If this article is anything to go by, email marketing is set to explode in 2012. With tablets and smartphones now dominating business it’s literally never been easier for people to pick up their emails in the office and on the go.

This is great news for content marketers but puts a lot more pressure on email marketing to start showing positive results. While I can’t give you a check list for writing the perfect email, I can give you a number of tips and tactics to explore that can help you point your own email marketing strategy in the right direction.

Find your Voice

If you have a website (who doesn’t?) or already use marketing materials of some sort you should have already thought about the ‘voice’ of your company. If it helps, think of it more as your identity; Do you want your communications to be from a corporate, unnamed presence or from an individual (or a few different individuals), someone like me for example, you can see my name on the post, my image to the side, my bio etc.

Also think about what terminology you use; do you have a set of terms for your products (like 37signals)? What about your employees (like Rackspace)? Consistency is also key here, you can’t just make these up; make sure you use the same terminology that your site does or it could just end up confusing your recipients.

Sorting this stuff out is important because it not only helps you write your actual emails but it’s the first impression people receive of your company and says a lot about how you conduct business.

Personalisation

This kind of goes with the point above and can go from simply using someone’s name in an email, to the actual email address used (Some people have an aversion to marketing@company.com emails and will have more time for emails like hello@company.com.)

Think about how you want to address your recipients in the actual body of the text too. Things like newsletters and updates won’t really require much personalisation but if you’re addressing someone to complete a task (update information, for example) you might want to make it sound like you’re addressing them personally.

Also think about who the email will be from; is there an individual that will be handling them or do you want to use a generic titles like’ The Team’? Different types of email will warrant different approaches.

Segmenting, Goals & Targeting relevant groups

Determining what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaigns will help you know which segments of your database you want to target. Before you start a campaign, decide what you want the outcome to be; for example, if your outcome is for users to update a certain bit of information on their profile page, it makes sense to only target users who have this information missing. Segmenting like this will help the impact your emails have and the interaction rates you receive.

I like to also divide my groups in country too so I know what time of the day my emails are going out and when I should be expecting interaction rates to rise. I find this also helps me write my emails as different countries/cultures have language and spelling differences that you could cater to.

Also remember to plan a schedule; this will also help to prevent you spamming the same groups of people. It’s likely that your audience won’t want to get hit with a general mailer more than once a week (personal notifications are different), so if you’re sending more than one subject of email per week, be aware of who you’re hitting.

Experiment with Content

Content is obviously the biggest thing you need to play with when it comes to testing the effectiveness of your email marketing. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to write successful email marketing campaigns because that is all dependant on your recipients, but here’s the stuff you need to be testing or at least be aware of:

Length, style, links, intro text, closing text, signature, email sender, use of names, use of bullet points or lists, use of pricing, use of questionable words like ‘free’ or ‘offer’, images (or any embedded media), country specific language and spelling, and probably a load more that I’ve forgotten. (All of these things will be touched on somewhere in this post).

Think about links

If you’re placing links into your emails then there are 3 main things you need to bear in mind; the amount, the placement, and tracking.

The amount of different links you place into your emails will obviously have an impact on the CTR’s. If you’re linking to 4 different pages then you’re CTR’s will be split 4 ways, so think about where exactly you want to send your visitors and try to limit your links.

The positioning of your links will also have an impact on their CTR’s. It probably goes without saying that if you’re using more than 1 link, the order they’re placed is likely to be the order they’re clicked – so bear this in mind if you have one link more important than the other.

Finally, tracking. If you don’t add tracking to your links then you wont have any way of determining how successful your emails were (i.e. how many people clicked on the links you wanted them too). For any email marketing campaigns that insist on an interaction, tracking links is vital.

Remember your signature

All of the above points can come into play with this one. Remember that your signature is just as visible as your emails content so consider the use of links, images, contact information and even aids like testimonials. (Remember tracking on these links as well, it keeps your analytics results neat and shows how many additional visits you can get from signature links).

It shouldn’t detract from your email, and as email marketing tends to stay pretty short, I wouldn’t recommend using all of those variables in your signature!

Test Your Subject Lines

There are a number of ways to test your subject lines, including;
Length - usually the shorter the better, but don’t hold me to that
Keywords - often the use of ‘free’, ‘offer’, or ‘discount’ don’t go down too well
Exclamation marks & grammar – you can test the use of these things but be careful, exclamation marks are usually a sign of spam and most people are savvy to it.
Use of personal names & business names – some people like it, some find it too imposing; you’ll have to test how your recipients react

Devices and Formats

Just bear in mind that it’s extremely likely that a decent sized portion of your audience will be reading your emails on mobile devices, so do everything you can to ensure your emails are compatible with smart phones and tablets.

This mean you need to be conscious of the format of content, are you just using plain text or have you included HTML, Javascript, images, videos etc.? Compatibility of these can vary on device (For example, Apple devices won’t display Flash).

And this all just has to do with the actual emails; if you want some tips on creating an effective landing page to then convert your visitors, see our guide here: 6 Steps to an Effective Landing Page.

You can also see our guide on Lead Generation 101: Turning Visitors into Leads if you need help getting started with building your database.

Content might not be king any more but that doesn’t mean it’s been booted out of the kingdom altogether. Businesses shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that content marketing is a waste of time and the Venn diagram, courtesy of SEOmoz, shows that even though content marketing is now sharing the limelight with Technical SEO and Social Media, it’s still very much a part of any optimisation strategy.

To really maximise your content marketing, whether it be via blog posts, news items, press releases, or email marketing, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you get off to a good start.

1. What do you want to achieve?

Before you start a content marketing campaign it’s important to firmly establish the point of it. What are you trying to achieve? Promotion of a product? Customer interaction? Brand awareness?

Content marketing isn’t likely to be the sole form of marketing you use so think about how content can aid your current campaign. Also set yourself a deadline, by what date do you want to achieve your goals?

2. Know your audience

Blog posts, news posts or email marketing campaigns are likely to fail unless you can display a coherent theme that relates to your audience. In order to find out which themes will be effective, you first need to know your audience.

Do all the research you can to determine exactly who your audience is. If you have the resources it’s helpful to perhaps send out a survey or a poll so you can get a general idea of the age, sex, demographic, interests etc. of your audience.

There are of course, a few assumptions that can be made when determining your audience. For example, if you’re a web hosting company you can assume that your audience will display more of an interest in blog posts relating to web hosting than they would graphic design.

3. Themes & developing content

Once you’ve established what you want to achieve and the exact audience to which you want to target, you can actually start planning your content.

Start thinking about what themes you want your content to revolve around, what kind of voice (are you writing from a personal perspective?), the kind of tone you want (informative/stern or conversational), and whether you want to aim more towards guides or casual news items. Personally, I find making a list of rough titles I want to write to helps me with developing content so I have a kind of check list of posts I want to write, this also helps me with the planning of my content, which brings me on to my next point.

4. Scheduling

Think about how often to want to publish content. If you’re sending emails, how often are they going out? Perhaps you’re writing an monthly newsletter or a weekly product update. If you’re blogging are you aiming for a daily post? Do you have the time and staff to do this? Always try to be realistic with your schedule or you could become overwhelmed and start producing poor quality content, or missing deadlines altogether.

The tips from now on can be seen as a continual loop. When you first start your content marketing you’ll take an educated guess at what times and dates are best for publishing content. However, once you go through the testing, measuring results, and plan review stages below you’ll probably find that you need to come back round to the scheduling stage and re-evaluate your strategy.

This isn’t a bad thing though so don’t worry if you find yourself back here 3 or 4 times before you start seeing some positive feedback.

5. Testing

As with any kind of online marketing and advertising campaigns it’s important to test different methods of promoting your campaign in order to determine the most effective delivery method.

Testing may seem easy but there are tonnes of variable combinations that you’ll need to explore if you want to really cover all your bases. Don’t just test whether a short blog post works better than a long one, test whether a short blog post works better than a long one at 10am, whether it gets more retweets on Twitter than a long one, or whether it gets you more comments.

Testing and measuring your results (below) go hand in hand so remember that for every variable you test and change, you also need to be recording its effect.

6. Measuring your results

As a company that takes pride in our email marketing campaigns we put a great deal of effort into measuring the success of each campaign. We take into account factors like the number of people in the campaign, the title of the email, the time of day, the length of the email, interaction rates, the relevance of the email to the recipient, and much more.

We can look at all of these things to determine why certain emails failed and what proved to be effective; do 10am emails have a higher interaction rate than 5pm emails? What about Monday compared to Friday? Long emails or Short? These are all factors that can be turned into useful information; market research if you like.

The same principles can be applied to blog posts and news items too; timings, content, audience, relevancy; they’re universal variables that come into play with all kinds of content marketing, and are therefore all variables that can be harnessed and studied.

7. Don’t be afraid to change the plan

Obviously, the point of testing and measuring your results is so you can optimise your content marketing strategy. If you find that your original plan isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it.

If your content either isn’t working, or starts to drop (in visits, CTR’s, comments etc.) then loop back round to the testing stage and start again. It’s safe to assume that once your figures start dropping, you start to lose the attention of your audience and therefore you start to lose the reason for your content marketing.

See also: A Guide to Successful Email Marketing