Email Marketing 102
Hi, I'm Damian Jennings and I 've worked in email marketing for 9 years. You may remember me from such shows as AVN, Xbiz or Amsterdam. I run
The domain name adultmarketing.co.uk is for sale where I help porn companies like yours make more money with free porn marketing tips. Written by me, specifically for people in porn.
I thought I'd try and share my passion for email with GFY and hopefully help you all make some more money along the way. Email is probably the best ROI in the industry. It costs next to nothing to send emails and it can generate you a metric shit ton* of cash
In Email marketing 101 we discussed why you should bother doing email at all. You can
read over that here if you missed it.
So now you have your permission based list, your mail server is ROCKING and you are set to actually send some goddamn emails. Here's what to think about now.
Getting people to open your email
Email is awesome as it is all about testing variables to improve your bottom line. If you tweak something you can see the impact it has instantly. Brilliant. Now, in terms of getting people to actually open the email you spent hours lovingly hand-crafting is your first problem. Luckily there are only two variables involved: The Display Name and the Subject Line.
The Display Name is the name that shows up that the email is from. This is so very important to get right. Picking this is dependant on the type of email you are sending. For double opt-in newsletters you could use something like "Playboy UK". They have signed up, they are expecting it. For a CRM email for a dating site you could use "Playboy Dating Alerts". For cancellation emails I would recommend testing either "Accounts Team" or "Playboy Accounts". Obviously, don't REALLY put "Playboy", put your own company's name!
This is all VERY dependant on your brand, your niche, your list. You cannot just give generic answers to this, you must test and measure. Is "Katie Jones" better than "Playboy UK". Depends often on the subject line.
Now, I could write the entire post about subject lines. If you want more info on them, let me know. However, in short, keep it simple and to the point. Do not to put in the words "help" "% off" and "reminder"**. Obviously words like FREE need to be avoided to stop setting off spam traps. Personalisation really works. So putting in "Damian, I want to talk to you" works better than "I want to talk to you". But what you need to do it TEST. I know I say that all the time, but clearly if you are sending email for Playboy UK or Triple Anal Cream Pie Gay Midgets (calm down Juicy, that is just made up, it's not a real site) you are gonna need to use different sorts of Display Names and Subject Lines.
One cold, hard fact is most important thing is 50 characters or less. The reason for this is it will get truncated in most email clients if it is longer than that so your carefully, lovingly created subject line will not be seen properly.
My favourite method to get someone to open an email is to try and stand out in the inbox. Try to think about which emails you get that YOU chose to open and why. Then attempt to recreate that. Oh and split test the display name AND the subject line. This isn't an exact science.
Some more good tips here
Excessive Traffic
Getting people to read your email
Getting your email actually read boils down to design and formatting. What works for one list or brand may not work for another however, the following are immutable:
- Design like it is 1995. Tables are GOOD. I know, shocking, isn't it? But it's true. You thought designing for different browsers was a pain? You are gonna LOVE email then! Almost every email client is different, and hardly any follow the rules. What works in Outlook won't work in Hotmail and what looks great in Yahoo will look shit in Mail. You need to use VERY basic design, no table background images, nothing too clever. Have a call to action above the fold. Remember many people use a preview pane to scan email, to you need a strong heading and a really good call to action that is visible within a preview pane
Many email clients do not download images by default, so your mail can look like shit. However, using clever CSS you can make the email inviting, even before they have clicked.
Optimizing CSS Presentation in HTML Emails | Campaign Monitor
9 email design rules
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- Write short copy. Think postcard or outdoor poster, not letter. The average read time for an email is about 4 seconds. So you need to get your point across quickly and succinctly.
- Don't use spam trap words. Obviously the spam industry is all over porn spam. So obvious porny words will get your email delivered to the spam filter. Euphemisms are your new friends. "See his pole pound her dripping hole" rather than "See his cock pound her cunt".
Many email clients do not download images by default, so your mail can look like shit. However, using clever CSS you can make the email inviting, even before they have clicked. Have a read of this article about it for more information.
Optimizing CSS Presentation in HTML Emails | Campaign Monitor
And here is a page with 9 very handy email design rules
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Getting people to click on shit in your email
This is painfully easy. Ask them to click.
I did an experiment with the Playboy UK email newsletter a few years ago. I wanted to increase the CTR on the thumbs. So I put the text CLICK FOR MORE on the thumb in a diagonal corner flash. The CTR more than DOUBLED over night. Yes, our customers really are quite stupid it seems! So ask them to click, and lo and behold, they do! I may try inserting a MIDI file of a bell ringing and seeing if I can get them to salivate next week.
Calls to action should be where people expect them. Having a button in the bottom right hand corner for example.
Give them a REASON to click. I know it sounds obvious, but so often I have seen emails with no FAB reason why they should click. FAB is Feature, Advantage, Benefit. For example:
FEATURE - Check out the newly designed Playboy UK site
ADVANTAGE - It has free pictures and videos
BENEFIT - It will cost you nothing to have a wank
"Check out the new Playboy UK site now, it has amazing free pictures and videos of the hottest girls on the planet. It won't cost you a penny to get your rocks off! Click to see the girls now."
Get more ideas on this here
http://www.clickz.com/3640571
Getting people to read your landing page…
And that is for the next instalment of this series.
*Official
The domain name adultmarketing.co.uk is for sale measure
** according to Mail Chimp survey of 2 million emails.
http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/be...subject_lines/
