Posted: 15th April 2016
A main part of our marketing mix at Topdogdays is our regular email newsletter that goes out to over 14,000 email subscribers. Topdogdays provides information on deals & top tips to help you get the most from your day out in the UK. We’ve put together 10 top tips for email marketing that we hope will prove useful to fellow WIRE members.
1. Email Subscription Pop-ups; whilst these pop-ups can be slightly annoying, we found a huge increase in take-up once we’d installed this onto our site. Play around with the timings of these pop-ups to balance subscriptions against the chance visitors will leave your site before realising the valuable content that lies within.
2. Email Sign Up Form; keep your email sign up form as simple as possible to make this a painless process for the subscriber & only ask for data that you are actual going to use.
3. What’s In It For Them; highlight to potential customers why they should gift you their email address, clearly setting out the potential benefits available such as special offers, top tips & guides or free downloadable content.
4. Email Marketing Software; use an email marketing software package to help you craft & send professionally formatted emails. We use a monthly plan from MailChimp but the great news is that they have a free option for those with under 2000 subscribers, (maximum 12,000 emails a month).
5. Mobile Friendly; around 50% of emails are now opened on a mobile device so it’s vital that any emails sent out are mobile friendly. Many of the email marketing software packages have this inbuilt into their systems for ease of use.
6. Regular emails; it’s often best to build a routine around your email newsletter so not only will the customer remember you, but will actually be expecting contact from you.
7. Timing; look for an optimal time during the week/month that will work best for your recipients. As we write about days out in the UK, we tend to time our newsletters to go out on a Friday afternoon as people begin to make plans for the weekend.
8. Topical; sometimes you can link your email newsletter to a particular issue such as a national event or even a change in the weather. For example during a heat wave, (fingers crossed), we might look to put together an article on best water parks to be found around the UK.
9. Competitions & Offers; often it’s the special offers & competitions that provide the best conversion rates so consider if this is something you can run within an email campaign. Our recent Leeds Castle competition was quickly picked up on Moneysaving Expert forums & led to a huge increase in traffic.
10. Monitoring; whilst the more advanced users can look to branch out into split testing & such like, simply by keeping a close eye on your campaign statistics you’ll quickly gain a greater understanding of what works, or sadly has people reaching for the dreaded unsubscribe button!
