality will also be different depending on your browser
 Raw text cannot appear on a background image
 Only web safe fonts can be used
 .gif animations only work on browser based mail
 Flash will not work in email
 Javascript will not work in email
 Some CSS may work but is not recommended
 Test for spam
 Single image emails = spam
 No unsubscribe link = spam
 Checkout www.emailspamtest.com
Functionality testing

17. You don’t just click the send button and forget about it? You
need to analyse the results! Make sure you have tracking.
Tracking testing
 Google Analytics offers tracking tools for links on
your newsletter – Google “analytics url builder”
 These tags will show up in your analytics as links
from your email campaign
 Now drill down to see what those users did
 Manage Bounces, Unsubscribes, Most popular links
clicked, Social shares, follows etc

18. Tracking testing

19. How to increase your database
 Position the signup box above the fold
 Visible without scrolling
 eCommerce sites have PopUps using cookies to only appear once.
 Offer an incentive to sign up
 Use coupon code to get a discount
 Weekly specials delivered to you
 Signup and you could win
 Value to customer
 Market the newsletter on all channels
 Offline pamphlets and leaflets
 Social media
 Branding

20. www.GoFishClientCatchers.com
011 612 7460
thom@gofishcc.com
gofishcc
Thank You!