What Content Works in eDMs
“Drop the ball on your eDM content at your own peril” – our words of wisdom for the week!
Is it that time again already? The pressure’s really on to get your monthly newsletter out to your recipients but you’ve got less time than usual to do it, so inevitably the quality of the newsletter content suffers this time around. Oh well…just getting the newsletter out is good enough isn’t it?
Umm no – you may get away with it for one newsletter but if the ball is dropped often you’ll see the click rate drop and the unsubscribe rate climb.
In earlier blog posts this year we’ve covered email marketing plans and how to create a winning eDM campaign. In this blog post we focus on actual eDM content and how it can secure hits to your website. As expected the content in an eDM will be part of a bigger project or campaign that was determined when your email marketing plan for the year was created. For example your email marketing plan states what type of communication is shared and how often.
Your email marketing plan may include a monthly newsletter so the content of that eDM needs to be relevant to a newsletter – not content associated with selling a service or product – that would be in a sales eDM campaign.
At Mobilize Mail we deliver a regular monthly e-newsletter and our focus for this type of communication is to share our experience and news on email marketing, blogging and use of social media.
Reviewing our newsletter eDM statistics regularly informs us which topics in the newsletters receive the most clicks and our future newsletter content is crafted based on earlier newsletter results. It is clearly evident when we deviate off the path in our newsletters- our click statistics suffer.
Reviewing your eDM statistics is fundamental to understanding your audience – and their action determines the content of future eDMs.
It can be a laborious task reviewing statistics of earlier eDMs – and taking shortcuts is human – we may just look at the most current campaign.
The key to successful content however is in reviewing a series of eDM campaigns.
We recently identified that our September 2013 newsletter was highly successful so we’ll be using those results to guide us in our next newsletter. Mobilize Mail provides a Statistics Report service. Our team is less attached to your campaigns therefore we can review and compare a series of eDM campaigns for you more objectively, offering recommendations for your future eDM activity. Our clients using this service are getting better results consistently.
In summary there are guidelines for eDM content presentation – i.e not too much, catchy titles and clear call to actions however reviewing your earlier eDM success will determine what content really works with your audience.