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Email marketing campaigns went out of fashion for a while, often branded ‘spam’ by members of the general public, there was nothing worse than email blasts clogging up your inbox.

Fast-forward a few years and email marketing is an essential element of any marketing strategy. With the rise and rise of content marketing, email campaigns allow businesses to deliver their insightful, engaging, educational content directly into the hands (or inboxes) of potential customers. An effective communication tool, email marketing builds relationships with prospective (and existing) customer, gathers important data, and helps boost marketing return on investment.

As important as email marketing campaigns are, many miss the mark completely, failing to deliver return on investment. In order to build, execute and maintain successful email marketing campaigns, you must listen to your audience and distribute valuable content that they actually need. Avoid blasting out self-promotional messages at all costs. This only leads to recipients hitting the unsubscribe button.

So, before you embark upon your email marketing campaign, peruse our handy hints for email marketing success.

Carefully Craft Your Content

Think about the content that your email marketing campaign includes. It should be educational, informative or entertaining. It needs to engage potential customers. It should never be a pushy advertising blast. Give away some of your knowledge, and position yourself as an expert. And don’t forget about the basics: proofread your copy, check for spelling mistakes and embarrassing grammatical gaffes. Spend time crafting compelling subject lines and article headings: they are your only opportunity to convince subscribers to click on your content. Choose relevant, eye-catching images. Use infographics and charts and diagrams where appropriate.

Don’t Get Too Hung Up on the Numbers

The standard metrics (like open and click through rates) reported on by all the major email marketing software platforms are important. Just remember to evolve beyond these basic statistics. Explore data related to subscriber behaviour as well. What areas of your website did they visit? How long did they spend on your site? How many times did they visit? Did they share your content on social media? Once you have more of a subscriber behaviour profile, you can even segment your mailing lists using this data. Then, create targeted campaigns based on the preferences of your subscribers. The more targeted a campaign is, the more successful it is likely to be.

Segment You Subscriber List

Following on from our last hint, make sure that you segment your subscriber list. Apart from using the subscriber behaviour indicators mentioned above, you should also take into account more traditional segmentation criteria to customize email content. Consider demographic factors like gender, age, and geographic location. For instance, the email content you distribute to 40+ women, might be very different to that distributed to men in their 20s. If you have information about the interests or hobbies of your subscribers, use that data to customise content as well. It’s all about enhancing engagement.

Automate Your Email Marketing Where Possible

Automating your email marketing frees up your time to develop better quality content, more creative campaigns, more targeted emails. So, set email content to be pulled directly from your blog posts (which can be categorized to match your list segments). Don’t painstaking create and design a new email every week. That time is much better spent building solid relationships with potential and existing customers.

Always Include Social Media Sharing Options

This is so important, and so easy to do. Just include the little social media icons somewhere in your email. Make it easy for your subscribers to share your valuable content with their networks. It increases your communication network exponentially, and word-of-mouth is by far the most effective (and cheapest) marketing going round.

Check Deliverability

There is absolutely no point in generating all this earth-shattering content, complete with social media sharing ability, if the email in which it is all embedded is never going to reach your intended recipient. So, check on the deliverability of your email. Check for common spam software trigger words like offer, free, and click here. Include a HTML version just in case embedded images are blocked by your recipient’s spam filtering service.

Build Your Audience

There is absolutely no point in creating or curating tonnes of valuable content if you have no audience to read it. So, spend some time building your audience. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your email list: include a ‘Subscribe Now’ form on the homepage (or indeed every page) of your website. Offer new subscribers something for nothing: a free e-book, or pod-cast or downloadable checklist. Push this offer out through all your social media channels, including a link to your website. Offer existing subscribers a free gift if they forward your emails to a friend. Include a link to your subscription form in your email signature.

The design of your website, its navigational cues, its mobile responsiveness, and even font choices can make or break your site. Like it or not, website design choices can mean the difference between achieving the pinnacle of online success, and suffering abysmal digital failure.

But there’s no need to despair, with our top ten tips for website design, you can rest assured that you’ve made the right decisions when it comes to the design of your website.

Tip #1: Logo Placement Counts

If you don’t already have one, sort out a polished, professional logo that encapsulates your brand image. Once sorted, take your brand-spanking-new logo (or your existing logo if you already had one to begin with) and pin a high-resolution version of it prominently in the top left-hand corner of each page on your website. Then, link your logo back to the homepage of your website. That way, your becomes a handy navigational tool for your website visitors, as well as a brand enforcement tool.

Tip#2: Intuitive Navigation is the Best Kind

According to industry-standard and best practice convention, primary navigation is placed along a horizontal menu bar at the top of a website. Then, secondary navigation is usually accessed via drop down menu tabs (located underneath the primary navigation bar) or in a sidebar. These locations are industry-standard and best practice for a reason. They are intuitive. Website users expect navigational cues to be located in these positions whenever they hit a new site. So don’t try to be creative. If you do, the result is likely to be a high bounce rate, with people quitting your site, rather than puzzling out your creative navigation.

Similarly, opt for main menu labels that are commonly, or widely, understood. For instance, Contact Us, About Us, and News are common main menu labels. We all understand these terms, and know what content to expect to appear on website pages with these names. In contrast, Ping Us, Rad Peeps, and What’s the Haps might cause some confusion, particularly for older demographics.

Tip #3: Always Opt for Responsive Design

Your website design must be mobile responsive. According to leading industry sources, mobile internet usage rates will overtake desktop internet usage THIS YEAR. That means that more people will be looking at your website on a mobile, than on a laptop. So, design it accordingly.

Tip#4: Eradicate Clutter

Try not to go overboard with visual stimulation on your website. It’s all too easy to upload a plethora of images, interspersed by moving graphics, overlayed with fluoro green pull-out quotes. When confronted with too many options, website users fail to process any information at all. They suffer from sensory overload. Instead, cut out the clutter. Ensure that you don’t have competing graphics, or multiple calls-to-action on any one page. Limit the number of hyperlinks included in any one page, and even pare back footer and header content. Give your website visitors room to breathe. Include clear empty white space. Less really is more when it comes to website design.

Tip #5: Use Colour Strategically

While design is somewhat subjective, using colour strategically can have real, positive results. If you maintain a clean, modern, elegant palate that includes mostly neutral colours (or even just white), you can then use colour to highlight important information. Dashes and splashes of bright colour can be used for headings, for call-to-action buttons, for hyperlinks, and for key graphics. Colour then becomes like a road sign for your website visitors, marking your most important content.

Tip #6: Feature a Fabulous Font

Above all, website fonts must be easy to read on all types of devices (from desktops and laptops to mobiles and tablets) and on all available browsers (from IE and Firefox to Safari and Chrome). Don’t use a font that is smaller than 11 pt. And don’t use fonts from more than two families, or you risk slow page loading time.

Tip #7: Photos Are Crucial

While it can be expensive, high-quality professional photos can make an enormous difference to the look and feel of a website. Impressive imagery naturally draws the eye, and captures the attention of website visitors. Photos can wow users in an instant, and communicate a sleek, polished brand image instantly. Commissioning a professional photographer is obviously not feasible for everyone. However, there are numerous websites from which you can quickly and easily purchase stock photography.

Tip #8: Fend Off Fold Faux Pars

Know where the fold lies. Imagine a dotted line cutting your website horizontally across the middle. Now, double check, is your call-to-action above the fold? Are your contact details above the fold (a main menu navigational tab is acceptable)? If you answered NO to either of these questions, go back and rethink your layout. Move these two important elements up the page immediately.

Tip #9: Forget About Flash

With the never-ending dispute between Apple and Adobe unlikely to resolved any time soon, Flash really isn’t an option when it comes to website design. Flash simply doesn’t work on the millions of Apple devices in the marketplace. So, opt for a more Apple-friendly program, like HTML5, instead. HTML5 has a raft of benefits: it’s search engine friendly, and works on all of the popular operating systems without a plugin or bridging software.

Tip #10: Engage in User Tester

Last, but by no means least, once your newly designed website is live, elicit feedback from your website visitors, from your colleagues, from your friends, from your family. When you first launch a new website, test different placements for call-to-action buttons, try different colours and different photos, move things around. Just be sure to keep accurate records of user behaviour both before and after making any changes.