Read part two here

It’s no secret that email is a great way to draw large numbers of leads down your sales funnel. Not only is it easier and cheaper than other lead-nurturing methods, it’s incredibly effective. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email returns $48.56 for every $1 you invest.

But great ROI is not automatic. To fully realize the potential of email as a sales tool, you need two things: (1) knowledge of email best practices and (2) a well-reasoned strategy for success. These are the things we’ll cover in this two-part email series.

First let’s make sure we’re on the same page: We’re assuming you already have a targeted list of leads that you’ve collected yourself (as opposed to a list you purchased). If you’re not at this point, don’t worry: Robin’s post on building your opt-in list is a great place to start. Read it, start implementing it, then come back here. (We’ll wait…)  OK, let’s go.

1. Deciding on an emailing schedule
Consider the game of chess. A chess master isn’t thinking about how his next move will get him to check mate—he’s thinking about how his next 15-25 moves will get him there. Same goes for email. One email won’t do the trick, but a carefully constructed sequence of emails will.

How many, how often and what time to send?
Extending the chess analogy further, I regret to inform you that here is no rule of thumb for designing email campaigns, just like there’s no foolproof series of moves that will bring you to checkmate.

When creating your campaigns, you’ll have to make judgment calls based on a variety of factors, including your audience type (demographics, needs, wants, habits, etc.); what you’re selling (is it something people want to think about frequently?); the content of your emails; and your relationship with your audience.

An example
If you sell auto insurance, a monthly email is probably the right frequency, since people have only so much desire to think about their insurance. However, certain content may dictate a more rapid-fire approach: People are always eager to save money, so if your campaign centers on an irresistible offer, you may have success with more touches at a higher frequency.

To reiterate, there’s no formula for constructing an effective email nurture campaign. We could lie and tell you to send X emails at Y rate on Z day of the week, but that advice wouldn’t be very helpful. If you want to produce results with email, you need to do your research, think critically, test multiple strategies, monitor your results and keep striving for perfection.

2. Getting your email through the spam filter
At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s impossible to nurture leads if they don’t see your email. It pays to take every precaution to avoid spam filters. Start with your subject line.

Subject line no-nos

• excessive punctuation!!!!!
• ALL CAPS
• missplleed words
• w0rds sp&lled wth $pecial ch@r@cters

Message body no-nos

• Email messages that contain images but little or no text could be labeled as spam. (Spam filters suspect that senders of image-heavy emails are trying to hide their content.)
• Messages that use colored backgrounds or numerous font styles. (If possible, use a simple stylesheet to format the message text rather than excessive font tags.)

3. Getting recipients to open your email
So you’ve successfully avoided the spam filter. Good job. But you still have work to do: You’ve got to get prospects to actually open your email, and yours is just one email among many clamoring for attention.

So you have to stick your subject line.

Any tennis players reading this? Yes? Then you know that getting your serve in play is one of the most important elements of the game. You have zero chances of winning the point, much less the match, if you don’t get the ball in play. Same goes for subject lines. If they don’t entice people to click, your email campaigns won’t get off the ground.

Here are some tips for your subject lines:

• Tell readers who you are up front. There is no need to try to hide your identity, so make sure your company is easily associated with your subject line.
• Entice with your subject line, but don’t give everything away. You want to give recipients a reason to open the email.
• If your message contains an offer, be sure to include it in the subject line. People are always looking for a deal!
• If you can, split test your subject line to find out which is the highest converting for your business. (You’d be surprised which subject lines perform well.)
• Don’t get carried away with writing enticing subject lines or you’ll risk alerting the spam filter. What’s more, you don’t want to overpromise in the subject line and under-deliver in the message body.

According to research from Epsilon, the from line is now nearly as important as the subject line when it comes to getting fickle people to open emails. Faced with too many emails and not enough time, people use the from line as a filter. If they don’t recognize the name, they skip it, delete it, or mark it as spam. The upshot is that your “from” line should include your company name and/or other markers that the recipient will recognize.

That’s it for part one. In future posts, we’ll discuss the remaining four elements of a successful nurture campaign: Optimizing your layout for the preview pane, applying the WIIFM method to content, issuing calls to action and using landing pages to improve conversion rate.

Read part two here

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