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E-mail can bring more visitors to your website, it can help you to recruit new customers, maintain relationships with your current customers, increase sales ( also to already existing customers ) and in general makes you better known. Sending people an e-mail is fast, cheap and highly targetable. But setting up an e-mail campaign that is effective requires great care. In this article we’ll give you some things to consider when you’re thinking about adding e-mail as a sales channel.

Only use Opt-in & Opt-Out recipients

People don’t open spam, and they’d rather drop dead than click on a link inside it if you even managed to trick them to open it. Only send your e-mail to people who have asked to receive it. And always allow people to stop receiving your e-mail messages by providing an unsubscribe link.

Make sure your e-mail is opened

People scan their incoming mails and decide instantly whether they are worth opening or not. In this screening things like the subject, but also experiences with previous mails from the sender are considered. Use your company name as a sender. The subject should give a short overview of what the mail has to offer. Don’t use capitals, and try to use as less punctuation as possible.

Use the Mail Client window

When a mail arrives and isn’t opened yet, only a small portion of the top is visible in the mail client window. Use this space as best as you can : provide interesting and attractive text in case images are blocked. In fact, most mail clients, on and off the internet, block images by default.

Make sure people click

Even if people open your e-mail, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are actually going to interact with it. Try to address each recipient personally, and personalise the content if possible. Take in account every reader is in a hurry, so don’t use language that’s too difficult. Avoid long sentences. Highlight important words, use paragraphs, en don’t go too wild with fonts and font sizes. Adding your own personal contact information also adds to build trust between you and your recipients.

What do you want your readers to do ?

Think about this call to action for each mail. Make sure it is visible at least once without scrolling. Limit your offer in time : Order now, react before … Repeat the action at the end of the mail. The connection between the number of links and the number of clicks is proven, so be sure to use different links to refer to the same page. Don’t use ‘click here’, make your links meaningful. Only underline words when they form a link, and make sure every graphical element in your mail links to something.

After the click

If you generated some person’s interest, and this person has decided to react to your e-mail, this person will end up on a page you guided him to. This page should fit the expectations of the person who goes there. Make sure the link goes to a relevant page, preferably in the recipients language. If possible, make sure the lay-out of the mail and that of the landing page are the same. Remove any superfluous navigation. Use big buttons and easy to understand text links.

Experiment with rendering

Rendering in e-mails is taking care your e-mail look the same in each mail client. Register accounts with major e-mail service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! and Windows Live Mail. You should also install Mail Clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird, and check beforehand what your mail looks like in all these programs and online applications. Make sure your HTML gets shown the way it’s supposed to in as much mail clients as possible.

Integration of e-mail and CMS

If you have a Content Management System, and you integrate the content of your site into your e-mails, you’ll be able to e-mail people more often, and your e-mails will be of higher quality. You’ll also be able to adapt content easier to specific recipients.

Integration of e-mail and Web Analytics

It’s important to know how many people have received your e-mail, how many have opened it, how many and which links are being clicked and so on. If you manage to track the performance of your e-mails by using an analytics program, you’ll be able to increase effectiveness, because you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t.