We love helping companies save money. Email campaigns can get expensive so here are some tips guaranteed to generate savings you can take to the bank.

Graphics grab attention and can make your emails stand out. However, they can be expensive to produce. Rather than paying an arm and a leg for graphic design, consider using free online tools, such as Canva. Canva allows anyone to create beautiful designs (sans any knowledge in graphic design) simply and efficiently. The easy-to-use tool guides you through the basics and their design resources are inspiring.  You’ll be able to choose all of your own elements starting with the custom size or type of the finished work of art. In addition to supporting your email art, they have templates for Twitter cards, blog graphics, Facebook covers, and more. Find just your type, add images and a snazzy background, and drop that beauty into your next email.

Before you incorporate a lovely photo into an email, you can resize it and reduce the file size so it will load quickly for all your recipients. Any kind of image that’s slow to display leads to frustration and disinterest rather than fascination and engagement. Plus, a large image size can negatively affect mail delivery by email providers. To ensure that your mail gets delivered and the load time is optimized, use Webresizer to shrink those huge file sizes without affecting the quality or sharpness of your images.

When you spend big bucks on an email marketing campaign that doesn’t get the results you were looking for, your ROI goes down the drain and your anxiety levels go through the roof. Free services, like Gmail, won’t allow you to send an email to a large number of people all at once (which can get you flagged as a possible spammer resulting in a suspension of your Gmail account). To get better results, use an email marketing service. Pick one that can optimize your emails plus handle the sticky deliverability and legal issues while always employing the industry’s best practices. A good email marketing service will help you manage your recipient lists and track analytics (such as the number of emails that are actually being opened), too. If you’re sending out a high volume of emails on a regular basis, using a marketing service to avoid technical problems with deliverability is a must.

With dozens of email marketing services out there, finding the best price from a reliable company that will provide support matched to your needs is important. If you’re using one already be sure to find out exactly what it is you’re paying for (and that it isn’t their large overhead or complicated tools that are far beyond your needs or skill level). Another thing to think about is growth; if your business is booming and your contact lists growing then starting now with an email marketing service offering the best price for delivering large volumes of material will save you in the long run. Many services start out free but once you trip their maximum-per-month level they can ramp up the big charges fast. Not us.

At Sendinblue, we’ll help you create your email campaigns, manage your contacts, integrate with your website, and we’ll provide you with meaningful statistics. What’s more, we’ll even reliably deliver up to 9,000 of your emails for free each month. Increasing your email load? Just $25 per month delivers 40,000 monthly emails, or opt for our economical pay-as-you go plan. Here’s more info on why Sendinblue is a leader in email marketing services.

Despite the fact that online content marketing and the use of social media for outreach are growing at a more rapid rate than ever before, the value of a great email campaign shouldn’t be underrated. If you’re a business or business marketer, here are three easy steps to start optimizing your email campaign today:

1. Improve Email Deliverability

 The single most important element of an effective email campaign is ensuring that the email is actually deliverable to your audience. It’s extremely important that you use the right tactics to make sure that your email doesn’t wind up in a user’s spam folder, or that it’s not deleted immediately before even being opened. You can improve email deliverability by customizing fields in your data base using email newsletter and marketing services like Sendinblue, Aweber, or Constant Contact; carefully selecting your email address and name that will appear in the “from” field of the email; and setting up a Sender Policy Framework (SPF).

2. Limit Your Text, Optimize Your Visuals & CTAs

 Once you’ve improved email deliverability to the point that users are actually receiving and opening your emails, the next step is guaranteeing that the content within is interesting, engaging, and readable. If you’re like most marketers, this means that you probably need to reduce the amount of text within your email, placing the most important information in headings within the text. To eliminate too much white space, replace the text with visuals, like relevant pictures or videos, and make sure you have a strong CTA. CTA stands for call to action, and is the part of your email that details what you want the user to actually do. Without at least one good CTA, your users are unlikely to take any action at all, other than just deleting your email once it’s been read.

3. Use a Newsletter Service

 If you’re not already using an email newsletter and marketing service to help ensure that your emails actually reach your customers, today’s the day to start. A newsletter service can optimize your emails for you, creating emails that are aesthetically pleasing, relevant, social media ready, mobile-optimized, and more. A newsletter service can also help you to manage all of your email lists, and even track analytics (like how many emails are actually being opened).

Optimizing an email campaign is time-consuming work, but doesn’t have to be difficult. By improve your email deliverability, limiting the text with your emails, optimizing visuals and calls to action, and investing in the services of a professional newsletter service, you can be well on your way to growing your customer base and improving ROI in no time.

Sources

https://www.sendinblue.com

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2336717/7-strategies-to-optimize-your-email-marketing-campaign

http://www.digitalwavefront.com/performance-marketing-blog/3-tips-to-optimizing-your-email-marketing-campaign/

Tracking Your Email Campaigns with Google Analytics and Your Marketing Software 

Email campaigns can be a highly useful marketing tool. It is important to obtain accurate statistics in order to discover their effectiveness. These statistics, as well as an overall idea of your return on investment (ROI) for the campaign, can be acquired by using Google Analytics combined with software tools from an email marketing service like Sendinblue or another email software provider monitoring pre-click information.

Tracking Users’ Actions 

Software from email marketing services can help you gather basic information about the recipients of your email campaigns. Specifically, the email software is designed to give you user information regarding which recipients have opened each email and clicked on links within, as well as which ones have ignored it altogether. However, once your recipient clicks on a link inside of a message, the email software no longer can gather statistics on any further actions.

Here, Google Analytics can be put into use to gather a wealth of “post-click” knowledge about them including actions that the recipients take once they have clicked on the links within the email. By creating an advanced segment within Google Analytics, an email campaign manager can track the destination website’s source, discover how successful the email campaign is, and make any changes necessary to bring users to the site.

Implement Sendinblue to Complement Google Analytics

Of course, Google Analytics helps a campaign manager gather “post-click” information; but how can you obtain further information about the user’s actions before they click on the links within the email?

Simple – by using tools offered by Sendinblue, an email marketing service delivering a host of benefits. You can view statistics including open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, the number of contacts who sent the email to a “junk” folder, the number of clicks per link, and statistics based on your recipients’ providers including Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and all the others when you are empowered by Sendinblue’s tracking technology.

This, in combination with statistics provided by your Google Analytics strategy, can help your marketing team gather incredibly useful information that will be useful as you craft and revise all your successful email marketing campaigns.

Now that March has blown by, we wanted to recap some of the top email marketing experts’ best posts from the month for you. Obviously, it’s hard to pick just four that are worthy of the spotlight, but these provide what we feel are really valuable insights and so are well worth your time.

Like any other form of marketing, email marketing practices and strategies change and evolve. But there are also basic best practices. These experts deliver tips on both. We read a ton of different resources every day to stay on top of it all and have found a number worth following.

So without further ado, here are our favorite email marketing experts from last month and some of the top tips that they shared. And, we’re including their Twitter handles to make it easy for you to follow them regularly, too.

In The Tease Factor: How to Optimize your Email Marketing for Engagement, Jordie throws a video of monkeys in to make the point that your customers will reject poorly optimized emails. Monkeys always get our attention, but this post goes beyond the fun factor with practical ideas about optimizing engagement. He offers four steps to help you see your email campaigns differently. Try his thought exercise:

1. Lay out all your emails side by side and see how many are purely focused on direct purchases. This leaves no choice for the people that, at that time, do not want to buy. When there is no meaningful alternative presented, they cannot (be expected to) interact.

2. Add to that all the emails where the gist or your entire message is in the email itself. This doesn’t encourage any activity “beyond the read”.

3. And then the mails that, in the eyes of the recipient, contain a repeated message. Without variation there is no incentive for active recipients to further engage with your brand.

4. Finally we look at the emails that remain (if there are any). For what percentage of your email list are those really interesting? Are they also geared towards the profile of a – soon to be – inactive recipient?

Jordie’s posts are on www.emailmonday.com

It may be the start of spring but Chad is thinking about Christmas. That’s because retailers are planning for the holiday sales now. He’s offered timely slides on 6 Retail Email Marketing Priorities for 2015. This one especially hit home:

“Email conversion rates on smartphones are about half of what they are on tablets and desktops. The majority of that gap is due to poor design rather than consumer preference.”

He shares his more of his Salesforce Marketing Cloud notes at www.emailmarketingrules.com.

Spoiler alert! The 4 Areas of Email Marketing Improvement are Collecting, Connecting, Converting, and Circulating in Daniel’s post on the Marketing Land site. He steps through the details of the metrics and tools that can be applied to make your marketing better and also lists the pesky “common errors” that every email marketer should learn to avoid.

Following all those happy conversions with a strategy he call “circulating” will help your organization develop deep campaigns to reach long-time and repeat customers. He notes:

“This phase is towards the end of the customer lifecycle but should be viewed as a continued portion of the customer or prospect relationship with the company. It’s safe to say that this is where 90% of businesses ‘drop the ball’ in terms of maintaining relationships with valuable prospect and customer groups. Optimizing this phase means the construction of a profit-rich database that a company can draw upon again and again for sales and referrals.”

Daniel posts on Marketing Land and Duct Tape Marketing, a site for small businesses.

Our last pick is a growing collection of experts. In March, we were especially impressed by Sujan Patel’s post on 10 Ways to Improve the Open Rates of Your Marketing Emails.He asks:

“Did you know that there’s a form of marketing that returns $44.25 for every $1 spent? … Far from being ‘dead,’ email marketing still has one of the highest engagement rates and returns on investment of any marketing strategy.”

We agree. While Sujan doesn’t often post on email marketing, the site pulls in a variety of voices providing expert advice on the topic.

That wraps up our four fab favorites from last month. Check back soon to get more ideas on how to improve your email marketing efforts.