Whether you’re selling hair curlers, or gathering donations for a charity, you’ll probably run a one-off email campaign at some point with the objective of making direct sales. This kind of one-off campaign is quite straightforward & linear: similar to an exchange with a customer at an event. They’ve signed up to receive your emails, so you can be fairly sure they’re in the market for what you’re selling, your purpose now is to gain & keep their attention, maintain their interest, and elicit the desire to buy.

Overall, in this type of campaign, there are four key areas on which to focus your efforts:

1. The Subject Line

The average internet user gets 7 ‘wanted’ (non-spam) emails every day. On top of that, they are targetted by a further 77 spam emails (hopefully their server/software will block at least some of these). While you, as a marketer, like to think that your latest campaign is of high importance, your recipients probably have 10 or 15 things higher up their to do list. These facts combine mean your subject line has to do two things well: 1) Avoid sounding like spam - or you’ll be straight in the deleted items folder, & 2) Persuade your recipient to actually open & read the email.

2. The Headline

Whether this is the headline of the email body, or just of an individual section within the email, the main role of your headline is to draw the reader’s attention & persuade them to read the body copy. It’s important, however, not to oversell. Email is largely about trust, and if your reader feels you’re trying to trick them, they’re unlikely to continue reading & even less likely to reach your final conversion point.

3. The Body Copy

Your headline has drawn the reader in, the purpose of the body copy now is two-fold: 1) maintain your reader’s interest, and 2) elicit the desire to click through to your site for more information.

4. The Landing Page

The two main traps people fall into when putting together landing pages are 1) to repeat the exact same information as the email, or 2)to totally ignore the content & purpose of the email, and start the landing page at a tangent from the email content. The landing page is a continuation of the email reader’s experience, not a different experience altogether.

If the user has landed on your landing page, they are a good way through the journey. You’ve caught their attention, maintained their interest, elicited a desire to move forward and find out more. All that is left now is to move them toward your target action.

The Conversation

If you think of this email experience as a conversation between you & the reader, you can’t go far wrong. Your subject line is the equivalent of catching the reader’s eye across a room. If your subject line looks interesting enough, and you do manage to catch their eye, you have a chance to put in your opening (your headline). If they respond to your opening, you get to expand a little further &, if your body copy is good enough, your reader may say “oh really? tell me more” and click through to your landing page. At that point, all that’s left is to draw them toward action, and your campaign is a success.

The primary advantage of online marketing over offline marketing is instantly trackable. In an offline world it might take weeks or even months before a marketer can gather meaningful data on the success of a campaign, whereas, in email marketing, this data can be gathered (and acted on) within days, or sometimes even hours.

The Biggest Advantage Of Email Over Direct Mail

If you send out a letter to 200,000 people & only 10 of them respond, what does that say? Unless you’ve got a really high-margin product, it probably means you wasted 199,990 letters, stamps, envelopes & a whole lot of time.

But what if you could send out 200 letters, find out within a matter of hours whether anyone was going to respond, and then send out (or fix) the rest of the 200,000, knowing your money won’t be wasted?

That’s more-or-less what email allows you to do: trial, measure, evaluate & improve your campaigns in hours rather than months.

The Other Biggest Advantage of Email Over Direct Mail

The average direct mail campaign has only one conversion point: the point of response. For example, a charity campaign may be measured simply on the number of donations received. If results are lower than expected, it is a complex task for us to figure out why.

An email campaign, on the other hand, has several conversion points:

1. Bounce (soft/hard)
2. Email Open Rate
3. Email Forward Rate
4. Clickthrough
5. Final Conversion

Not only can we measure here the number of Final Conversions, we can measure:

1. What percentage of our emails bounced? (is our list reliable?)
2. How many of our emails were received? (are we triggering spam filters? was our subject line appealing enough to open the email?)
3. What percentage of our emails were forwarded? (was our offer exciting enough to spread?)
4. How many email readers clicked through to our website? (did our email interest our readers enough to go further?)
5. What percentage of click-throughs converted on our website? (is our web-funnel effective in converting traffic?)

Answering each of these questions gives us the opportunity to improve our next campaign (or, if this was a trial campaign, to ensure our actual roll-out is as effective as possible). Making small changes to our lists, creative & website and monitoring the effect on the above metrics can hugely improve results for very little effort.