Email marketing, despite being one of the older e-marketing tools, remains an essential lever for any e-merchant wishing to create a long lasting relationship with their customers or prospects. The majority of Internet users check their emails at least once a day, thus giving e-merchants a great opportunity to communicate with customers and/or prospects at little cost. E-mailing can be used as a strategic tool to highlight current offers and promotions.
Email can also be used to take advantage of periods which punctuate the life of an e-merchant (sale, celebrations, holidays…), which are great occasions to communicate on your product catalogue.

But how can you create a quality e-mailing campaign? Here are six tips to help you do just that.

1°) Qualify your customer database

Nowadays, the validity of data tends to expire quickly. That is why it is important to regularly update your customer database. Thus you will gain time and get the best results. Make sure to remove incorrect e-mail addresses, duplicate addresses, inactive contacts…

If your email database is not very large, competitions are great way to easily obtain email addresses. During this year’s Lengow Ecommerce Day in Paris, Olivier Martineau from the company SpreadButton gave us some tricks for easily organising this type of marketing operation, on a Facebook page for example. It is also possible to buy or rent email files according to your business sector, but we recommend you to proceed to targeted partnerships for your email campaigns to have a better impact.

2°) Personalise the sender’s name and the object of your message

The main goal of an e-mailing campaign is to obtain a high opening rate, this is effected by two important elements: the name of the sender and the e-mail subject. These elements are key to the opening rate, as well as the campaign performance in general.

For example, Vente-privée.com uses an alias (Cécile de Rostand) to address regular offers to their customers or to announce upcoming events.

The sender’s identity has to be clearly identifiable and the object needs to be a reasonable length without containing terms that could be considered as spam (win, free…). In order to draw attention of the addressee, you can also personalise your email object with the help of the fusion fields. They offer the possibility of inserting the customer’s name in the subject or the body of your message.

3°) Offer coherent and attractive content

Internet users receive a lot of solicitations by email on a daily basis. Therefore it is important to strike the right balance between differentiating yourself and commercial pressure. Even if the sender and subject are effective in getting the recipient to open your email, your content has to be coherent, interesting and useful!

Furthermore, it has to be both visual and textual (Mailjet recommends the following ratio: 30% images and 70% text).
Don’t forget that Internet users spend just few seconds on your message, therefore the main information has to be immediately understandable. Using a graphic design which is coherent with your website will also help the customers to identify you as the sender.

4°) Choose the right moment to send your e-mail

It is essential to study the behaviour of your customers in order to know the right moment to send your email. If you have the opportunity to do so, test different sending times, compare the results (opening rates, click rates…) and make the most appropriated choice.

5°) Allow the possibility to cancel subscription

All email addresses in your database must have opted in to become part of the mailing list. Furthermore, you should clearly indicate in the footer of your e-mail the option to cancel subscription (opt-out) for those who would like to stop receiving emails.

6°) What kind of tools can be used for an e-mailing campaign?

Different types of tools exist for creating an emailing campaign. With the Lengow Hub you can find several partners who give you the possibility of creating and analysing email campaigns. After sending, it is important to analyse the main indicators of success or failure of each campaign, such as the subscription cancellation rate, the opening and click rates and to manage the addressees’ lists.
If you wish to have an analysing tool integrated into the Lengow solution, opt for Campaign Tracking, Lengow’s newest tool, which allows you to analyse e-mailing campaigns, but also to track sponsored links, display campaigns, as well as newsletters.

With e-mailing campaigns you can strengthen customer relationships and gain loyalty, develop the reputation of your company, put forward different offers/promotions and encourage your customers to go to your website in order to buy your products.