As many of you know we have been creating a monthly electronic Newsletter for over 5 years. It has been a consistent and valuable method to “Keep in Touch” with our clients, friends and prospective clients.
With the enhanced integration and ease of use with Sage ACT! and Sage SalesLogix CRM we have moved from Constant Contact to the SwiftPage offering. (SwiftPage is the engine that powers Sage eMarketing for ACT! and Sage SalesLogix E-marketing.)
You can strengthen your customer retention and conversion rates through the use of E-newsletters. Get started today with these strategic tips for a year of e-marketing success from Lindsey Weinig at SwiftPage:
1. Scheduling For the Audience
First, consider your audience and their schedule. Based off of the information you know about them, you can determine the dates to avoid, including national holidays, common vacation times and industry-related events.
2. Squeaky Clean
Take pride in increasing your subscribership and keeping your database free of errors, dormant contacts, or any non-permission based email addresses.
3. Dress to Impress
Create a design for your templates that you can be proud of. SwiftPage along with ACT! or SalesLogix provide a wealth of templates to get started with and build from.
4. But Why?
Give them a good reason to open that email! Use your subject line and a consistent ‘from’ address to convince them that it’s worthwhile to open. Then continue to impress with your header and headlines as well as the actual content.
5. Define ‘Better’
You should include some metrics to benchmark your responses. If you have data from a previous related email send, start there. Then shoot for improvement, perhaps a 10% increase in list size, 5% open rate increase, and 3% click rate increase.
6. Learn What Doesn’t Work
What have you learned after you send your newsletter? Split your send into two groups and use your open and click reports to determine what your audience responds to best. When we want to contact to local businesses we found that “Michiana”, a term to define our Indiana / Michigan area, would increase our open rates.
7. You Might Want to Stretch First
You will need to be flexible to your target market and the curve balls you will surely be thrown along the way. Your email might not always go out on the date you intended, or have the data you had hoped to research, but if you give yourself some flexibility and make e-marketing a priority for your business, you will see improvement in the upcoming year.
For more details from Lindsey’s article, click here.
Introduction Video – Success with ACT! eMarketing
Helpful Related articles:
13 Tips to Boost Your EMail Marketing Efforts
Target Marketing Customers by What’s Important to Them
4 Key Aspects to Boost Sales Efforts
8 eMail Marketing Tips from Sage ACT!
Past issues of eCRM news can be found here.
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