Business
How to reach out to Hank Hoffmeier: When you put together an email marketing campaign, there are some factors to take into account if you want it to be successful. Email marketing expert Hank Hoffmeier of iContact shared those factors and his suggestions for yielding a huge ROI from your efforts in this week’s podcast. Here are some of the main highlights of what he and our host, Bryan Reynolds, discussed. Factors to Consider for Email Marketing Success There are a number of components that go into a successful email marketing strategy. The first lies in your ability to actually get people to open the emails you send. It doesn’t matter how well written the body of your email is. If your subject line isn’t enticing enough to click, nobody will receive the message you’re hoping to convey. If you want consumers to actually open and engage with your emails, you’ll need to get inside their heads. Ask yourself whether you would want to open the email if you received it, and use that to gauge whether it’s ready to send. Remember, people are more likely to read emails that are personalized and that convey usefulness. This can be done by using their names in both the subject line and body text, as well as with email content that addresses problems your audience may be experiencing. The next factor you need to consider is your email’s call to action. This is just as important as the subject line, as it brings your readers even closer to becoming paying customers. If your CTA doesn’t drive the point home and entice people to learn more, they won’t click through to your landing page. Once you get your subject line and call to action optimized, your job isn’t done. You then need to turn your attention to the landing page you link to. This page needs to be a follow-up to the content of your email that moves readers even further along in the buying process. From there, stay in contact with your contacts and reach out to any who abandon their shopping carts. Getting Into the Inbox Although all of the above factors are necessary for implementing a successful campaign, they won’t get you anywhere if the emails don’t even make it into readers’ inboxes. Every aspect of your campaign relies on deliverability, so you’ll want to do all you can to ensure you maintain a positive domain reputation. Here are some of the components that affect your reputation: Positive Actions Think of your domain reputation as a credit score. Each time you send an email, providers like Gmail evaluate the actions your contacts take and ding or elevate your score based on those actions. Actions that have a positive impact include opening emails, clicking their links, marking emails as important and marking emails as TINS (this is not spam). The more positive interactions people have with your emails, the more likely providers will be to let your emails into the inboxes of new subscribers. Negative Actions Although it’s impossible to completely eliminate negative reactions to your emails, you can greatly reduce the number of times they happen through personalization and usefulness. Some of the events that have a negative impact on your score include email bounces (invalid email addresses), being marked as spam, requests to unsubscribe, and worse, having your emails go ignored. To increase the likelihood of positive reactions, avoid making the following mistakes. Don’t Make These Mistakes One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is thinking that buying contact lists will help. Unfortunately, it will actually have the opposite effect on your deliverability “credit” score. The same goes for sending emails to unengaged contacts. Although an “are we breaking up” email can be good for list hygiene, constantly sending emails to contacts who don’t want to hear from you will have negative effects on your score. Similar to this is your list hygiene. Hank recommends cleaning out your contact list at least once per year,