Singapore is one of the top business destinations in the world. due to the immense potential it has shown over the past couple of years. Singapore is considered to be a great environment to start and do business. Their status as the digital hub of the world and its strategic positioning has made it a go-to for young entrepreneurs who are looking to cut through the digital marketplace.
According to the World Bank, it only takes someone a maximum of six working days to have your business up and going. The ease of starting any business in Singapore has been allowed by the availability of enabling laws for carrying out business, safe and secure environment for the human resources and the company.
Singaporeans welcome every visitor with open arms regardless of color, religion or political inclinations. The government has constructed excellent internet infrastructure allowing entrepreneurs to penetrate the online markets where most of the world population exist nowadays. The internet provides marketplaces on the web where customers and business owners interact. With the development of email marketing, sharing information regarding products with customers and prospective customers has been made easier.
Email marketing, also known as a direct electronic mailer (eDM) help in relaying of customer- tailored messages to every customer regarding sales, synchronized with client preferences. Business owners acquire clients’ credentials from landing site forms for specific promotions or credentials entered when registering for newsletter subscriptions.
Electronic direct mailing is the most sought-after model of marketing services and products, and its potential is still huge especially to fast-growing economies such as Singapore. Its effectiveness and low finances to run it make it a handy marketing tool. Globally, there are more than 3.7 billion email users, and this number is expected to grow to 4.3 billion by 2022. This statistic is one of the primary reasons why email marketing is considered the most sustainable and timeless digital marketing strategy in the world today.
The average ROI for every SGD 1.37 spent on email marketing currently stands at SGD 43.77. It is important to ensure that the campaign is designed correctly, run, and monitored to achieve the expected results.
Here are expert tips on how to create a great email marketing campaign for the Singapore market.
Benefits of direct electronic mailing(eDM)
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Highly informative
The direct mailing provides a mammoth of information to its users. The info enlightens individuals about different products and what prices they are sold at. The data also holds benefits of a specific product which impart them with information, and as we know, knowledge is power.
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Targeted
This mode of marketing is advisable for sending of information to a known customer base. Organizations can post information on product s to specific groups of people depending on their demographic factors such as age, sex, income
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Multiple formats of writing emails make it versatile
The array of options used for generating an email in the forms of newsletters, catalogs, and brochures, makes it a preferred method of transmitting information regarding products and manners of accessing the products. Its compliance with various forms of writing, make it adaptable in all situations.
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It is easy to quantify the results of an eDM campaign
It does not require statistical tools like analyzing. Discerning the success of a campaign only needs counting the number of inquiries about the product since the beginning of a drive.
Select the Right Email Automation Tool
Email marketing automation tools such as iContact, MailChimp and Constant Contact can help you send out bulk emails to the target audience fast. However, it is essential to consider the labor requirement associated with each of the tools to avoid any inconveniences in the future.
Ideally, the right automation tool should be in line with the size of your marketing team and budget. Some of the sophisticated tools need one or more trained personnel at the reins. If you are on a tight budget and cannot afford to hire such staff at this stage, consider simpler software that requires little overhead.
Though it can be tempting to use a mail program like Outlook, this is not fit for purpose as consumers cannot unsubscribe to it. Anti-spam laws are quite strict in Singapore and users must be able to opt-in and opt-out of emails. Automation tools are the way to go.
Automate Loading Contacts with your Customer Relationship Management Tool
Manually synchronising or loading the subscribers’ email addresses from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can be time-consuming and tedious. It can result in technical misfires where people who have already unsubscribed are added back to the mailing list, or you end up sending out duplicate emails.
You can avoid these challenges by using a plug-in that automates the whole process. The plug-in or tool should be compatible with the other systems that you use to capture existing and potential customers data.
Compliance with laws governing the internet
The Singapore government utilises the internet to its advantage for their economic development. As a well-developed nation, Singaporeans are able to access their resources online with ease which is one of the key responsibilities of the Singapore government. This applies to the low-income households as well. As a well-developed nation, the Singapore government have imposed wireless networks island-wide to ensure that everyone is able to use it which makes it one of most internet-savvy countries in the world. The Singapore government places utmost dedication to develop a robust internet infrastructure that is accessible island-wide.
The government holds a very stringent approach towards internet based businesses. Reason is, to not allow them abuse the platform, breach and hurt the security of others on the internet. They do not hesitate to investigate and hunt whoever abuses the platform for anti-government ideologies.
It is obligatory for users to ensure whatever information they post online is acceptable according to the law.
Identify When People Unsubscribe
Understanding your target audience is crucial to creating a great marketing campaign for the Singapore market. Take note of the time or instances when the recipients unsubscribe from the mailing list. Before they go, ask them the reason so that you avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. Make it easy for them to respond to this question by listing down some of the plausible reasons and include a checkbox that they can click on instead of typing the response.
If the prospects are clicking on your emails and CTAs (call-to-action), you are doing it right. If they are not clicking or taking the desired action the chances are that, they are unsubscribing.
Knowing the reason why they decide to leave will help you improve your campaign and avoid other subscribers from doing the same. Remember that getting a new client is more expensive than retaining an existing one.
Cross-Sell Services and Products Using Email Automation
If you have successfully converted a potential lead to a customer, go an extra mile and cross-sell additional goods and services that are in your portfolio to them. Be cautious not to sound too marketing oriented to avoid compromising the reputation of your business.
There is no harm in having multiple campaigns such as a specific campaign for potential customers at each stage of the sales funnel and another one for clients who have already converted. Make sure that the content contained in the email is pertinent to them and fresh.
Be Timely
Use the different seasons in the year to market and grow your brand. For example, during the tax season, send out emails that contain information on how your product can help them file their returns easily, accurately, and efficiently.
During the festive season, send out emails that contain targeted promotions such as special discounts to customers who have purchased certain products. You can also offer special discounts and coupons to potential customers who are yet to convert but are towards the final stages of the sales funnel.
Employ services of native speakers
Native speakers possess the unique abilities to understand the local language and the local needs. Employing thus offer a business owner the opportunity to transmit specific information regarding specific products to specific groups of people. The understanding of different clients’ needs is enabled by the ability of the workforce to discern the needs of the customer properly. The worker’s interaction with the local population daily offers a niche for the business because the business can understand their needs, sending customer-tailored preferences and methods of accessing the services.
The hiring of a native speaker is a method of creating employment for the local population and the government expedite the processes of starting a business for an owner. The act is a motivating condition undertaken by the government to business owners to motivate them.
Understand the local culture
The transcribing of email and its content cannot be enough factors to ensure a successful localized email drive. Good understanding of a specific culture helps in the manner a target population engages and practices its purchasing power. The way eDM communicate in countries should vary in the context that the business is operational in different countries. It helps in avoidance of distraught clients with a message written in a language they cannot read nor understand. Pay attention to variance in cultures to avoid converting the sound of your email or the entire email drive.
Create Stellar Content
Content matters. The content contained in your email will determine whether the recipients will open, read, and take the desired action.
Here are actionable tips to help you create stellar content for your email marketing campaigns for the Singapore market:
- Create a compelling subject line to boost open rate
- Personalise email copy (include the customer’s name in the subject line and the body of the email)
- Strive to make your emails clear and catchy
- The subject line should be related to the copy
- Keep the content relevant
- Entire email copy should be written in the second person
- Focus on highlighting the benefits of the products/service rather than the specifics of your offer
- Keep it short and compact
- Let your personality shine
- Do not spam
Ensure Testing Your Email
It is essential to research and test the different moving parts in your email marketing strategy. The information you gather in the process will help you to know the specific areas that you should improve on or delete altogether.
For example, placing a sign up form at a random location on your site and waiting for subscribers will not deliver a successful oucome. You need to carry out A/B test frequently to know if the form is working as expected. The same case applies to the various elements in the emails that you send out such as subject line, message, and the CTA buttons.
Some of the best email marketing tools in the market such as OptinMonster and Hello Bar come with an in-built A/B test split testing feature. You can use it to test locations, wording, and sign up forms to know what works best for your site. The tools also have reporting tools that you can use to monitor various metrics such as open rates.
Generate Your Own Leads
If you are to succeed in creating an email list in the current competitive Singapore digital market realm, you need prospects to sign up. Great content, good user experience and lead generation campaigns will all work together to help grow and maintain your email list.
If you have compelling content that resonate with the target audience and a mobile friendly website that offers great user experience, but the sign up forms are not noticeable, all your efforts will go down the drain.
Lead generation plugins such as Optin Monster and WP Optin Wheel will do all the hard work for you. That is, they will increase the opt-in rate exponentially thereby making your email marketing campaign more effective.
As a new business that wants to get started on email marketing as quickly as possible, you might be lured to purchase an email list. Do not do this. You will not get any tangible results, and you may jeopardise your reputation by bombarding people with emails and newsletters that they never subscribed to. Instead, focus on good content to keep your new and current subscribers hooked.
Check Your Stats
When is the last time you checked your Singapore email marketing campaign stats? Metrics such as the open rate will help you to know if you are doing the right thing. Google Analytics has a feature that allows digital marketers to track email subscribers in real time.
Stats can tell you the number of subscribers who visited your website from a specific email campaign. Stats will also help identify emails that had the most significant impact on the target audiences as well as onsite purchases.
Apart from Google Analytics, you can use other email marketing providers in Singapore such as AWeber, MailChimp and Mad Mimi. They all have reporting tools that you can use to keep track of one or multiple email marketing campaigns in Singapore.
Survey users for their preferences
Singapore is a cosmopolitan country with people from across the world due to its notoriety as a tourist destination. The Singapore government has diversified their official languages to incorporate non-natives. Singapore has the Malay language spoken by the Malaysians who are considered natives, Tamil, Chinese, and English. English was meant to ease communication for the friendly business environment. Ensure the clear understanding of the language spoken by many of your clients, an individual can undertake surveys for customers to fill in forms holding expressions of preference while communicating.
You should also consider segmenting your list using other parameters such as gender, income, geographic location, past purchases and other factors that are meaningful to your campaign goals.
Of course, it is not possible to collect all this data from the website, lest you turn off potential subscribers. Once you have their email addresses, proceed to send surveys. The information gathered will help you segment your email list accurately thereby supercharging your Singapore email marketing campaign.
Optimise for mobile devices
Mobile devices are becoming a go mode of receiving and sending information all over the world. It is estimated that two billion of the world population, accounting for a quarter of the world population is in possession of a smartphone. Mobile devices are always the best platforms to access people because they are in peoples’ vicinity at all moments. These specs make it proper for fast transmitting time-sensitive information. Bearing in mind that Singapore has the highest smartphone penetration in the world, be sure that over 80% of the recipients will read your email on a smartphone.
Singapore is among the fast-growing infrastructural country in the world, it suffices to say it is the best environment to own a technology-driven business. The ability of the state to be near gadget developing nations like China, where mobile devices are cheap and accessible enables Singaporeans to be gadgets’ savvy, providing entrepreneurs with platforms to access their clients and share information regarding products and modes obtaining the products.
Take some time to test how your email looks on multiple devices before sending it out. You should only send them out when you are sure that it will look great on multiple devices. Tools such as Litmus can help you test your email across different platforms and devices without breaking a sweat.
Be timely and consistent
In the situation your business is an international entity, it is essential to consider the times of day when posting information. Businesses found in the western hemisphere, should consider the time they send information for their customers in the eastern region. The time differences between these parts of the world is always a space of 8- 11 hours, in many cases, your customer could be asleep when your email hits their inbox and vice versa, .
Understanding local vacation cycles help in knowing holidays and non-working days. Some countries (for example, in the Middle East), it is essential to understand it is a typical working day from Sunday to Thursday. The information enables the sending of emails on time and to the right recipients.
Email marketing newsletters are the most effective means of product promotion. According to this study, 90% of consumers prefer receiving updates through email over other channels, including social media.
However, engaging in email marketing is not a guarantee for success. Your email messages should contain the right content that convinces the reader to complete the desired action. Here is what you should in you include in your email if you want it to benefit your business.
A Compelling Subject Line
The first thing the recipient sees when they open the email inbox is the email subject line. It should be enticing such that it encourages the user to open the email. You can do this by asking a question, sharing an intriguing statistic or asking a question.
A Persuasive Pre-header Copy
After the subject line, the next piece of information that the email recipient sees is the pre-header. You should consider it as an extension of your subject line. It should include a copy that convinces the user to open the email and learn more about what you are offering.
Featured Content
The top of your email marketing newsletter should highlight the most critical content in your message. This encourages the recipient to read the entire content.
Choose Graphics With Care
Graphics have a significant impact on your email marketing strategy. If you use high-quality graphics in your content, your audience is more likely to engage with your email. On the contrary, poor quality graphics mean that your audience is less likely to interact with your email content. You should also observe the number of images you use in your email. Too many images make the email hard to read, and the recipient is likely to move it to the spam folder.
Tailor-making email campaigns to fit a geographical setting also need localizing of content. You should aim to use images that are familiar with the particular country. For example, an email message could be sent to prospective tourists to employ the use of a specific touring guide company in Singapore. An image in the email could be a natural monument in Singapore to increase its ability to be consumed both by the local and foreign population.
Organised Layout
Your email template should display your content in blocks. This makes it easier for the recipient to read the email. You could also try using other popular reading patterns like the inverted pyramid and zigzag layouts. These ensure that the reader uses a particular pattern when reading your email message.
Minimal Text
Your emails should be concise and straightforward. Avoid using large blocks of text, as they discourage the recipient from reading through your email. Your email marketing newsletter should feature the title of the article you choose to include, as well as its description.
Clear Call-to-action
Your call-to-action button should stand out from the rest of the content on your website. This ensures that your email recipients can see the action you want them to take. The easiest way of making your CTA outstanding is by using contrasting colours.
Minimise Ads
Email marketing the most effective way of sending promotional messages to consumers but recent studies indicate that consumers favour informative emails over messages filled with adverts and promotions. You should make sure that your email content is mostly informative and minimises ads.
Most people who use the internet have a social media account. You can boost your email marketing strategy by including social buttons in your messages. These buttons make it easy to share your content, and also provide a way for your audience to access your social channels.
Use a Customer Resource Management System and Follow-up Regularly
A CRM system allows you to track the interactions customers make with your brand. When you understand the behaviour of your audience, you can craft an effective email marketing newsletter. You should also send follow-up emails if a consumer doesn’t follow through on the CTA after having pressed the button.
Use Personalised Videos
By including personalised videos in your email marketing newsletter, may you grab the attention of your customer. Make sure that a compelling description accompanies the video.
Leverage User-Generated Content
The effectiveness of user-generated content goes beyond social media. Repurposing such content as part your email marketing strategy can grab the attention of readers and increase sales.
User-generated content is authentic and more engaging than other forms of content. People are more likely to convert and buy your products when they see others using them. Also, a streamlined visual marketing approach in all channels can strengthen relationships with consumers.
Offer Positive Disruption
Positive disruption offers a change from the usual messages and spurs thinking. You should understand the needs of your audience. Your email marketing newsletter should provide readers with the latest trends and industry, as well as useful insights, opinions, and solutions.
The art of crafting a compelling email marketing newsletter is a must-have skill for all marketers. Your emails should have a subject line and pre-header text that encourages the recipient to open the message. Regarding content, it should be relevant, accurate, informative, and feature engaging graphics. You should also make your CTA outstanding by using contrasting colours.
If you master this skill, your emails will become more effective, which means more conversions and sales for your business.
Direct email marketing in Singapore has been at its optimum since the popularization of email marketing. This is due to the goodwill of the government to create a conducive environment for both international and local business.
7 Must-Follow Email Marketing Ethics You Should Adhere To
1: Consistent branding is important
It is easy for your target audience to dismiss your emails as spam if you are not consistent with your messaging and branding. The message should rhyme with what your brand is known for, and this can be in terms of design, layout, and colours.
If the audience is already conversant with your brand’s themes, colours, and design but receives a message from you that seem to be inconsistent, they will develop suspicion immediately, and that could affect your sales. Sadly, many organisations disregard this essential element of email marketing ethics because they don’t understand its impact.
The message you sent to your email list must not necessarily look like your website. However, they must incorporate most of your brand’s unique identifiers such as the logo, slogan and proper styles that reflect your online identity. Inconstancy is, in fact, one of the reasons why the targets ignore their favourite brands’ emails because if things don’t add up, then there is a strong chance the message is not credible.
2: Creation of email lists
This is the second most important commandment of email marketing. However, some individuals and businesses often misunderstand it. You see, if you don’t understand how your target will interpret your emails, you’re more likely to do it the wrong way.
For instance, it is fairly common for a business to immediately embark on pumping tons of emails to a large number of people without stopping to check the credibility of the email addresses. This strategy, most of the time, is never successful because the targets would block you or mark your emails as spam. In extreme cases, the search engine might flag your brand for spamming activities and block your mail ID – that can be disastrous.
A business that’s serious with email marketing ethics invests its time and efforts to establish its email lists instead of buying them. Creating your email lists would certainly involve you requesting for the consent of the visitors. That happens when you ask you’re the visitors to subscribe to your newsletters and other materials.
Fortunately, there is more than enough apps you can add to your marketing intelligence system to track site’s visitors and those who subscribe to your newsletters, all which will help you create your custom email lists. The best part about creating your custom email lists is that they tend to be more productive and responsive.
3: Adhering to a schedule guarantee predictability
The rate at which you send your messages, whether it’s weekly or monthly, doesn’t matter much as long as you maintain a level of predictability. A predictable schedule allows your readers to know when to lay in wait for your next communication. Targets are less likely to unsubscribe from your service if they realise you only send your messages on a specific day of the week or month.
Although they may not read every message you send to them, they’ll rest assured that the next copy will be on schedule on a specific day. An unusual schedule would translate to unusual results. If you must make special promotions and announcements outside your schedule, ensure that they’re attention-grabbing.
The mere fact that they appear outside the schedule is an attention-grabber. But don’t overdo it; people would find a reason to unsubscribe if you keep bombarding them with promotions and information.
4: Give your subscribers something valuable
Many businesses would use the monthly newsletters to inform their current and potential clients about the current events taking place in the organisation and the plans, discounts, and promotions. Although this may look a great way of staying in touch with your subscribers, they will begin ignoring your emails if you don’t, once in a while, offer them something that adds some value.
It is a basic email marketing ethic to award your subscribers with promos, e-books, exciting blog posts, latest industry publications or anything of value. Be mindful of your subscribers’ necessities, and they might return the favour.
5: Give your subscribers the freedom to opt-in and opt-out
Another basic ethic of digital marketing: let your subscribers opt-in and out of your list freely. You can check opt-in at tow levels. Firstly, once the subscribers have submitted their details on your website, you can ask them to confirm the subscription via the email verification.
Email verification helps the marketing department to know that the brand’s emails are being delivered to the right person. Secondly, you can add an opt-out option at the bottom of every email you send to give the subscriber a second chance to unsubscribe if they are no longer interested in your emails. Once the person has unsubscribed from your list, you are obliged to cease sending more messages to their email addresses.
6: Focusing on the subscribers’ needs, not their money
Subscribers don’t want to be prodded into buying your products or services now and then. Although emails are strictly used for marketing purposes – at least regarding email marketing strategies of a company – you should not make your interests to be the A and Z of every email you send. Rather, you should seek to tackle subscribers’ issues.
For instance, you know your subscribers would want to buy things in bulk during holidays, so this would be a good opportunity to offer them massive discounts on a range of items. You also know your customers would like to experience your latest products before buying them, so this would be an excellent opportunity to give them free trials.
Consider designing your sales pitch in such a way that it seems to place the customer first before anyone else. Your calls of action need to be decent too; think of outlining the benefits of the product or service rather than just the price and cost.
7: No exaggeration
If the subscribers learn that the content of your email didn’t live up to your promise, the first thing they would think of is to unsubscribe. It could turn worse and end up in the hands of authorities for misleading advertising. You can avoid all these by ensuring that your emails are honest or at least promises something practical.
Additional Steps For An Effective Email Marketing Campaign
Effective email marketing doesn’t happen by chance. If anything, this is where your wits and emotions intersect. There has to be a perfect strike of balance between the two for the emails you create for your marketing campaign to inspire, teach, self-express, motivate and get the bulk of your subscribers to take action.You have to dig deeper to harness the fire burning deep inside your bones while putting your intelligence at work to make sure you’re doing everything right.
Not an easy task. But for success, there’s no other way around it, and here are proven and tested tips to make email marketing work for you:
You need a rallying cry
A rallying cry is a one-line summary of what you are purposing to achieve with the email marketing campaign. This is what encourages you to keep forging ahead and doing everything you’re doing without losing hope somewhere along the line.
It’s what keeps the campaign burning inside you. They’re the mantras that keep your campaigns rejuvenated at all times. Some would like to say it’s what summarises your email marketing goal, but more in a motivating sense.
Here’s a classic example of an email marketing campaign mantra: “our email marketing campaign is guided by simplicity, consistency, and staying on the course.”
Set Customer-focused Goals
Now that you’ve established where you’re headed with the email outreach campaign, the next thing you want to do is figure out what you want to achieve with it in terms of customers.
You have to begin by laying down your intentions in the clear. What customer value do you wish to get from the emails?
It could be something simple like defining the number of customers you can reach with a single email you send; or, coming up with a near-accurate estimation of the number of people that open every email you send to read it.
Get the Rest of the Teams Involved
This is NOT your journey alone, but for the rest of the team as well. So get them all involved.
Go ahead and share the email marketing plan you have with the executive leadership, customer service, the marketing team of other channels, and any other person out there that you wish to include.
You have to make sure your plan blends perfectly with the holistic vision of your company. For all we know, the rest of the teams could also be inspired to revisit their strategies and make necessary adjustments to make them even better.
Keep Track of Past Results
There’s only one way for your business to go – and that’s forward. So you have to maintain a keen eye on your email marketing strategy and the results coming in.
Set a benchmark and use it to establish if your business is headed in the right direction. You can start by looking at the previous email programs you employed and find out how your subscribers reacted to them.
Find out where improvements can be made or at what strategic points did the campaign register the highest engagement rate. What did you do in the past that triggered the highest number of unsubscribes?
The answers you come up with should help you figure out where to improve and adjust your current marketing campaign.
Find a Way to Align the Campaign with Other Goals within your Organization
None of the goals your teams come up with has to conflict. If they do, this can prove to be extremely challenging to the overall growth of your business and your email program.
So find a way to align your goals with your content creation team, merchandise team, leadership, creative team, and so forth. Do this early on, by setting realistic expectations for cross-functional teams by first agreeing on the workflow.
In other words, collaborations should happen more naturally – like they were already expecting something of the sort.
Establish your KPI’s early on
KPIs are the success benchmarks you set to determine your achievements every step of the way. They’re what you need to find out if your efforts are really paying off or if something is still missing.
You have to find out about the conversion rate or the lifetime value of every customer you attract to figure out if you’re headed in the right direction.
Revisit Your Objectives and Make sure you Understand them Completely
Do you have a clear number of targets that you plan to hit with your email program? This could be something simple, like a 5% increase in the number of subscribers you’re getting after a certain duration of time.
Or maybe it’s a reduction in the number of unsubscribes or an increase in the number of conversion clicks. You have to understand the objectives to avoid making impulse decisions that are likely to hurt your customer profile or your overall marketing strategy.
Find a Way to Weigh your Progress
Your mind must be so focused on your campaign strategies, and the progress made every step of the way. You have to find out how the emails you send are performing by tracking them down.
Look high and low, at categorical campaigns, aggregated top level, and the individual emails you send to find out which ones among them are driving the highest engagements.
Find out what works and find a way to add it to your campaign. You also have to go through your findings and figure out how to compare it with your benchmarks. And after you’re done, go ahead and share it with the rest of the teams and team members you are in partnership with.
Turn your Data into Action
The data you find should determine your next course of action. It should be what you use to come up with actionable insights. Learn about how the program is doing, and then use the data you get to identify the steps that will be inching you closer to your objectives and business goals.
Adjust
Don’t be too rigid with the emails you send. Nothing is written in stone remember. Find out if there’s any room for growth and figure out where to adjust to get to that point where you can successfully look back and conclude you’ve grown.
You grow when the campaign moves you closer to your objectives. So go through your program and correct or remove any effort that doesn’t align with the expectations you have.
Get their Permission
Bait and switching won’t work for the long term benefit of your business. Customers have to know beforehand about what they’re getting into. You can do this by first asking for their permission to send promotional emails to your subscribers.
The opt-in box must by default left unchecked. And even with that, make a point to explain what a user is getting into should they decide to go ahead and check the box.
Same goes with collecting emails. Make sure your customer knows what you’re about to do and that they fully agree to your terms and conditions.
Set Expectations
Let your customers know about what lies on the other end should they hit the opt-in button. Ask them for their addresses and any other information you’re interested in — and in exchange, let them know about what you have in store for them.
And immediately a subscriber decides to opt-in, follow them with a confirmation email reminding them of some of the perks that come with that decision.
Focus on quality and NOT quantity
You need at least thousands of subscribers to succeed in your email marketing campaign. But then again that pales in comparison to the quality of the subscribers you’re getting.
First, you have to know where the bulk of your subscribers are coming from. After this, make sure that every single one of the subscribers that made it to the list did it on a whim. They weren’t lured by false promises or forced in any way to hit the opt-in button and subscribe to your emailing list.
We get it: nothing bothers an email marketer more than a customer opting out of their email list. But that’s NOT to say that you should use unscrupulous means to keep your customers from unsubscribing when they do NOT wish to see your emails any more.
So you can start by making the unsubscribing button conspicuous enough to be seen by anyone who’s reading through your emails.
It’s also crucial that you make it simple enough to unsubscribe. In which case, make it possible to opt out with just a single click of a button – and where possible, allow them to control their preferences by suggesting the frequency at which they wish to receive the email and their preferred type of content.
Include Any Relevant Piece of Detail in the Emails you Send
The emails you send must bear all the crucial info about your business. It should contain your contact info, a link to unsubscribe, and all the relevant social sharing buttons.
In other words, should your recipient find it necessary to contact you or share your email, they should be able to do so with so much ease.
Don’t Settle Much on Un-engaged Recipients
If someone hasn’t opened any of the emails you send for more than three months, then there’s no need to keep sending them the same email as the rest of the prospects and customers on your email list.
Instead, move them over to the list of advertising audience. There, you can keep sending them win-back emails until they start showing some vested interest in the emails you send. Where possible, try to automate the entire process to make it a snap for you.
Warm up your IP
Don’t rush into sending every prospect that shows up in your database an email right away. In this way, nothing you do will give spam monitors any reason to mark you.
Your focus should be on building your reputation first. Cull out your best list and focus on this list as you gradually increase the volume of the emails you send and add more recipients into your mailing list.
This will allows you to spot the issues in the emails you send early on before more emails start bouncing off. And after you figure this out, you can go ahead and come up with a detailed plan on how to increase the volume of emails you send as you edge closer to hitting the marketing goals you’ve set for yourself.
Be consistent
After you warm up your IP address, the next thing you’d want is to be consistent with the emails you send, both in terms of frequency and volume. Consistency is key in any email marketing program; considering that’s the next thing that Internet Service Providers focus on to ascertain whether or NOT your emails are spam.
Remember to Set Up an Email Authentication
We’re living in a world where getting cat-fished is nothing out of the ordinary. Worse is when some hacker somewhere starts pretending to be you.
The emails they send could significantly taint your online reputation to the extent of throwing you out of business. There’s however a simple solution to this – and that’s authenticating the emails you send.
With tools such as domain keys, DKIM, and SPF, you can come up with a set of rules that define how your emails are sent, thus making it even harder for spammers to imitate you.
Be Responsible
You’re the person to blame for every single tragedy that befell your email marketing campaign. You make the decisions, so be prepared to shoulder the consequences of whatever outcome swings by.
Take the red flags and mistakes as your own doing, and find out how to correct them and return your business on course.
Create a Methodology
Check out with the other teams in your organisation to find out if you could collaborate with them to develop a framework or workflow to foster creativity and enhance productivity among yourself.
Plan your Template
After you’ve figured out the type of messages you’ll be sending, the next thing you do is come up with the most appropriate design system to pass these messages across.
Try to come up with a template that turns your vision into a reality. Take a look into the type of content you post and envision the most proficient layout for sending your content.
Go ahead and determine if you only need one template with a broad variety of modules or if you really have to create a series of them for different types of communication.
Focus on the Journey
Think of every email you send as a step towards the customer experience journey you’re embarking on. Meaning all your communications have to fit into each other, not random.
The messages you send must also be in perfect sync with the rest of the communication messages emanating from your brand — whether it’s in terms of looks, consistency or subject matter. There’s must be one common ground tying everything together.
Consider Mobile Responsiveness
Test out the emails you send across different devises and find out if they’re loading just fine or if there’s any problem with them.
Do they look just as great as they look on mobile? If NOT, find a way to make necessary adjustments to your email layout for a more elegant mobile experience.
Assign a Purpose to Your Imagery
Find a way to draw interest to the emails you send through illustrations and photography. Make sure you’re using the most appropriate imagery, particularly those that appeal to your subscribers’ emotions and communicate functionality more appropriately.
Great visuals also help to break the monotony that comes with reading through a block of texts. However, if you can’t find a suitable photography that snugly aligns with your marketing message and targeted customers, then don’t force it – as you’re better off not using one.
Find a Way to Make the CTA Pop
Your CTA has to stick out to be noticed, and one way to go about it is by making it pop through placement, colour, and text treatment.
Readers have to understand the intended purpose of your email by just looking at it. But most importantly, a popping CTA will be making it a whole lot easier for your recipients to take action.
Create Room for Skimming
Don’t make it appear like readers have to read every word and sentence in your block-like email content to understand what the email is all about.
Where it’s possible to break the email into bullet text, do so without any hesitation. Also, consider making your paragraphs a little bit shorter for a higher readability score.
Consider Everyone in your Audience
Try to fit into the shoe of every single one of your readers to understand everything from their point of view and preference. Consider the limitations and how exactly they’d prefer to see you serve them with content.
Think about readability, alt tags, text visibility, and all the crucial features that may come in handy in making your content more readable and enjoyable.
Test the Content Without Images
The images you publish alongside your content are meant to target your subscriber’s attention. Other than that, they’re what you use to keep your readers hooked in.
But there’s more to the content bit of it. You want your readers to draw the main message of the email and act on it. So turn off the images, and try test the rest of the content as is. Is the content still relevant? Can the CTA still be seen?
Preview and Review
Preview and review the email before sending. And while at it, take into consideration all the different variables.
If the content you’re publishing is a bit dynamic, be sure to check it for the different permutations. Create a checklist where you find your message to be a little complex and use it to catch on anything you missed or included incorrectly.
Be Relatable
Don’t be too stilt with the emails you send. If anything, your subscribers have to feel like they’re interacting with a real person on the other hand. So while you’re still expected to conduct yourself professionally, it’s still crucial to address your target audience in a manner they can relate with you and feel like they’re talking to a real person.
This is particularly important if you’re looking to instil trust in your target audience and increase the likelihood of them taking action.
Offer Something to the First Few Subscribers
While starting, you’re looking to populate your mailing list with quality subscribers, so why NOT offer them something that will get them to take action fast.
This can be a gift or a discount on a product you’re offering. Whichever offer you decide on, gifting the first few subscribers is the surest way to get even more people to consider signing up with you, especially if you’re starting.
PDF Version of Some of Your Most Popular Blog Posts
Create a PDF version of some of the popular posts you have and offer them to the customers that take the bold step to sign up with you.
Offer Transparent Segmenting
Don’t force your content on your subscribers. Instead, let them choose what resonates with them best by choosing from a list of options provided.
Your homepage enjoys the biggest share of traffic your site attracts. You’d want to take advantage of that by converting the bulk of them into active subscribers.
So make sure you’ve included the signup form at all the strategic points on your homepage.
Offer an Email Course
Once in a while, create an email course that you’ll be offering to your subscribers for a series of days. It can be something simple like a 10-day workout course for building rock solid abs. Users can sign up for this course for free, while you win for creating another solid team of active subscribers and product customers.
Conclusion
If you follow the above tips and guidelines, you will be well on your way to success in creating a great email marketing campaign for the Singapore market. MediaOne can help you get the best results by creating a robust campaign for your brand and monitoring it to ensure that it delivers the expected positive results.
This service will free up your daily schedule and give you ample time to concentrate on other equally important tasks in your business. Get in touch with us today for more details about this and other digital marketing services we offer in Singapore.
