Evaluating Your Email Promotion Campaigns

By Author: Jen Silva
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When it comes to delivering a concise and detailed message to customers about a company's product - services, few marketing approaches are as cost effective as email marketing. Unlike "spam", email marketing targets a specific demographic or market niche and is intended for only the most interested parties. However, many email servers may immediately treat your email campaign as "spam" and immediately filter them to the junk folder. Finding out about it after the fact can be a complete waste of time, money and effort, not to mention the lost opportunity of not reaching your customers in time. While email marketing campaigns are relatively inexpensive, there is still a large upfront investment of time in preparing the text and visual presentation of the email. Finding out about it afterwards can put the entire campaign at risk. Therefore, in making sure your email campaign reaches its target audience the way it was intended, there are a couple of simple and straightforward testing methods you must adopt.

Understand How Different Email Servers - Systems Operate

A successful email campaign often adopts images and ...
... photos side by side with its text. After all, people are visual and a picture speaks a thousand words. Many email servers have images turned off by default. As a result, the image itself may not be visible and could skew the text itself. As previously mentioned, many servers have different settings on their "spam" filters and some may immediately send your email directly to the junk folder. So, given these two scenarios, how can you ensure your emails are received the way you intended?
- Test Email Campaign on Multiple Email Addresses - Services

For this exercise, you could use the email addresses of your employees, coworkers and friends. If not available, then the next best method is to set up a number of different email addresses on email services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Google. Since these are the most prominent email services, you've likely covered the majority of the types of emails under your target audience. It's important to just set these email addresses up and not mess with any of the default settings. You want a baseline test on your email campaign, so don't try and skew the results.

- Review How Each Email Address Received the Email Campaign

Once you've sent out your trial emails, you'll then need to review how each email address received the campaign and whether it was registered as "spam". Here are a couple of things to look for. How did each of the email addresses receive the campaign? Were some immediately sent to the junk mail folder? Were the images visible and if not, what happened to the text? What did your friends, coworkers or employees think about the email itself? If you included links in your email, were users able to click on them properly? What about your promotional items such as coupons, discounts and special sales? Are they visible and easy to read? While these are a lot of questions to answer, it really amounts to ensuring that you check your email campaign before going "live".

After ironing out the kinks you can then move forward to analyzing metrics as they pertain to the incidence of success of your marketing approach. You can move your analysis and testing methods onto finding out what day produced the best results, what time of day customers clicked on the advertisements, and what titles and promotional items worked best and when. However, the first and most important step in any successful email campaign is to make sure the email itself will be properly received by your customers.
About Author:
The author is a writer and specialist of small business tools and options on topics such as email marketing. Please visit http://www.email-marketing-options.com for reviews of email marketing providers.