The Bright Business Suite

"Information at the source of action" is the slogan of Atemis since 1998. It's natural to analyse metrics and compare data to others. Benchmarks give you a reference for how well you're doing -- and indications on how to improve.

In marketing and thanks to internet, benchmarks are much easier to get. To see how many social media followers another company has, just visit their profiles. To see how their overall marketing is performing, plug their URL into Marketing Grader and compare their score to yours. To see their most popular blog posts, easily find the information on BuzzSumo.

Other benchmarks feel nearly impossible to get. Take email marketing metrics, for example -- most companies don't divulge their opened and click rates. If you're just starting to invest in marketing, you have no frame of reference of how well your emails should be performing.  

HOW MANY EMAIL CAMPAIGNS SHOULD YOU SEND PER MONTH?

Weekly emails are considered as more effective than monthly ones. In fact, if you send one email per month to your subscribers, there is a risk they forget you and delete your messages.

Unfortunately, the once-a-week formula isn’t for everyone. Atemis team used to have some feedbacks: Some of the customers sent 3-4 newsletters per month but the opening rate was not high. The emailing compaign wasn’t as what they expected. Then we decided to take a look at what they sent. The truth is they wanted to deliver the long and heavy content for each emailing. This is the reason why the recipients felt overwhelming to received “a bunch” of emailings during a month. After that they reduced the frequency to one per month and got much more better results.

What you need to keep in mind is: the frequency of sending an newsletter is depending on your target customers. It’s better to listen to them and change/adapt the emailing campaign along what they reacted with the content you sent away.

HOW DO YOU MAKE YOUR EMAILS SUCCESSFUL?

To run emailings or newsletter, an email marketing service is essential.

It’s tempting to cut corners by mailing your list from a free Gmail or Yahoo account. This strategy has some major weaknesses.

Free email providers lack the design, segmentation and reporting features offered by professional email marketing services, and their deliverability rates can be dreadful.

As a result, you’re far better working with one of the services below when creating your email newsletter:

• Aweber
• MailChimp
• AtemisCloud
• ConstantContact
• Infusionsoft
• iContact

HOW TO CREATE EMAIL NEWSLETTERS THAT DON'T SUCK

Think about newsletter you’ve received in the past. Have you ever encountered messages that were difficult to read? Those that didn’t render correctly on your mobile device? Those didn’t use sufficient contrast between background and text colors?

Your subscribers won’t keep reading your newsletters if it's difficult for them, so keep the following tips in mind:

• Use a font that is easy to read, such as Courier 10 pt. or Arial 12 pt.
• Try to limit the number of characters on any given line to 60 characters
• Don’t use more than 2 or 3 sentences in a paragraph
• Offer both HTML and plain text versions
• Use images that enhance your text without overpowering it

Enhancing readability is one of the easiest ways to improve the success of your email newsletter. Before you click the “Send” button, make sure all great content you’ve put together can be easily understood by your subscribers.

Plenty of people ask us whether HTML or plain text email messages perform better. Ultimately, there’s no cut-and-dried answer that applies to all businesses, due to one important factor: If you don’t have somebody who can work with HTML designs, you won’t be successful!

So if you’ve got a talented designer (or an agency), definitely take advantage of an engaging, well-designed image-based message.

And if you don’t? Don’t sweat it!

Plenty of businesses get great results with plain text messages alone. As it turns out, the success of your marketing campaign is as much about the content of your messages as it is the visual appeal.

USE A CLEAR AND CATCHY SUBJECT LINE

 Those are not just few words on the top. It plays the deciding role for the click “open”. Our team spend many time digging into this area and after many emailing campaign’s consultant, we found out one truth: People love the short and catchy descriptive subject lines. They are ready for those emails which reached this level.

• Try new subject lines

Newsletter tends to start with high open rates, but these decrease over time. First, refresh your content often, keep up with the trend. Second, don’t repeat the same subject lines for each campaign. If you’re just lazy for that and change 2 – 3 words, the reader will immediately point them out.  The email recipients are not purely reading; they are “checking mail” which means they are judicious to realize how many faults you make in your sent email.

• The art of being short

Most people quickly scan subject lines to decide if they’ll open or pretend not to see the ever. So do not expect your target customers to spend time on studying your headline. Stay short and easy to understand, do not try to be intellectual.

If you want more tips to have a successful emailing compaign, do not forget to check out blog.atemiscloud.com frequently cause we will update many more interesting methods at any time. Together we can surely conquer the Email Marketing nation ;)

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