For three years running Cape Town Holiday Villas, a high end holiday villa & apartment rental company, has been using GraphicMail to communicate special offers and promotions to our customer base. During this time we have gained lots of experience on how to build appealing promotional email newsletters for well-off customers. Our latest mailer, which was sent out during April 2011, has been our most successful; with an astonishing 17% open rate and 26% click-through rate. This leads us to believe that we are reaching an apex in refining our approach to email newsletter marketing, as far as our own target market is concerned.
These are our Top Ten HTML Newsletter learnings to date:
1) Make sure your newsletter design is professional. Shoddy work will harm your brand. So why not start off by choosing one of GraphicMail's free HTML newsletter templates?
2) Address your newsletter to an individual. We sent out several mails to “Dear Traveller”, and found that personalisation is received a lot better by our audience.
3) Send your email from a personal email address not an info/enquiry@ account. It adds a personal touch. Nobody likes to feel as though they are speaking to a robot.
4) Use a compelling subject line. Don’t be afraid to clearly state your offer right off the bat, but be realistic and make sure you follow through and deliver on your promises.
5) Email newsletters with photographs embedded perform better. Make sure that you scale down the picture's disk size (in kb) to reduce the size of the newsletter. The smaller the newsletter, the less email credits you will need to spend.
6) Always include your telephone number on the mailer in case someone wants to call you directly. They should be able to find your number easily without having to navigate back to your website.
7) Use testimonials in your email newsletters. I know this is a little old-hat, but it does give the mailer a lot more dignity. Readers like the reassurance of previous customers and reviewers.
8) I like sending emails before the weekend. We sell a leisure product and people need to be in the right mental space to really pay attention to what we have to say. Not surprisingly, we have found that we get more inquiries over the weekends.
9) Buy credits in bulk. You will use them eventually and it will work out a lot cheaper in the long run.
10) It’s obvious, but service your responses promptly. You can even make use of an auto-responder if you are performing a send over the weekend to notify clients that you are aware of them. The longer you wait, the more they will shop around.
Finally, I really like using GraphicMail since it is constantly improving and new features are regularly added, the latest being additional mobile marketing and social media tools. This is the most comprehensive and suitable email marketing service for any business size that I have ever made use of.
Alexander Smith, Google Professional
Networds
Cape Town Holiday Villas
GraphicMail South Africa - Digital marketing for everyone. Email, mobile, social marketing made easy and affordable! Email marketing tips, mobile and SMS marketing innovations, best practice digital marketing, email case studies and more!
Friday, 6 May 2011
Wednesday, 4 May 2011
GraphicMail cements the benefits of Email Marketing to various SME Industries
Direct email marketing tools often don't cut the mustard when it comes to versatility and getting just the right fit for your company. There is just simply no one-size-fits-all advertising solution that will act as a promotional panacea for your business type or even your industry. We've all seen that there’s big money in customisation, in everything from automobile to bosai trees, which is usually where pro designers and brand managers come in, and your money goes out.
It isn’t always financially feasible to bet your business brand on the typical marketing campaign outputs, which won't necessarily give you the best ROI. And other than that, too many cooks spoil the broth, so ultimately having a sense of unity in your email marketing efforts - such as limiting third party alterations strictly to the degree to which it is needed - will give your brand a more clear and consistent skin.
The email marketing uniformity dilemma is not to be underestimated. If there are many thousands of companies out there doing just the same thing in just the same way, how can you expect to become an industry champion? Regardless of your individual qualities, you will remain stagnating at about the same digital altitude as everyone else, with the consumer not being able to distinguish you from the rest of your competitors.
So what you need is a free template that reflects your industry, one which you can change easily to suit your needs. No good marketer can do without reliable campaign reports to measure your email marketing success and AB split tests to compare two newsletter layouts against each other… to see which one receives the higher click through rate… etc.
GraphicMail identified the following industries as major users of their direct email marketing services; Travel and Tourism, Media & Publishing, Financial Institutions, Retailers, Real Estate, Education, Events, Marketing & Advertising, Music, Clubs and Non-profit organizations - all of which demand a unique voice and style of engagement, and much has been done in the line of developing service features that will deliver practical solutions relevant to your business' category.
In conclusion you necessarily have to differentiate yourself in the way you do business and market yourself accordingly to avoid becoming a face in the crowd. A blind stab at anything-will-do marketing is money lost, which is why your business should target ESPs that have slated special industry-sensitive service packages which will effectively be in sync with how consumers think.
It isn’t always financially feasible to bet your business brand on the typical marketing campaign outputs, which won't necessarily give you the best ROI. And other than that, too many cooks spoil the broth, so ultimately having a sense of unity in your email marketing efforts - such as limiting third party alterations strictly to the degree to which it is needed - will give your brand a more clear and consistent skin.
The email marketing uniformity dilemma is not to be underestimated. If there are many thousands of companies out there doing just the same thing in just the same way, how can you expect to become an industry champion? Regardless of your individual qualities, you will remain stagnating at about the same digital altitude as everyone else, with the consumer not being able to distinguish you from the rest of your competitors.
So what you need is a free template that reflects your industry, one which you can change easily to suit your needs. No good marketer can do without reliable campaign reports to measure your email marketing success and AB split tests to compare two newsletter layouts against each other… to see which one receives the higher click through rate… etc.
GraphicMail identified the following industries as major users of their direct email marketing services; Travel and Tourism, Media & Publishing, Financial Institutions, Retailers, Real Estate, Education, Events, Marketing & Advertising, Music, Clubs and Non-profit organizations - all of which demand a unique voice and style of engagement, and much has been done in the line of developing service features that will deliver practical solutions relevant to your business' category.
In conclusion you necessarily have to differentiate yourself in the way you do business and market yourself accordingly to avoid becoming a face in the crowd. A blind stab at anything-will-do marketing is money lost, which is why your business should target ESPs that have slated special industry-sensitive service packages which will effectively be in sync with how consumers think.
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