Email Marketing Best Practices For Business To Business Email Newsletters
Email marketing has been proven to be one of the top three return on investment marketing methods consistently over the last 3-5 years. In my mind every business should be using email marketing to promote their business. In this blog article we outline some of our best practices for email marketing and the studies that we conducted to come to these conclusions.
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The ROI Of Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best return on investment marketing methods any business can use. I believe the reasons for this are because it can be sent repetitively to the same target, it is low cost and people generally pay attention with great detail to their email. To see the data we have seen on the ROI of email marketing go to our article The Best ROI Marketing Method For Small Businesses article.
From Title
What we have experienced is that including a persons name in the from title instead of a company name appears to increase results. This makes logical sense as having a person's name in the from title makes if more personal. We have seen this across various studies and tests we have conducted. Here is the data from just one of those studies. Click here to see the data.
From Email
From our experience we have seen that using a from email address with a name like "This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it." gets superior results compared to a generic email address like "This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.". We have not yet published study results from a test like this on the blog. We hope do to that at some point in the near future. Be sure to check back to our email marketing article repository in the future to watch for this article. Click here to go the email marketing article repository.
Subject Line
What we have found to generate the best open rates are one word subject lines instead of multiple word subject line. The word you want to choose should be both relevant to the recipient's industry and spark a high degree of curiosity. For more details read our article on Email Marketing Subject Line Analysis
Time Sent
Day Of The Week
The best day of the week to send email marketing from our experience tends to be either either Saturday or Monday. For these days to be the best you have to send them early in the morning. To see the results from our data read the article Best Day To Send Email Marketing Newsletters.
Time Of The Day
The best time of days to send emails appears to be between 8:15 am and 8:45 am as well as 6:30 pm and 7:30 pm. The data that supports this finding can be found in our article Email Marketing Optimization - Best Time Of Day To Send Emails For Maximum Impressions. This data is from 2011 so it is a little old. Most of it still holds true. What we have also seen recently is that sometimes sending earlier like at 6:30 am or 7:30 am can result in even higher open rates than emails sent at 8:15 am.
Email Content
Format
Email marketing should be in the form of short personalized notes over the typical newsletter format as they results in better results across all metrics. To read the data from the study we conducted to come to this finding read the article Best Email Marketing Newsletter Design by clicking here.
Images
It appears you get better results when any images you include in emails are located on the left hand side of the email and place text on the right hand side of the email. For the full study and test results on this finding read the article Effective Email Templates by clicking here.
Attachments
We do not yet have conclusive evidence on whether email attachments increase revenue generated or not. They appear to increase open rates when sent to customers and it is still unclear to us if they increase open rates when sent to non customers.
Metrics
Be sure to track the result metrics you see from the email marketing you are doing. The most important thing to track is the amount of revenue you generate from your email marketing and the ROI you are getting. Looking at open rates, read rates, click rates and unsubscribe rates are good to track because they help you understand what is happening. They are only useful though to help determine what is the main hindrance from increasing revenue. At the end of the day the only metric that really matters is the amount of revenue generated and the ROI. If you don't know how to measure the ROI of your email marketing read this article How To Measure Email Marketing ROI.
Email Marketing Software Solutions
If you are a business that does not use email marketing I would highly recommend you take advantage of this tool. It very easy for anyone to do and can lead to a good ROI. If you don't know where to start sign up for Aweber or Constant Contact. Both systems are low cost, easy to learn and very effective to use. I think Aweber usually has an offer where you can sign up for $1 for a one month trial, which can allow you to test if for a month and see if there software is a good fit for you. Forwebsites built on Joomlathe email marketing programAcymailing is probably the best option but I know not many websites are built on Joomla in North America.
My name is Chris R. Keller. I work at Profitworks Small Business Services helping various B2B small businesses in Waterloo and Kitchener Ontario generate new customers. Feel free to connect with me on Google+ or if you are just interested in getting new customers for your B2B small businesses enter your email in the box provided below and click the "Send Me Free Sales Insights" button.
