Working on your email marketing without a checklist is like climbing without a rope—if you make a mistake, there’s nothing to stop you from losing everything. A well-developed, well-tuned email internet marketing strategy considers every angle, covers every flaw, and optimizes to seize every advantage. So the next time you sit down to consider your email marketing, have this close at hand:

Tracking E-mail Marketing Campaigns

Tracking e-mail marketing campaigns is a vital part of deciding which marketing campaigns are successful for your company. The Google URL builder adds parameters to custom web-based or e-mail ad campaigns. This feature is the most effective in identifying URLs that are most effective in attracting users to your content.

From Addresses

Your from address should be something recognizable, something that means something to the recipient. Under no circumstances, ever, should a prospect receive an email with your content in the body and a label reading ‘do-not-reply’. This is marketing—sacrificing brand association is just plain counterproductive.

To/Reply Addresses

You want these configured for first and last names, for a couple reasons: You don’t want auto-generated gibberish here. You don’t want to lose an opportunity for contact because an email ended up in the wrong pile. And you certainly don’t want to sacrifice an opportunity to get the prospect thinking in terms of building a one-on-one relationship.

Subject Lines

Short, simple, engaging. This decides whether the email gets opened or deleted—think like a recipient. What catches your eye in your inbox? You also want to avoid looking too much like spam.

Tracking + Analytics

Does your email marketing have adequate email analytics solutions at work? Tracking tags in your HTML can tell you whether your subject lines are triggering reads or need refining, that prospects are reading but not biting, and much, much more. Information drives every profitable marketing campaign, so take your tracking and analytics seriously or your email campaign will suffer.

Segmenting

This is crucial to any email marketing plan looking to pull real profits, grab real attention: Segment your prospects and target different audiences, different markets, with different content. These segments can be anything you might imagine; old and young prospects, mobile and desktop users, male and female, business owners and middle managers. If the distinction matters to how you would sell to them, make sure that’s reflected in your segmenting and your email marketing. This is also why taking analytics seriously matters: the insight you gain there will greatly inform this step.

Social Sharing

Going viral with some witty piece of marketing content is in many ways the Holy Grail of marketing, so don’t make sharing a difficult task: put social sharing links and buttons in your emails. It’s much easier to get shared with an impulse click than with a manual effort. Make social media work for you–don’t be afraid of it.

View Online

Sometimes an email client handles content poorly; including a link to an online version of your content early in your emails gives prospects a quick way to see your emails as you intended them to be seen, should their clients give them any trouble. Why allow software incompatibilities to become a serious barrier to your outreach?

Unsubscribe

Nobody likes being frustrated as they hunt a quick and easy way off a mailing list they’re not enjoying anymore. When you make it difficult to unsubscribe, people talk; and when they talk about difficulty getting off your list, their friends think twice about signing up. And of course, a lost subscription does not equal a lost customer, so frustrating them is doubly concerning.

Cleanup

Maintenance of your list to clear out dead addresses, weak content, broken links, and other flaws will keep your email marketing light, lean, and effective. Clutter wastes time, distracts from better uses of time, and loses profits.

Dynamic Content

Personalizing for different customers counts for a lot in email marketing. When a customer feels like they’ve been personally engaged by you and your company, they pay far more attention to what you have to say.

Plain Text

Make sure you offer a plain-text version of your email content with each message, just in case your fancy formatting isn’t playing nice with their device. Not everyone has a modern computer or mobile device capable of running your graphically-enhanced content—depending on your industry, missing out on those prospects who can only read plain-text emails may be a very big hole in your campaign.

Scheduling

Consider when you’re sending out your emails. Experiment with pacing—some lists operate best with multiple messages daily, others with content pushed out in big chunks every week or month. Only with experimentation and research will you be able to figure out the optimal schedule. You’ll also want to avoid mundane traps, such as holidays and other low-business periods.

Looking to push your email marketing to the next level?

If you need extra email marketing expertise on your side, WebTech Marketing can help you transform your lists and campaigns into profit-generating machines. Contact us today and ask how we can help YOU harness the power of email marketing and see a real change in your bottom line.