by Dorothée Lacroix, 1000mercis

This section is an introduction to three different types of email marketing campaigns. By analysing your audience and messaging, you will be able to choose the right type of campaign for you. The three email campaigns types are:

• Conquest emails: sent principally to rented email addresses
• Conversion emails: sent to a prospective customer database
• Loyalty emails: sent to the client’s database

Conquest emails

Conquest emails are generally sent to rented email databases to reach a new audience. The objectives of a conquest email are:

• To increase brand awareness of the advertiser
• To generate sales
• To acquire new customers

The content of conquest emails really depends on the advertiser, the message they want to reach consumers and the objectives of the campaign but mostly, they are used as a call to action.

Conversion emails for prospects

Conversion emails are, as the name implies, used to convert prospective consumers into customers. The main objectives of conversion emails are:

• To convert prospects into clients
• To increase brand awareness of the advertiser
• To announce any new products and/or services

The table below summarises the various different forms of conversion email, how often they should be sent and what they should contain:

Loyalty emails

The purpose of loyalty emails is to reward or provide customers with a service they have requested. The main objectives of loyalty emails are:

• To increase the loyalty of clients
• To use up-selling and cross-selling tactics to drive further custom
• To measure the clients’ satisfaction
• To enhance the image of the advertiser

Loyalty email content is largely composed of the same email components as prospects (newsletter, tactical emails, relational email and cart abandonment email- see above), but with a more personalised feel, particularly around purchasing behaviour for example.

Campaign testing

Your email marketing campaigns will only be as effective as the quality and depth of knowledge you have on your database. The aim of email testing is to understand what works with your database of customers and subscribers. This will increase the cost effectiveness of your mailings and the benefits of using email marketing.

Before you begin sending, review the life cycle of your products/services' life cycles. This information will affect the content, timing and frequency of your mailings - as well as your conversion rates.

What to test in email marketing?

With email marketing you can measure effectively who opened your email and what links they clicked on. This information will help you to continually improve your email marketing communications and improve the success of your campaigns.

The ‘From’ field is something that should be tested very early on. In general the "from" is used by marketers to establish exactly who this email is coming from - and recipients have come to expect that as well. This is a decision the advertiser should make: is it the brand, the company, the name of the email newsletter, or the name of an individual?

It should definitely be a company or brand name, not an email address, generic department or unfamiliar person's name. Also, the actual email address used should include the company or brand name, not a generic address such as reply+companyname.co.uk - which can trigger spam filters.

• Subject line: the subject line helps get your email opened and is a very important aspect of email marketing communications. If the advertiser has the ability to segment, consider making the subject line relevant to a segmented list - which is key to getting opened
• Call to action: testing this is imperative to test the call to action
• Layout: the layout, look, style, fonts and even colours can give a professional sheen to email marketing communications and reinforces your brand. Test all aspects of these to see if they could perform better. If over several emails you find that articles and topics in the mailings are not performing well - i.e. not getting clicks of significant numbers, test the location in the layout or have a different style synopsis to the article
• Copy length: here's an interesting area to test. Though brevity is important in this day and age of scanning the inbox, studies are finding that long copy can indeed perform as well as short copy. You may get fewer clicks but more conversion (more intensely interested then just generally interested)

Time, day, frequency - if you go by industry 'standards', the best days to send are Tues/Wed morning for B2B and Fri/Sat for B2C. But this may not suit your database at all. Testing is how you will assess what your readers respond best to. There are some practical mail times, such as sports and travel at the weekends, and business information during the week - otherwise it really is up to you to test and find out.

How to test

Testing the effectiveness of your email campaigns will help you to improve and make sure you are getting value from your activities.

A/B split test

Split out your list for A/B testing within your email campaigns. What you send and when you send should be identical for both lists - except for the test. Tracking the results of both will provide insight for your next send.

Random test

If you have a large database you can test a segment of your list and based on the results send the most successful performing test to the remaining addresses on your list.