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When you put together an email marketing campaign, there are some factors to take into account if you want it to be successful. Email marketing expert Hank Hoffmeier of iContact shared those factors and his suggestions for yielding a huge ROI from your efforts in this week’s podcast.

Here are some of the main highlights of what he and our host, Bryan Reynolds, discussed.

There are a number of components that go into a successful email marketing strategy. The first lies in your ability to actually get people to open the emails you send. It doesn’t matter how well written the body of your email is. If your subject line isn’t enticing enough to click, nobody will receive the message you’re hoping to convey.

If you want consumers to actually open and engage with your emails, you’ll need to get inside their heads. Ask yourself whether you would want to open the email if you received it, and use that to gauge whether it’s ready to send.

Remember, people are more likely to read emails that are personalized and that convey usefulness. This can be done by using their names in both the subject line and body text, as well as with email content that addresses problems your audience may be experiencing.

The next factor you need to consider is your email’s call to action. This is just as important as the subject line, as it brings your readers even closer to becoming paying customers. If your CTA doesn’t drive the point home and entice people to learn more, they won’t click through to your landing page.

Once you get your subject line and call to action optimized, your job isn’t done. You then need to turn your attention to the landing page you link to. This page needs to be a follow-up to the content of your email that moves readers even further along in the buying process. From there, stay in contact with your contacts and reach out to any who abandon their shopping carts.

Although all of the above factors are necessary for implementing a successful campaign, they won’t get you anywhere if the emails don’t even make it into readers’ inboxes. Every aspect of your campaign relies on deliverability, so you’ll want to do all you can to ensure you maintain a positive domain reputation.

Here are some of the components that affect your reputation:

Think of your domain reputation as a credit score. Each time you send an email, providers like Gmail evaluate the actions your contacts take and ding or elevate your score based on those actions.

Actions that have a positive impact include opening emails, clicking their links, marking emails as important and marking emails as TINS (this is not spam). The more positive interactions people have with your emails, the more likely providers will be to let your emails into the inboxes of new subscribers.

Although it’s impossible to completely eliminate negative reactions to your emails, you can greatly reduce the number of times they happen through personalization and usefulness. Some of the events that have a negative impact on your score include email bounces (invalid email addresses), being marked as spam, requests to unsubscribe, and worse, having your emails go ignored.

To increase the likelihood of positive reactions, avoid making the following mistakes.

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is thinking that buying contact lists will help. Unfortunately, it will actually have the opposite effect on your deliverability “credit” score. The same goes for sending emails to unengaged contacts. Although an “are we breaking up” email can be good for list hygiene, constantly sending emails to contacts who don’t want to hear from you will have negative effects on your score.

Similar to this is your list hygiene. Hank recommends cleaning out your contact list at least once per year, if not every 6 months. Doing this will get rid of dead weight and increase your deliverability and open rate.

Deliverability comes down to relationship building. It’s important to build trust with your audience, and email provides you with a way to develop one-on-one relationships with your audience.

To do this, make sure you set your new subscribers’ expectations as soon as they subscribe. How often will you contact them? What valuable information can they expect from your emails? Be sure to establish these details early and get your contacts used to receiving your emails. The more used to it they are, the more likely they will be to remain subscribed to and engaged with your company and products.

Remember, people will only open emails that provide value. If you want to see a huge ROI from your email marketing efforts, having a personalized, relatable approach that addresses the problems experienced by subscribers is a must.

• Email allows you to be personal and have one-on-one conversations with all your consumers.
  
• Email providers give every company a “credit” score that affects deliverability.
  
• No matter what your email marketing strategy currently looks like, you should NEVER purchase a contact list. Using a purchased list can have detrimental effects on your long-term email deliverability.
  

• Email isn’t going anywhere in the near future. It’s just as relevant to relationship building now as it was when it first became a marketing strategy.
  
• It doesn’t matter how good your email content is. If nobody opens it, nobody will click through to anything.
  
• List hygiene is critical to success. You should clean out inactive subscribers at least once per year, if not every 6 months.
  

• Hank’s LinkedIn
  
• iContact
  

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