Five tips for effective email marketing

Valerie Delforge offers five tips for effective e-mail marketing. 1: Plan your activity When sending a message think about timing – when are your customers most likely to take action.

• Avoid sending emails on a Friday afternoon, or late at night, customers are less likely to interact with your email when sent at these times.
• The more you plan, the better the communication and engagement. Work at least one month in advance, ideally a quarter.
• Sending your mail on the same day and time has a better impact than just sending it whenever you have the time. Customers look forward to it or expect it, you create a habit, a subliminal message.
• Twice a month is a good frequency for emails. Some specialists suggest three times a week, you simply need to assess your audience and what they want from you.

          2: It’s all about conversion  Think of the content that can be seen when opening the email without having to scroll, you must have all our important messages above the scroll or “above the fold”

• Have a strong subject line. This will entice the customer to open your email.
• Avoid the use of uppercase in a sentence, people will think you are shouting at them. Remain professional. Too many exclamation marks have the effect of customers not taking you seriously!!!!!! Look at your grammar too.
• Think three messages maximum: promotional, educational and informative. Too many messages are discouraging, keep it simple.
• Encourage engagement: Use the link to all your communication, including all of your social media.
• Make everything clickable, it creates engagement and facilitates conversion
• Follow companies you like in order to see what they do, the more inspired you are, the more creative you become.

 3: Think of your target market Who are you targeting? With this in mind you can segment your database and send relevant emails to ensure a better response.

• Know about your customers and their previous booking behaviour for better response, hence why data capture is crucial.
• Ensure your database is up to date, the better the data the better the response.
• 50% of the customers will open their mails on their phone. It is crucial that your mail is mobile friendly.

         4: Use a tool There are a lot of tools to use that are easy and efficient. Work out which one you like to work with and the effect it has on your database.          5: Measure the success  Ensuring that the mail campaign has been successful can be easily measured by the analytics and reports of the campaign.

• Anything you do, try and get the customer back to your salon so you can check how successful your mail was, or get them to quote a reference.
• Ensure every activity has a code to track the success, this code should be inputted in your till system so you have the results from when people are checking out.
• Look into the relevant figures: people who unsubscribe, who click on the links etc.
• You can create an A/B testing which is a mail with a slightly different lay out to see if the engagement is better in one than the other. You can only send it once you have segmented your database.

Valerie Delforge is founder and CEO of consultancy Delforge + Co www.delforge.co