The key to successful email marketing campaigns

News: August 2011

The key to successful email marketing campaigns

Email marketing is a proven, cost effective way to promote your business. However, since more and more firms are getting in on the act it is becoming harder to achieve the same impact that you may have enjoyed a year or 2 ago. The following are some tips to help make your email newsletters stand out from the crowd.


Subject lines – Your subject line needs to appeal to your target audience — otherwise they won’t open the email and your time, effort and expenditure will have been wasted.

Ensure that your subject line is relevant to your target audience and focuses on an important aspect of your newsletter i.e. “Important tax tips to help you reduce your tax bill” might be a subject line which would appeal to business owners.


Design – Recent research has suggested that business to business e-marketing campaigns achieve higher click-through rates when the email has more text than images.

The study also suggests that business to consumer campaigns achieved better click through rates when the email had more images than text. Bear this in mind when designing your e-newsletter.

It’s generally a good idea to include only a summary of an article in the actual e-newsletter with a “click here for more” link directing the reader to the full article on your company website. This way you drive traffic to your website which could potentially result in a sale.


Testing – Don’t be afraid to experiment with your e-newsletters. Email marketing is not an exact science and trial and error can help you to customize your e-marketing to really appeal to your target market.

Change only one thing at a time and compare your metrics — open rate, click through rate, etc in order to determine which changes have a positive impact on your campaign.


Relevant Content – It seems obvious but keep your content relevant to your target audience. There is not point sending e-newsletters about business to business services to householders.

They would be more interested in consumer products, whereas a Managing Director would be more likely to read a newsletter focusing on business services.

Tailor the language accordingly — corporate speak is fine for business targets but consumers don’t need jargon, they respond better to plain English describing the benefits of the product to them.