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Button Up Your Button Text to Up Your Email Marketing Results

Clickmail Marketing — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:49:46 +0000

Email marketing is made up of many moving parts. There are technical parts like the software, policy parts like CAN SPAM compliance, tricky parts like the email delivery, email design parts like alt text, and last and certainly not least, the word parts.

Email can also be pretty, flashy and showy, but it’s the words that drive the action. And the whole reason you do email marketing is to get email marketing results! So driving action, i.e. conversions, is critical. Making your email copywriting critical, even on your buttons.

As a follow up to our recent blog post on which words will encourage the most sign ups to your email marketing or email newsletter campaign, let’s tackle the words on your buttons next.

“Buttons? We don’t need no stinkin’ buttons.”

Yes you do. For those email recipients with images turned on, the button can offer a strong call to action. But not if you’re email marketing ingenuity is lacking and your buttons say only “Click Here” or “Submit.”

Your button text can be a strong motivator by being urgent, relevant and/or specific. Consider these possible word choices:

Start saving now
Get the latest issue
Join the club
Don’t miss the discount
Sign me up

But two caveats about using buttons in your email marketing:
1. Don’t rely on buttons alone. Remember that most people have images turned off in their emails, meaning your button won’t even show up, no matter how snazzy your email design.
2. Include more than one call to action. Usually a mix of buttons and text works. You can include text calls to action within the body text of the email, and in other places as standalone text.

Have you used button text that outperformed boring words and brought better email marketing results? If so, let us know at blog@clickmailmarketing.com! As an email solutions provider, we love to learn from and share your success stories.

Quick Email Marketing Checklist: Check These 7 Things Before You Hit “Send”

Clickmail Marketing — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:00:52 +0000

Even permission-based email marketing can go awry if you deploy an incorrect email marketing campaign. Yes, those folks opted in to get your email promotions and email newsletter. But they won’t stay opted in if you send them an email with broken links, typos in the subject line, or irrelevant content.
As an email marketing vendor, we’ve put together a quick checklist for just before you send that email:

1. Make sure your email promotion or newsletter renders correctly in different email clients. Use eDesign Optimizer from Pivotal Veracity or some other email marketing software to check.

2. Proofread the HTML and the text versions. Don’t think because it’s right in one version, it’s right in the other!

3. Check all the links to make sure they work. Actually do a test send and click on the links in the email. Go through the motions that your customers or subscribers will.

4. Double-check your subject line for typos. Subject line mistakes can be embarrassing! Don’t just stop with spell check as it doesn’t take into account the wrong word being used.

5. Test your subject line for spamminess.

6. Check the list you’re sending too. (Do you know the saying about sawing wood: measure twice, cut once? That mentality applies email marketing too. Check the list twice, send the email once…meaning save yourself from sending a follow-up, apology email.

7. Check any prices or dates to make sure they are correct and haven’t changed.

Of course a more comprehensive list is possible, but we want to make sure it’s an email marketing checklist you really use. These are the parts of your email marketing campaign that are most likely to be incorrect. Although double-checking all these won’t make up for poor data, out-of-date email lists, lackluster email template design or weak email copywriting, at least getting these seven parts right will help your email delivery rate and open rate.

Email Marketing Tools: Boost Your Email Marketing ROI with These Resources

Clickmail Marketing — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:00:29 +0000

Now that we’re in the holiday season, you’re likely busy with your holiday email marketing campaign (if you’re B2C) or understaffed with people taking time off. We don’t want to throw a lot of new information your way this time of year, rather we want to get you in a good place for a successful 2009, one with a higher email marketing ROI. Therefore our gift to you over the next couple of weeks, will be blogs on email marketing tools and resources you can learn from in the coming months.

If you haven’t yet tapped into MarketingSherpa as an email marketing tool, it’s time you did. Put it on your task list for 2009. You don’t have to subscribe to their email newsletter to benefit from their email marketing case studies and research. In fact, you don’t even have to be a paid member, although membership gives you access to over 880 case studies.

You can access all of the following email marketing resources (for free):

· Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2009 – Executive Summary

· Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008 – Executive Summary (PDF download, includes data charts)

· 2008 Dirty Dozen Email Newsletter Mistakes (PDF download)

· Sherpa’s Annual Email Marketing Study Results Teleconference Sherpa’s Email Marketing Presentation 2008: Top 10 Research Findings & Practical Ways to Lift Results (presentation, PDF, MP3 and transcript)

· Email Summit 2007 Wrap-Up Report

· Sign-up form – Free brochure & news on Email Summit 2008

· How to Improve Your Customer Service Email Responses (author interview)

· Top 10 Email Newsletter Mistakes

As an email marketing vendor, it’s our job at ClickMail Marketing to stay on top of changes in the email marketing industry, from regulations to consumer expectations. MarketingSherpa is one of the most valuable email marketing tools we’ve found.