Mastering Email Direct Marketing (EDM) is a big challenge, for which not only requires a reliable EDM system, but also needs the marketer's expertise in composing a quality email. We all agree on one thing: the quality of email content is the core of email marketing. Naturally, writing a good email is the prerequisite of successful email campaigns.
Here, we're to discuss what kind of emails can be considered as a good email.
How to define "Good"?
What features do good emails share?
High readability? Bringing about orders? Stimulating word of mouth marketing? The criteria above are fine. And the standard we introduce in this article is going to be more universal and easier to be understood. It has two aspects:
The first one is people receive your emails. This is a prerequisite we usually ignored. If people fail to receive your emails, you have no chance to present your content, not even to mention whether to know it's good or not.
The second is people are willing to read. No one wants to waste his/her time in anything unattractive.
People Receive Your Emails
There are two situations if people couldn't receive your email: delivery failed and spams.
1. Delivery Failed
Except for the system exception that rarely happens, the main reason behind delivery failure is that the email content has been rejected.
In most cases, it's because the email contains some "illegal words or phrases" Of course, this is not common. The normal mails couldn't have illegal words or phrases since the illegal means you have already violated law. To be more specific, the content in your email may have something damaging national security or crime-related.
2. Spam
Spam is the most common case. Your emails have been delivered successfully but filtered to the trash folder directly. Although this is not delivery failure, they are almost the same, for no one would check emails in the trash folder. There are many reasons behind the situation. The main ones are the following:
- Emails' subject or body contains some spam-related words. Words like advertisements, loans, invoices, free, gifts, agents or some special characters, are likely to lead the email to be identified as spam. Please treat this case with caution and test the email before mass sending. If the test email goes to the trash folder, remember to change the possible spam-lead words.
- Too many links in the email. The more links one email has, the lower rating it gets. It's recommended to add one or two links in one email only.
- Too many content or too large in size. An email with too many high-quality images consumes large space so the email could be filtered by the email server easily. Use large-size images with caution!
- Too many duplicates sent out. If you send out emails with the same content in bulk, they're easily been considered as spam emails. You could insert some variables in the content like recipients' name to make each email different. Besides, completing the whole task by dividing it into smaller sending operations is also recommended to avoid the spam situation.
- Historical issues. If the emails you sent have been reported as spam repeatedly, the newly sent emails are likely to be identified as Spam, too. To fix it, you need to guide people to unsubscribe your emails (an Unsubscribe link exists at the bottom of each mail sent) and don't send any email to them. By doing so, your emails will have lower reported rate and more people could receive your emails.
Remember
Qmail has a close connection with the QQ, the largest SNS platform in China, so its mail service has quite a lot of "difference". A widely-known experience is that you should avoid to set a Qmail address or QQ Exmail address as the Sender's address if you're going to send a large number of emails to Qmail or QQ Exmail addresses, reducing the possibility of being rejected. Besides, since the QQ email addresses could be guessed out by the QQ number, the delivery failure rate might be higher if there are too many guessed addresses in your sending lists.
Tips: the mails sent by MikeCRM use the unified server to send out emails. Although recipients would see the Sender's address as you've set, the recipient's mail servers know the emails from MikeCRM are all sent by the address service@mikecrm-edm.com.
So, you can lead your clients to add the email address service@mikecrm-edm.com or the domain mikecrm-edm.com into the white list of their email account. P.S. we're going to provide a service with custom email domain to send out email. Stay tuned!
People are willing to read
When your clients receive marketing & promotion campaigns or get product/service from you, they might experience four emotion phases, from "unfamiliar", "familiar", "recognized", to "trustworthy". People in different phases may vary recognition level of your EDM marketing.
People who trust or recognize you click the email once they see you're the sender. The familiar ones might read the email subject first and decide whether to read it or not. The unfamiliar might ignore your emails when they consider the sender as junk or spam email.
This might be the key factor that decide whether people are willing to read your email. We must know that there is no marketing channel that meets all our needs. Each channel has its own most suitable usage scenarios and corresponding downsides. Apart from those consideration, we still could do something within our control to strengthen the attraction of your emails.
1. An attractive email subject
When people receive your email, they notice its sender and its subject firstly. That's to say, email subject plays a decisive role in whether people open your email or not.
The length of email subject must be appropriate, usually around 10 words. It should also be clear, tightly focused, and relevant to the email content. It's not worthwhile to use an attractive subject with nothing to do with the content because people may feel cheated. It's time for you to make the most of your language skills.
2. Valuable email content
The email body should not only be pleasing in appearance, but also be worthy of read. It doesn't make sense if people don't need it no matter how good your products are. So, the best option is to understand each other's need, find the common ground, and place higher value on email content.
Otherwise, once people get the first impression like "This is not what I want", "Does it have anything to do with me", it takes much higher efforts to remove prejudice.
To write a good email, you need to do more homework than those mentioned above. The above advice are the basic requirement. We'll find more valuable experience and share them with you. I wish everybody could make the most of the EDM system MikeCRM provides and get fruitful marketing campaigns.
